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Are MS, W3C Barking Up Wrong Prior Art Tree?
theodp writes "CNET reports on how Microsoft and the W3C are spotlighting old technology - Pei Wei's Viola browser and W3C staff member Dave Raggett's HTML+ specification - in an effort to defeat Eolas' Web patent. In his ruling, the Eolas judge agreed that a Wei presentation that included an interactive image of a chessboard came close to prior art, but explained that the late 1994 date of invention excluded it from the ambit of prior art. Perhaps the judge might have ruled differently had he been shown January 1994 correspondence between Tim Berners-Lee, Pei Wei, Dave Raggett, and others in response to a challenge to match the prior art of the interactive, networked games that were operational on the PLATO system in the 70s at the University of Illinois to make it possible to develop browser-based chess games." (Read on for more.)
theodp continues: "If they were up on PLATO history, Microsoft's lawyers could have shown the judge that operational prior art existed two decades earlier than Eolas', Wei's, and Raggett's efforts. Not only that, there are striking similarities between PLATO and Eolas patents. BTW, Eolas patent holder Michael Doyle obtained his degrees from the University of Illinois, where PLATO was developed and widely used."
They're out to kill the web and replace it with something more Microsoft-centric. IE is essentially dead, and this is the perfect excuse to replace it with something different.
Are barking in the wrong forest, tbh.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
That's why this concept of "prior art" is rediculous. Since any idea can in theory be discovered independently of any other discovery of that idea, all ideas must exist outside of time.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
...sorry, just temporarily dazzled by the sun reflecting off your tinfoil hat.
prior art? as if any of you can cullame 'ownership' of anything, as everything is only part of everyone. there are no exclusions.
so, how many fauxking greed/fear/ego based corepirate nazi billyonerrors do you think we need/there's supposed to be?
consult with/trust in yOUR creator... the barking's almost over?
You cannot use e-mails as a prior art! This is because you cannot patent an idea, you can only patent an implementation of an idea!
3 people sitting around and talking about something doesn't mean you can't patent it! Whoever creates an implementation of an idea gets the patent.
You need to show a working implementation of something in order for it to be considered prior art.
Does this mean I will no longer be able to patent the wheel??
geek gear and other goodies
Must be cos everybody's busy torching each other in that Gun censorship thread... :)
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
it's funny
The entry-level physics course had the option of using PLATO for all of the homework. The system could show animated demonstrations of the mechanics problems you had to solve.
It was amazing that they usually got fairly responsive interactive performance even when hundreds of users shared a single mainframe that probably had less power than a 386.
Some of the later plasma terminals had their own microprocessors and could be set to run programs locally. It was good to use those terminals because some of the best games used the local mode. I wonder if downloading these programs on demand to the terminals could be considered a "plug-in".
"Eolas patent holder Michael Doyle obtained his degrees from the University of Illinois, where PLATO was developed and widely used."
Where would you rank this guy with then other so called psuedo internet inventors that have copyrights ?
Remember the hyperlink fiasco ?
Al gore ? Whens his suit against Microsoft ?
I relish the idea microsoft getting handed a half billion dollar IP judgement. With what they have been trying to pull with SCO I can only hope their legal budget is forced to exceed their software development budget and marketing budgets combined.
The other aspects of this that I love are 1. Microsoft may wind up footing the bill for starting the process of getting our patent and copyright system cleaned up. Seeing as they have in the past been a giant beneficiary of it being screwed up, I welcome the irony.
I also look forward to watching microsoft eat its words about I.E. . They will either have to change the default browser shipped with every microsoft os, or they will have to pay a licensing fee with every copy. Either one is to the good.
If so can you get a patent without even having a functional version of something? And then use that patent to quash someone else who produces a working version at the same time but files for a patent a day or two later?
Can you thus patent something without a working version? That is, just patent the general ideas, never bother to actually go though the process of making it work, and use those general ideas to claim fees from someone who does actually make it work.
And you can do this even if the process would be obvious to someone versed in the field?
Yah, this is sane. Reasonable. Logical.
I think the brains behind this are demonstrating a serious need for massive quantities of anti-psychotic drugs.
Oh thats right. Its "Legal".
let's just put all these patents into public domain and make them invalid to be copyrighted, including microsoft's name.. just for fun.
The real prior art for every Internet patent that I've ever seen can be found in PLATO and/or NAPLPS based systems like Telidon. In the Eolas case it is the ability of PLATO to display vidoe disc images on the screen under control of the content sent to the PLATO terminal from the PLATO central server. That is clearly an external application being triggered by the PLATO equivalent of a web page. Yes, the PLATO terminal and videodisc player were hardware but I don't think you can justify a patent by simply implementing a hardware function in software.
And if you compare the WWW with Canada's NAPLPS-based Telidon system circa 1981 then the similarities are eery. Someone really needs to document this stuff properly before we have completely lost all of the NAPLPS systems and software and content. A lot of this was developed in the Ottawa area and members of the tech community there could probably provide leads. But NAPLPS was also the basis of the pre-Internet Prodigy system and Knight-Ridder news had a NAPLPS-based news service. I believe IBM had a lot to do with those two developments.
Of course you can patent an idea. That's what a patent is! Patenting does not require you to build a prototype if the examiners agree that no laws of physics are violated.
Learn some crap dude. Patent examiners dont run around examining prototypes.
Maybe the way you pronounce it, but the way I pronounce it, it does.
Unfortunately for Berners-Lee, et al., this is at least 2 months two late, since it came out at the trial that the UCSF team demonstrated their stuff onstage at a conferene at Xerox PARC, in mid-November of 1993.
Postings to a public mailing list certainly count as prior art. As long as you can prove the date and the mail discloses all the features that are in the claim, the patent is invalid. If it misses some of the features the question is whether the difference is "obvious" or not.
Patent offices might not allow pure ideas to be patented, they certainly allow ideas of implementations to be patented. The letter of the law only requires you to disclose enough so that the "skilled person" will be able to practise the invention. Actually, all applications consist of paper only (not entirely true.. genetic sequences can sometimes be handed in on cdrom i think).
To answer your questions:
1) Yes, assuming that the patent in question has utility (ie, whether the implemenation that you are attempting to patent could actually work). See 35 USC 101 for patent utility guidlines.
2) Yes
3) Yes (but in the US the patent would go to the person who can prove the earliest invention date. This is not true for the rest of the world, where the first to file would get the patent)
4) Yes, you can patent something without a working version, but the patent can not just be for the general ideas. For example, you can not patent the idea of one-click shopping, but you can patent a specific implemenation for one-click shopping.
5) No, 35 USC 102 and 35 USC 103 lay out the guidlines for what can be patent. An invention can not be granted if it would have been obvious to one ordinarily skilled in the art at the time of invention. It is important to note that the obviousness has to be based on the prior art which is already on record somewhere, be it previous patents, products, publications, etc. The basis of obvious is not whether, given the problem at hand, someone of ordinary skill in the art would be able to come up with a solution.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
I love an opportunity to talk about Plato. For many people the first computer that they loved was their first home computer. Not me, I loved the Plato! These were way ahead of their time, with gui's, touch screens, and multi player games.
I was fortunate to be an 11 year old in berkeley, ca where you could rent time by the hour at the Lawrence Hall of Science on one of 8 or so Plato terminals. The dungeon games were completely amazing for being the first. Years later when the internet came around, I couldnt understand why there were no good dungeon games with first person perspectives. This was 15 years later, and it had already been done, and muds seemed pretty boring in comparison.
Shout out to PLATO users!!!!
music lover since 1969
using computers to put things together...
Programming is the act of automating complexity by putting simpler complexities together, and done so to make it easy to use and reuse the complexity.
The act is very recursive and common knowledge even reaching the second nature level.
This makes it clear that there has been a major failure of computer science to recognize even the most fundamental physics of programming.
Most software patents are not valid once bounced off the wall of what cannot be patented, for the natural laws of the physical phenomenon of our creating and using abstractions is three for thre what cannot be patented. And we can add to this mathmatical algorythims... making it four for four.
and teh patent office shoudl damn well know this already only the psuedo computer science does back it up, because it is biased by the money carrot.
If the patent stands, we'll have to rewrite every web site that uses plug-ins. The irony of seeing Microsoft shafted over patents is delicious, but it's not worth the pain of rewriting the web.
Or they'll just have to inconvenience their millions of users and software developers with annoying dialog boxes.
Hmm, pay license fee on every copy of Windows, or inconvenience users and developers... I wonder what they'll choose.
There are three plugins i use on a regular basis:
1) Flash... this would not be a big loss, css lets you do silly menu bars, and downloading silly flash animations wouldn't be that bad, maybe they could do something where you download a 'play list' and then the flash player grabs the file you wanted, so you can still do the silly loading bar.
2) PDF... not a big deal to have this run in another window.
3) Java Applets... this can be replaced with java web start.
Are there any other plug-ins that you use with any regularity?
Need a Catering Connection
If the patent stands, we'll have to rewrite every web site that uses plug-ins.
You say that as if it's a bad thing.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
1) Flash... this would not be a big loss
Regardless what you think of flash, there are lots and lots of sites that depend on it, and they will have to be changed. That's costly and boring.
2) PDF... not a big deal to have this run in another window.
Depends what you use it for. At my work, there are situations where we display a UI on the left, and generate PDF on the right, in response to the user's settings. That would break badly if it were in another window.
Tell me again where the downside to this is. Flash only works reliably in MS browsers. In others, it's iffy at best. If a site depends on Flash for navigation, they've lost my patronage.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
Tell me again where the downside to this is.
The downside is it's a waste of time and money whose purpose is to make things worse than they currently are.
Flash only works reliably in MS browsers. In others, it's iffy at best.
In my experience, Flash works very reliably in Mozilla and Firebird.
If a site depends on Flash for navigation, they've lost my patronage.
And if you don't use a web site, it should be made to suffer?
It may be bad for the US, but for Australia, Europe and Rest of World, we laugh, as the evidence turned up by MS does, or should be accepted as a preponderance of evidence of prior art. These parasites can kill an elephant, so MS will have to pony up the money, until the law can be changed in their favour.
The question is why does not MS have a US edition only, and foreign editions? They did before.
You can patent without the slightest idea of how such an object will be represented in the physical world.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
How many people remember ALL-IN-1 which was the leading minicomputer based office automation system back in the 80's? ALL-IN-1 was a "form-driven" system that had many similarities to what you see on the Web today and made extensive use of plug-ins and "embedded" programs to allow people to construct arbitrarily complex office systems. If you imagine ALL-IN-1 to be like a Web Browser, what it did was create windows in which you could embed, in frames, just about any application that could run on VMS. You could have a window that was just text, or you could have a window that included a frame with a text editor or a database program or whatever... We even defined a "common calling convention" that allowed developers of applications on VMS to make their programs "callable" so that we could invoke them directly and consistently. (VMS coders will remember seeing a lot of programs that offered callable interfaces that looked like edt$edt, dtr$dtr, etc. That was done for ALL-IN-1...) Embedding was good enough in the 80's to make ALL-IN-1 a multi-billion dollar business. What Eolas claims was done long before they filed their claims and was implemented in many other programs.
You can find similar examples of embedding in Digital's TPU editor (especially the DECWindows version that I used to build a network based hypertext system in the late 80's), the VTX videotext product and VaxNotes (both VTX and VaxNotes helped inspire Tim Berners-Lee while he was at CERN... My TPU based "Memex" hypertext system also ran at CERN in the 80's...)
The problem, of course, is that most people have forgotten that there were computers before PC's and before 1990...
bob wyman
first ALL-IN-1 Product Manager
I just cant wait until someone patents air. PAY UP OR SUFFICATE! Muhahahaha
Ashes of Empires and bodies of kings, these are a few of my favorite things.
Yes, half billion dollar judgement suit which Eolas stated it would use as a budget in order to attack others? Better start using Lynx now because shortly that's all you'll have left. Stupid fucker.
This isn't obvious to someone ordinarily skilled in the 'art'?
"We have got to make Stan understand the importance of voting, because he'll definitely vote for our guy." - South Park
As I said, there has to be solid proof in public record (previous patents, products, publications, etc). Simply stating that something could be held as obvious after reading it does not stand up as a rejection according to case law.
Show me a piece of dated prior art that shows exercizing a cat with a laser pointer, if you can't the patent stands. I am willing to bet that you can't.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".