Charlie Northrup's One-Man Patent Grab Continues

FirstEdition writes "Will this never end! Linux Business & Technology writes that Charlie Northrup, the guy in New Jersey whose prior art on what looks to be Web services dates back to 1994 and appears to trump anybody else's IP, has gotten another patent. Of course, he has transferred the IP to a spin off company populated mostly by lawyers. More details here."

Comments

That's okay...

[TWX]

I'm sure that he'll manage to get royalties from the two or three million geeks running Apache at home.

Maybe we'll get lucky, and he'll pull a SCO, and try to sue IBM. I'm rather certain that IBM will find something that they have prior art on, or something that his patent depends on, that IBM can pull out and have fun with...

What is it, actually?

[SmartGamer]

It seems to be describing IRC, a message board, and/or basic client-server architecture, all of which provably existed before '94.

It's quite likely I'm not understanding this correctly. What, in actually legible text, has he just patented?

And what laws are there that would permit him to retroactively sue anybody who was already using something like that?

Re:What is it, actually?

[GlassHeart]

What, in actually legible text, has he just patented?

That's a wonderfully good question.

A CS professor can write a book full of algorithms, and a second year CS major can read the book and tell whether a random piece of code uses an algorithm from the book. Why can't a professional software engineer read a patent application and understand what will infringe and what will not?

I think the balance between protecting the patent owner and protecting the public requires a plain English (at the very least, something that a CS major can read) reform to patenting.

Well, he does have a point. (Hear me out)

[beee]

I've heard a lot of "off with his head!" comments around these parts in regards to Mr. Northrup, but can we look at his point of view with a shred of objectivity for a moment? Let me introduce a hypothetical situation. You, a programmer, create some wonderful technology. It's so wonderful, in fact, that it spreads all over the world and is used by nearly everyone on a daily basis. Would you not want some measure of control on this technology that you labored over for so many hours? Would you not like some shred of claim to its origin? Though it's easy to tie this man to a cross for his pursuits in I.P., I think the honest answer most of us would give is "Yes, I would." Perspective is a difficult thing to deal with; however, I think Mr. Northrup is on the "good side" in this fight.

WTF?

[kg4czo]

Ya know, this stuff discribed really reminds me of the old BBS days. Almost every service in this "patent" could have been applied to almost any BBS package as far back as '86, maybe even farther. Isn't that prior art? Somone need to trump this guy before he makes it impossible for anyone to run services.

Re:I wonder...

[kien]

The USPTO had no reason not to grant this patent as of yet.

Not to nitpick, but shouldn't we expect a little common sense from the people that we pay with our tax dollars? I mean come on, the whole "ignorance is bliss/we are overworked" excuse is really beginning to wear a little thin.

From the article:

The LLC lawyers are starting to work on what are called "claim charts" that track alleged infringement. Licensing terms are still being thrashed out.

Claim charts??!!

rm -rf USPTO
kill -9 patent_squatter

--K.

Re:Well, he does have a point. (Hear me out)

[HeghmoH]

Let me propose to you another hypothetical situation.

You, a programmer, create a wonderful technology. Realizing its potential, you obtain a US patent on it. But then once the patent comes through, you file it in a drawer and forget about it. You go back to your day job. In the mean time, smart and more motivated people have recreated something like what you made, and are busy taking over the world with it. After they have succeeded, you come out of your hole and say "Hey! I came up with that first! I want money!"

You would have every right to expect people to desire your slow and untimely demise for such moronic behavior.

PLATO Prior Art

[kmahan]

After my eyes crossed reading the patent (and maybe not understanding all of it) all I could think of was "gee, we did that at the University of Illinois in the late 80s." Connecting to a mainframe computer from a specialized client that used TCP/IP as a communications medium. There were directory services, local and remote executing, fees for computing royalties, directories to be searched to find applicable content.

Oh well.The world would be a different place if Universities had been into patenting cool ideas instead of just writing papers about them and then having the commercial sector use the technology.

Again, prior art.

[NullProg]

I feel like I am getting old when someone patents something that was already done in the good old days of yore. But I don't feel old!

1) Netbios/SMB in the mid 1980's covers most of his protocol discovery network claims (OSI).It also refutes any of his service provider claims if you think of the central fileserver as the provider of services (which I think qualifies).
2) Purchasing items was done through compuserve over dialup long before this patent. I still have my 1985 (5.25 floppies) Compuserve kit to prove so.

I didn't read the whole patent. I didn't see what, if any, physical medium was claimed (the damn double speak gives me a headache). If someone wants to give me an itemized claim, I can probably refute most the rest. There is no physical difference from a LAN/MAN/WAN from the internet. Only the protocol has changed.

Bob Metcalf should be consulted to refute more than I can.

Enjoy,

No, Mod parent down

[tkrotchko]

"Would you not want some measure of control on this technology that you labored over for so many hours?"

In the computer science arena? I think not. I base this on several ideas:

1) Software algorithms are essentially expressions of mathematical formula (in a broad sense). This is inherently not patentable. Its the equivalent of copyrighting a prime number because it took you a long time to calculate that is was prime.

2) Based on 20+ years of software development, I've not seen any new algorithm. Every program is cribbed from some other program. As far as I can tell (and I'm not being facetious), nobody starts a program from a blank editor. Each program, or generation of programs, is in improvement. Allow minor improvements to an algorithm to be the basis of a family of patents is likeChevy patenting the automobile because the new Corvette goes faster than the last Corvette.

Lets look at some practical implications of patents:

1) If you consider my previous point to be true, then a small inventor can't benefit from Software patents because large corporations can always show prior art to virtually any software algorithm. You, as "Joe Inventor" don't have the resources to do this type of research so as a practical matter, software patents aren't useful to the mythical lone inventor.

2) In practice, software patents have been used exlusively by large corporations as leverage with other large corporations in arguments over control of markets.

I think the software industry was more vibrant and innovative prior to the "invention" of software patents. So if the intent of software patents has been to foster innovation, it has failed miserably at that goal and on the basis of that alone should be scrapped.

Finally to address your main point about hard work justifying a reward, consider the case of the man who makes a model of NYC entirely out of toothpicks and spends his entire life doing it. Impressive? Hell yea. Is he entitled to some sort of compensation? I don't think so. Hard work and effort is not equal to money.