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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."
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...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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?
Warning: Poster of this comment is a nerd. Just like everybody else here.
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.
+ Donald Gunth
+ Email: dgunth@quicktek.net
"Caffeine is the greatest lubricant ever created." -ESR
which has lawyers as its main labor force, should be destroyed!
Yes, we all know it's ridiculous, none of you reading this have to point that out in excruciating detail. The worst part about these kinds of stories is the avalanche of posts making bad jokes ("I'm going to patent air! I'm going to patent the alphabet!"), constructing elaborate metaphors, or making snide comments about MS, Amazon, or what have you. Don't preach to the converted. We all know.
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.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Sounds like our boy Charlie read a book on communications or network theory, understood about half of it, and threw all the words he remembered into a few densely worded and confusing paragraphs.
And then he patented it.
It's kind of fun to watch Chuck's patent exploits, since he has no chance of ever winning one of his pesky lawsuits. Of course, it can be kind of annoying for the other parties involved.
If you read the patent, it reads like a description of CORBA. The OMG started working on CORBA in 1989. That's all the prior art that should be needed.
Charlie doesn't like to talk in terms of suing people, but says it may be advantageous to Web services players such as IBM, Microsoft, BEA, Sun and the service providers to have a license
Woo hoo! Lawyer fight! I can't wait to watch this on court TV. I wonder which side will get Johnny Cochran
As someone who's recently started operating his own company I'm astounded by how many ways the legal profession has of taking your money without actually providing any benefits. I'm starting to believe that we have a large parasite feeding off of (American) businesses. This is not to say that the entire legal prof is a leech... only that legislation is abused for the sake of acquiring money that isn't legitimately earned. I seems that a lot of patent suits fall into this category. I hope I'm wrong, but my experience makes me believe this is one of the more serious and unnecessary threats to progress here.
OK, this guy got the patent, and yes, someone probably has prior art, and the courts will probably throw it out as long as the President doesn't interfere with the judicial system to help this guy. But there's still a problem: Who want's to be the first poor SOB to have to defend himself in a lawsuit? I'm sure this guy isn't stupid enough to make his "liscensing fee" more expensive than defending one's self in a courtroom, which means he can use those firms who choose the cheaper option of paying the liscense, to legitimize his claims against those who do fight.
Me? I say to hell with Iraq, we need a regime change at the USPTO!
Lagito ergo expectabo
I look at it this way...
IBM did significant development of computer theory. They've probably contributed more than any other company combined. Granted, they have screwed up at times, and screwed up royally, but they don't appear to be running around smashing others with only lawyer-based divisions, a'la Rambus. They're also contributing back into something that I use on a daily basis as my primary computer platform, even when they didn't invent UNIX. Right now, IBM is a community player, and while that could change in theory at any moment, they're more my friend than this freak who is trying to demonstrate a patent on hypertext transfer protocol...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
While I agree with your statement, it doesn't really apply to this case.
The individual patented the 'web' before the web was even heard of outside of universities. There might be prior art but that is another argument.
The USPTO had no reason not to grant this patent as of yet. What I find annoying is that the guy sat on it for nine years but AFAIK never put forth the effort to create the web. Basically he had an idea, patented it then filed it away. Meanwhile someone else had the same idea and used it now we are all in a pickle.
Maybe we will get lucky and he will go after Unisys first.
Is to make patents NON TRANSFERABLE...
so he would have defend that stuff by himself
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:
Claim charts??!!
rm -rf USPTO
kill -9 patent_squatter
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
A patent on the "Use of Common Sense to Solve Real-World Problems" was recently granted.
MOD PARENT UP. ...Not that I agree with you. While I would understand someone wanting to patent something he/she actually did, doing it nine years after the fact? Seven years after the limitations expire?
And it's not always clear what the patent is actually for. It sounds like IRC, Apache, SlashDot, or all of the above; anybody have any guesses? It's such a basic, fundamental thing (as far as I can tell, reading through that 100-page-ish pile of gibberish) that it's a root part of the Internet- and if it is IRC or basic message board protocol, it's very provable that it existed long, long before '94.
I'm pretty sure he only pushed the patent through with either a few well-placed bribes, or more likely well-placed obfuscation so nobody can figure out what the hell he just patented.
Hopefully, if it's the latter, that trend will continue so he can't defend it either.
Warning: Poster of this comment is a nerd. Just like everybody else here.
Interprocess: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) RFC 793 September 1981.
Intraprocess: main memory ENIAC 1946.
..and so on. This is plain nonsense and any competent lawyer will win the case against this atent. Not even OJ Simpson's pals can play this practical joke on a federal court.
Perhaps a few years too late, but IP is a network protocol that can communicate with other editions of itself independent of the underlying physical network technology (802.3, 802.4, 802.5, 802.11, ppp, fddi, atm etc.)
Of course this could be said of SDLC, HDLC, X.25, but all of these tended to specify what hardware infrastructure would be used at some point or another. Once the OSI model was created, as well as people implementing IP on various platforms, the cat was out of the bag. All of this was happening prior to 1990, so dating it at 1994, or 2003 (as appears to be the case with the article in question) means that there is sufficient prior art to eliminate the effectiveness of this pattent.
-Rusty
You never know...
just got it,it's the Charlie Northrup action figure.
It flouts the constitutional spirit of patents,its head spins round and round,spits up pea soup and cries f**k me!f**k me!f**k me!
realistic skin and two openings(somewhat indistinguishable from each other)
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
From the USPTO site:
For over 200 years, the basic role of the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has remained the same: to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing for limited times to inventors the exclusive right to their respective discoveries.
As much as I agree that this is a laudable goal, I think it's obvious from this case and others that in today's high-paced climate, patents often serve to do exactly the opposite.
The truth of the matter is that after 20 years, modern technology is most likely so far behind the curve that it's useless or, at best, so developed that no right-minded business is willing to spend anything on it's continued development. Thus, patents such as these no longer serve to give a small advantage to inventors and protect fledgling technology. Rather, they tend to provide a means for the Chucks of the world to significantly inhibit development for the entire useful life of the technology. This isn't the industrial age anymore; to think that 20 years still represents a "limited time" is both ignorant and counterproductive.Note how things seem to change abruptly when things get bad enough.
Remember when the Standard Oil Company had a stranglehold on anything to do with petroleum? Then one day, BAM!
The Bell System had just about monopoly on anththing telephonic? You could not even put an extention phone in, despite fully agreeing to pay for any use of the line?
I get the idea we just sit back and let the USA paralyze themselves. While we spend our resources having all sorts of petty arguments, the rest of the world will go on.
Its all about economics.
Its what did USSR in. It can do the USA in too.
Once our government realizes we are seriously losing our capability of supporting ourselves, they will start paying attention. Once another world power ( probably China ) becomes strong enough that they could take control, where we could not do anything about it if they did, we will see action. Of course, by then, it will be too late. Especially if that new power sees no logic in recognizing the lifestyles or property of those here who don't produce anything. Kinda like we don't recognize any power or property of the Iraqi ex-powers-that-was. They may have been billionaires, now they are just bobbling heads hocking up words. While the new powers-that-be not only ignore them, but may even consider them a pest that needs to be exterminated. I mean, who do you think will be needed in the country, a wealthy landowner, or someone who can make the water pump work?
Remember how our Government actually encouraged youth to go into the sciences during the cold war? I think when the time comes where we really need to get our nose back to the wheel and start doing something, legislation will be passed to "clear the clutter" so things can happen.
Until then, its gonna be the same ol, same ol. The big kids get to the playground, call dibs on everything that can be played with, then rest on their big butts collecting extortion from anyone who tries to play with anything.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
There is. 35 U.S.C. 102(b):
He didn't really wait nine years. He filed a patent in December 1994. The patent was issued in December 1998, meaning that's how long the patent office spent examining the application. Just before the patent issued, he filed what is known as a contunuation patent application. Basically, he covered one aspect of the invention in the first patent, and another aspect in this patent.
I just finished reading Practical Cryptographyby Niels Ferguson and Bruce Schneier, and in the back there is a brief chapter about software patents. These comments are in a crypto book, but are addressed to software patents in general.
Among the choice comments are:
- Our current patent system is completely out of control. At best, patents are a necessary evil. At worst, they are an entirely legal form of fraud and blackmail.
- We think that the IT industry would be better off without patents than with patents.
- [t]he current system is simply not working.
- The patent system won't be fixed, because there is simply no political gain to be made in this aread.
All this is, as most people agree, true, but Schneier and Ferguson seem to think that it's something that we have to live with. Money talks, they say, and "There is, of course, onne group of people that consistently benefits from the patent system: the lawyers. No prizes for guessing which professional group claims that the current system is workable, or even good."Sad, but there you go.
BTW, the book is truly outstanding, and fills a huge gap in the literature of crypto: watch this space...
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
It's cheaper in the short-term to just give in to these assholes, but if everyone always fought every garbage patent, it would put them out of business.
And that would be cheaper in the long run.
His patent describes the application layer of the OSI network model (presentation layer, too, in the old 7-layer version)...
Doesn't the OSI model predate all of his patents?
He didn't really wait nine years. He filed a patent in December 1994. The patent was issued in December 1998, meaning that's how long the patent office spent examining the application. Just before the patent issued, he filed what is known as a contunuation [yale.edu] patent application. Basically, he covered one aspect of the invention in the first patent, and another aspect in this patent.
Even so there is nothing in Web Services that was not previously invented in CORBA or previous systems. I published the idea of using the Web for machine/machine interaction in 1993, I don't hink I was the first, Tim probably discussed it in 1992 at Annecy. Try to remember what we were doing there folks, controlling real time physics experiments.
The language of this patent, 'brokers' etc is all from CORBA.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
You make a "company populated by lawyers" sound like a bad thing.
"All great truths begin as blasphemies." -George Bernard Shaw
What makes you so sure this would blow up in his face? Pan-IP has taught us weasels of this sort go after small fish until they have sufficient war-chest, not to mention a slew of precedent, to throw in IBM's face. I case you haven't been paying attention, our favorite whipping boy Rambus has been making some headway, thanks to some judges overlooking their devious behaviour while a member of JEDEC.
The damn shame in all this, and I'd love nothing better at this date than for someone to dig something like this up, is that the founders of the internet didn't make some blanket statement such as, "Whomsoever shall conduct business using these tools shall forgo any claim to intellectual property of methods or procedures pursuant to conducting commerce." Perhaps back in the DARPA roots there may be such a thing as, all your base are belong to public domain in the interest of furthering research. Sadly the lack of reason appears to hold sway.
"Ah ha, sent one packet, have it processed, get one packet back! A novel idea, I shall patent it and all subsequent technology!"
Given the chance, some bastard would attempt to patent breathing air and the way things are going they'd be awarded the patent.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Let's see.
"Whacking competitors is a business tool" and "Life isn't fair. Deal with it."
That was fun.
"Industrial espionage is a business tool" and "Life isn't fair. Deal with it."
Better, better.
"Insurance fraud is a business tool" and "Life isn't fair. Deal with it."
Nice.
"Defrauding investors and employees is a business tool" and "Life isn't fair. Deal with it.".
Whoo Hoo.
"Dumping toxic waste illegally is a business tool" and "Life isn't fair. Deal with it."
Yum.
You know? Life is so much easier when one doesn't have a conscious. Thanks dude.
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.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
Mmm, no. No patent would have to be filed, just prior art proven. (Although a previous patent that this one infringes on would be a good proof of prior art.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
So what happened to the theory that only megacorps could use patents? Seems like one guy named Charley can do it.
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,
It's just the normal noises in here.
I also worked on the short documentary that was filmed during the course of the project and which was shown ultimately to a Congressional committee, IIRC.
Maybe someone somewhere will find the existence of this old research and its public publications of use...
That's called swearing back of a reference, formally known as a Rule 131 affidavit, where the inventor makes a statement that "include facts showing a completion of the invention in this country or in a NAFTA or WTO member country before the filing date of the application on which the U.S. patent issued, or before the date of the foreign patent, or before the date of the printed publication." The particular reference can not then be used as a bar against the invention. However, the filing date (which determines the expiration date of the patent) is not changed, merely the date of invention.
What about 1991: Archie for file searching, WAIS for document searching, or all the public sites you could telnet into? Weren't those services? Or 1992: Gopher as a not too distant predecessor of http(d) and Veronica a year later as a menu service for Gopher pages. The 1+ million hosts on the Internet by late 1992 were not just at universities. How can all the servers that were running out there not qualify, at least in part, as prior art for 'Web Services'. Even NTP was around in 1992 - that's purely an automated web service - a client application getting data from a server application and doing something with the response in an automated fashion. I'm sure a good long browsing session through the RFC's would yield enough prior are to kill this patent.
This had an additional advantage that the protection of your invention could be extended, since protection used to be granted untill 17 years after the issue of the patent (commonly used for submarine patents like the Lemelson heritage).
With the amendments of USC 35 (US patent law), however, this was 20 years from filing, when filed later than July 1995 (I do not know the exact date). For patents filed before July 1995 and issued after that date, the protection was 17 years after grant or 20 year after filing, whichever was longer.
HOWEVER, for this kind of stuff (continuations), filed after July 1995, the protection is 20 years after the FIRST filing. So the US will be 'freed' from this patent by December 2014.
To a certain extend, this kind of stuff is also possible with the European Patent Office (EPO), filing a divisional. However, as I have understood from US colleagues (I am a European Patent Attorney trainee), it is in the US possible to extend your subject matter and with that, the protection of your patent, pretty far from what you have filed originally. With the EPO, you would go flat on your face; the EPO is very precise with respect to addition of subject matter: strictly prohibited and the rule is applied very strict. And when the EPO makes a mistake, you just file an opposition which you will probably win.
"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.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you