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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
That would be about the worst thing that could happen because individual inventors (except thouse who were rich) would have no power.
Imagine the following situation. You invent a chemical compound in your garage. Let's say its a new form of rubber that never wears out. Great! Now you can start making tires. Except you can't. Unless you have millions of dollars to build a tire factory. Fine. Sell the patent to Goodyear. Can't. It's been outlawed. Well, at least you can prevent Goodyear from using the rubber, right? No. Goodyear takes your formula, you try to sue, but you can't afford to pay the lawyers, so the lawsuit ends before it begins.
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.Cool. Does that include the US government?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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/
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!"),
Don't worry. I hold the patent on making jokes about patenting things that can't be patented, and will be contacting the aforementioned parties shortly.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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.
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.
"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