Slashdot Mirror
McAfee Granted Far-Reaching Spam-Control Patent
Titusdot Groan writes "Infoworld is reporting that Network Associates, makers of McAfee, have been granted a broad anti-spam patent. The patent covers "compound filters, paragraph hashing, and Bayes rules" and was filed in December of 2002. The patent appears to affect Spam Assassin, Spam Bayes and many other anti-spam products and services. As an aside Paul Graham's "A Plan for Spam" was published August 2002."
Lots of prior art on this one. The USPTO never does their homework anyways.
All you holier than thou EU people should show this to your reps as a great example of the kind of crap that shouldn't be patentable.
...if they can accept this then there is still hope for my application: "Use of the letter E (used in upper or lower context)."
Perhaps McAfee is secretly in league with spammers, so that this patent will help eliminate competition, increasing the overall number of unwanted messages delivered. Thus McAfee benefits, as do spammers whose audience is increased.
Some legal experts have expressed doubt that the patent will stand up to challenges given its wide scope.
I think Spam Bayes/Assasin can rest easy to be honest.
IANAL, but isn't that a proof of "prior usage" and makes the patent invalid?
Another question: Can somebody explain me why the "logo" for this article on Slashdot is "fork, knife and spoon" (in German we call it "Besteck" but I know that the english language has no equivalent for it)? Just curious about that... :-)
All this patent will accomplish is it will give McAfee legal right to knock everyone else's products in the dirt, while they try to push their own. If their antispam product is anything like their antivirus, their product will suck. Net result - everyone will lose, except the spammers who will keep doing their thing while McAfee screws everone else out of making effective solutions.
The US patent office is becoming as bad as the US legal system that allows you to sue anyone at any time for any reason. *shakes head in disgust*
A love beyond compare...
I'm going to patent "a method to patent methods" in Europe. Of course, as patenting business methods is currently void, this patent would not work - yet. But once the new legislation is there, I'd have a great patent! And, as NAI's anti-spam patent proves: there's no such thing as prior art in software and/or business methods. Great.
my other sig is a 500 page novel
Bleh, enough of that! I need a coffee .. and a shower.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
They got the patent which means lots of lawyers fees to straighten it out. So, the question is...who is going to stop them?
It probubally won't be an open source system. Needs to be someone with lots-o-money.
Evolution or ID?
It seems that there is prior art to this patent, but it might not matter. This patent could be used by NAI to lock out others filtering spam.
Let's hope they do.
It would signal the end of e-mail. That would be sad, seeing how it has served us well for so long. But in the end, a new system for e-mail is all but unavoidable anyway. Currently, instant messengers, online "contact us" forms and forums are replacing e-mail's functionality for more and more users every day that goes by.
To a certain extent that isn't such a bad thing, really.
Yes, most IM systems lock you into some vendor, they're not open, forum contributions and the like aren't as easily forwarded and sorted as e-mail, etc. But in the end, all those systems will catch up. Let's not forget that some of the most useful new uses for e-mail are webbased; that the underlying technology is SMTP doesn't really matter to most people.
More and more people chose to use whitelists on their e-mail inboxes, akin to the whitelist approach of IM. It would be a better world if you didn't have to, but it's happening.
The end of e-mail (as we know it) appears to be nigh for many reasons. If it dies an ungracious death, it might as well be SPAM and software patents that kill off the killer application, as a warning to future generations. Or at least, to politicians.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
if there is only one vendor to get antispam products from then it becomes easier to get around its rules - because every spammer and cr4x0r in the world knows exactly which anti-spam product it is they need to focus on instead of trying to get around all of them.
spam sucks, so do software patents,
tinfoil sandals rule, imagine a beowulf cluster of these, all your antispam are belong to mcaffee
The US patent office is becoming as bad as the US legal system that allows you to sue anyone at any time for any reason. *shakes head in disgust*
Well, it's lawyers who file and handle the patents and lawyers that fight the patents. Maybe they are just setting themselves up for more business.
Evolution or ID?
We were always encouraged to write ideas up as patents; lots of the people there received regular royalties or bonus payments from their personal patent portfolios, sponsored/owned by NAI. With the buy-out of SpamAssassin, I'm not terribly surprised at this news.
One tiny peeve, though: it's pronounced "muh'k AFF-ee ".
I believe the article is available online here, though right now it looks like this specific issue is kind of broken. It's called "An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances" anyway.
The Internet Archive of Early Journals is a great resource for 18th century journals and magazines. The Philosophical Transactions in particular are very interesting to history-of-science-minded science geeks everywhere.
...that if McAffe can get a patent for anti-spam techniques then I should be able to get one as well for spam techniques. That would enable me to sue every spammer even if spamming in some countries is not treated as illegal, but patent violation surely is. :-)
The logo must be a visual comment on the typical patent discussions on Slashdot, that is discussions of people trying to patent really obvious things, or things that are in use already.
By the way, both prior use and obviousness are grounds for opposing a patent, at least here in the UK.
So I suppose the way this all shakes out is that for every spam I don't receive, I owe them a dollar?
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Am I the only one that thinks Anti-Spam products should be free? Spam is aggraveting enough as it is without having to actually pay to get rid of it. Here's a novel solution: spammer gets sued spammer gives money money is used to found free anti-spam product customer doesnt have to pay to get rid of the nuisance although if I bothered to check sourceforge I'm sure there must already be a free product out there. I hope McAfee is smart enough to allow free products to go on. I really do think patents when it comes to computer software need to have their rules changed. This is really getting out of hand. Gene patents are the same way...what has this world come to when you can patent the rights to the gene that ____fill in the blanks____?
Mr. Graham's article discussed the Bayesian filter he was already using in the article. Several other spam filters, including SpamAssassin, added Bayesian processing shortly after the article was published. The patent holders would have a very hard time trying to go after those who had Bayesian rules processing prior to the patent being filed.
Just gr*at. I can't *v*n us* th* <blockquot*> tag to quot* your original m*ssag*.
I gu*ss I'll n**d to chang* my signatur* -- Th*r*'s no l*tt*r form*rly known as * in t*am...
They are refering to Bayes a lot, beside really simple stuff like "hashing an paragraph with MD5". That is like making an patent on the progress bar (that exits too!)
It is only for US anyway....
Let's not forget that this kind of broad patent can be easily circumvented. You only have to do one single improvement over the patented method, and you no longer fall under the patent. It's not the idea of doing Bayesian filterting that can be patented, it is rather HOW it is done. You patent a specific implementation. Ideas cannot be patented, in Europe (don't know about the US system, but I would say it is similar in intent).
That's why people look at prior ART to dispute a patent.
I don't know about SpamAssassin, but I use SpamBayes and I know that their algorithm involves more than just a Bayesian filter. I doubt they would fall under the patent that was just granted, or it would be really bad luck, doing the exact same things the exact same way as it is documented in the patent.
What are they thinking exactly by patenting Bayes rules, etc ? So take the best from open-source community, and then patent them under your own name, eh ?
I'll share some info about McAfee now:
Do I miss anything ?
I think we should distance ourselves to nasty companies like this. Let's speak with our money.
They should've patented the virus warning message instead. You know, when a virus/worm sends the server a copy of itself, and antivirus on the server returns a bounce saying the original message contains virus and has been removed/quarantined/whatever by Acme(TM) VirusNoMore 1.23.
I'm so pissed off by these messages. The antivirus maker _knows_ the Sender is faked. But they send it anyway. They're basically spammers!
If this is patented, then no other companies can use the same process, which is fine by me.
It was first published in 1990.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Whilst the InfoWorld article quotes '"To me this looks like a pretty broad patent," said Rob Tosti' it doesn't look as broad as the headlines suggest.
...
The key feature is in claim 1
"paragraph hashing by hashing a plurality of paragraphs and utilizing a database of hashes of paragraphs, wherein the paragraph hashing excludes at least one of a first paragraph and a last paragraph of content of the electronic mail messages wherein a plurality of hashes each has a level associated therewith, and the hashes having a higher level associated therewith are applied to the electronic mail messages prior to the hashes having a lower level associated therewith"
That's quite a tight restriction. If you're hashing the first and last paragraphs, for example, then you're in the clear! Of course this wouldn't stop them chasing you with a law-suit it would just mean you could be acquitted if you could afford to go the distance - [sarcasm] capitalism, I'm loving it!! [/sarcasm]
Also, I note that in the http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html article hashing is only used in terms of words [yeah tokens really, but who's being pedantic?]. Here the restriciton of the claims is to hashing paragraphs. If you're hashing words you're OK (previous disclaimer applies!).
That's not to say that I think they deserve a patent. Just that the knee-jerk - "this is hugely broad" - isn't really justified IMHO.
pbhj
Has anyone thought the only way to combat this maybe to have the FSF start patenting things? I'm not sure of the cost, but at least it'll prevent evil corps from doing it first.
Daniel
Anyone know if Thunderbird is affected by this? There's nothing posted about it on their home page.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
- A pitifully lame patent office.
- 200 year copyright terms.
- The US's last election was rigged (at least the Florida portion of it was) and no one cared.
- The lying-est politicians ever known.
- A constitution that has no meaning, because not a single line of it hasn't been overruled.
- An obesity epidemic that is among the world's most severe.
There's a lot more, but I think that's enough for now.I'd bitch about the US more, but my own country (Canada) is trying to become the US as fast as it can. Who's the bigger loser -- the loser, or the loser who looks up to him? Oy, what a world.
Anyway, patents suck ass. Any potential they had for encouraging innovation has long since been swept away in a tide of greed and corruption. It's time for patents to go.
This is not directed solely at the parent, but "this is how it works" is NO ANSWER.
Why can't you fix your own damn country? If you will dominate the earth you do have a certain responsibility to stop being such money hungry, corporation loving uber-capitalist, militaristic, jingoistic whores. Don't give me your bullshit about how this isn't your fault, it's the government/patent office/political system/corporations who are to blame: no, you are to blame. All of you US citizens. If this type of stuff is going on in your country, YOU have a responsibility to fix it, even if you didn't personally break it.
While you're at it please fix:
- the 'war on terror' which is apparently a carte blanche to all dictators and half-assed democracies around the world to eliminate human rights at their own discretion
- international trade, which you steadfastly refuse to make even vaguely fair, especially with respect to agriculture, the only area where the developing world has any kind of competitive advantage over you
- seperation of church and state: it took the world thousands of years to manage this, and you are happy to let yourselves be governed by a bunch of bible-thumping god botherers
- international weapons treaties: not a problem this decade, but unchecked nuclear proliferation sure will be fun when India and China are major powers in 2020 and we find that Bush cancelled all of the significant arms control treaties
- the FUCKING ENVIRONMENT. Waiting to see if we're really going to kill everything just in case we aren't is NOT LOGICAL, please stop trashing the Earth, it doesn't belong to you. At least build a dome over your own country and just trash the local environment. I'm on the other side of the world and I do NOT WANT TO BREATH IN YOUR SUV'S EXHAUST FUMES.
I will accept all flames, to quote your illustrious leader, "BRING IT ON."
Read Pynchon.
Spam!!!
Why can't the patent process be public? I mean, you file for a patent, it must be made public on the web for say three months, if nobody files any complaints/prior art then you're granted it.
I just noticed that in the 0.3 (initial) release of SpamAssassin, Justin Mason freely admits he based the idea on someone else's work. That's fine if you're in the free world, but since SA is apparently the basis for NAI's patent, wouldn't this be a problem? You know, other than all the other obvious prior art, and the ridiculousness of patenting an obvious idea.
Quoting:
SpamAssassin owes a lot of inspiration to Mark Jeftovic's filter.plx, http://AntiSpam.shmOOze.net/filter/ , which I contributed some code to. However, SpamAssassin is a ground-up rewrite with an entirely different ruleset, and a different code model and installation system.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
Just goes to show you the US patent system is made for large corporates...
The description of using Bayes rules alone is hilarious. Firstly, there is no "Bayes rule" applicable to spam filtering. "Bayes rule" is a mathematical identity relating probabilities. What Bayesian filters do is set up a probabilistic model and calculate quantities using this rule.
An analogy would be to pick a few numbers and add them using the "plus rule". The value is entirely in what numbers you pick, and similarly with Bayesian filters, the value is entirely in what probabilistic models you pick.
But if you read (ok, I skimmed ;) the patent, it never explains any models at all, except to say that words have probabilities. Probabilities of what? How? Why? Again, it's like saying "we store numbers compatible with the plus rule".
This is so broad it's laughable. They might as well have patented statistics.
As an aside, this should definitely be brought to the attention of the European anti-patent people. Spam is a high profile case in the public mind, and it would be a great example of how patents stiffle the fight against spam. It shouldn't be difficult to set up demo systems with McAffee's spam filter versus the best open source spam filters on the same sample mail stream, showing the superiority of the latter. Then reminding people that with this broad patent, McAffee could shut down the superior open source solutions.
From Non Sequitur
...all your Bayes are belong to us.
boakes.org
Then sue the spammers for infringment of your patent.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
that for most of human history, no forks were available. They only came into widespread use in (iirc) the 16th century. Might be off a couple of centuries, but that's not the point ;) (There's a Henry Petroski book which goes through a long, fun, history of flatware; but it's been a long time since I read it.
So things can seem obvious in restrospect sometimes which previously did not!
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
The "under the table" one.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
The following text is currently on SpamAssassin's site (see http://spamassassin.org/prehistory/) -- keep in mind that it's the basis for the patent. Emphasis below is mine.
SpamAssassin Prehistory: filter.plx
Before there was SpamAssassin, there was Mark Jeftovic's filter.plx. This was a 'context/keyword spam filter', which came up with the basic scheme of what we use in SpamAssassin: namely, named rules identifying spam-like 'features' of the mail, each rule has a score, and once the number of 'strikes' goes above a certain threshold, the mail is marked as spam. And written in perl, of course ;)
I (Justin Mason) used this for several years, adding a few small snippets of code; eventually though, the code was getting a bit stale, and Mark seemed busy on other stuff, and I had a few thoughts about some improvements I could do with a total rewrite ;) -- so I decided to recode from scratch under an open-source license, and that was SpamAssassin.
Unfortunately the original site at http://antispam.schmooze.net/filter/ is no longer up, but the Internet Archive has a snapshot of it from December 1998 here.
Also courtesy of the Internet Archive, the change log of filter.plx is here, spanning June 1998 to August 1997.
Finally, Mark was kind enough to dig up a source code tarball for filter.pl-1.02d.tar.gz (20k). This is the 1.02d release, February 1998.
Whatever you do, don't actually run the code -- spam nowadays looks nothing like spam did back then, before e-mail clients grokked HTML. Plus I don't think Mark wants to get bug reports at this stage, it's been 5 years ;) This page is here instead to document the history of this project.
--j. Jul 14 2003 jm
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
To avoid infringement, the circumventing product must eliminate one of the elements of the claims. In other words, for each of the claims, you have to find one element in the claims that isn't in the product. For claimed methods, one of the recited steps must not be performed.
Adding a feature or an improvement will not circumvent.
As to the "prior art" in August 2002, that by itself isn't enough. If the date were more than one year before the filing date of the patent, perhaps it would be effective as prior art. The problem is, the inventor may have come up with the idea/invention on his own before Aug. 2002, which means he's got a year from that date to file before the reference becomes effective as prior art against a U.S. patent/application.
Even if it were to hold up, the patent is useless. Spam filtering is a trivial application of text classification: given a piece of text, you classify it as belong to the "spam" class or the "non-spam" class. People have been doing text classification for decades and there are hundreds of methods for doing it. The kinds of naive Bayesian filters used by current anti-spam software are actually some of the worst text classifiers around (they aren't called "naive" for nothing). The fact that they work so well on spam shows you how easy the text classification problem actually is in this case.
If you want to see lots of other approaches, look on Google for "decision tree spam filtering", "svm spam filtering", "neural network spam filtering", "latent semantic indexing spam filtering", "boosting spam filtering", and "vector space spam filtering", to name just a few approaches. All of those methods are published, and NAI's patent doesn't read on them.
As for NAI's patent, I suspect it is actually fraudulent: the widespread use of naive Bayesian classifiers for spam detection, in place of better text classification methods, was a historical accident, and the fact that they patented this rather than any kind of better method strongly suggests to me that Bryson and Ekle didn't actually "invent" this, but that they applied for the patent after observing that the method was becoming popular.
LOL, Good idea. I didn't see you'd posted it a few minutes before mine.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
You just need to read the claims...
:)
:) )
Every one of the claims either includes the phrase
"wherein the paragraph hashing excludes at least one of a first paragraph and a
last paragraph of content of the electronic mail messages"
or is dependent on a claim that includes that phrase.
In short, as long as you don't clip off the first or last paragraph, the patent does not apply.
A good (in the FSF sense) side effect of this patent is that the methods given _absent_ the clipping (or, for that matter, absent any of the other processing bits listed in the claims) ARE NOW PUBLIC DOMAIN AND CANNOT BE PATENTED, EVEN BY MCAFFEE!
So, just don't worry about it, don't clip either the first or last paragraph, and you're fine.
You can also dissect the patent on the grounds that it only covers spam filters that both hash paragraphs AND do bayesian filtering... not either one alone ( the so-called "three-legged stool" rule in patent law - given two patents, one patent claiming only a subset of the stuff in the other patent, then the smaller patent wins)... and in this case, IF this is the smallest patent McAffee can make, we're in good shape.
(disclaimer, I am not a lawyer. But I do occasionally have to do patent stuff for work. And I'm also the prime author of CRM114, which is a moderately hot-shot spam filter among other things. So I'm not entirely third-party disinterested. But I'll also say that I'm not worried.
Fuck that(*)
John
(*) McAfee Legal: "Fuck that" is a technical term that indicates that significant prior art exists that invalidates a patent.
Would you disclose the ingredients of the secret sauce without getting something back? A patent is supposed to be about a trade between the patentee and the public. The patentee discloses the invention to the public, and in return he gets to exclude others from practicing the invention.
If a patent application were immediately published as you suggest, companies would be reluctant to file because their inventions would be picked up immediately by the competition. The company may not be successful in getting the patent they want, which means they will have given the invention to the competition for free.
On the other hand, in the U.S. an applicant can choose to have the application published after 18 months, which may give the applicant the right to collect royalties while the application is pending if the patent issues. An applicant can also choose not to publish an application, potentially surprising the industry.
Other countries (such as Germany, I think) have a kind of comment period. If the local patent office intends to award a patent, it is published for comment. After a period of time (months), the patent goes through if nobody produces prior art. In that case, examination is performed in two steps, first by the patent office and then by the public. In practice, this really doesn't provide an improvement because (1) the public really doesn't watch what patents are about to issue and (2) the public doesn't have the first clue how to fashion legal arguments directed to patentability.
This is actually quite a good idea: ... ...
1) Let the EFF of The FSF file a few rediculous general patents.
2) When a lawsuit comes down on a OSS project, countersue the rediculous patent with a rediculous patent.
3) media coverage, cheap out-of-court agreement
4)
5) Profit!
The patent portfolio acts as a insureance for OSS. If a company sues, the only thing they get is bad media. And more people will see how stupid software patents really are
watched the daily show recently. They had a great little piece on anti-spam legislation and had a discusison with 'massive-email distribution' king Scott Richter, and conveniently displayed his email address: scottrichter422@yahoo.com
Release the hounds!
This is the only time for the next four years we can have any influence on the system. Talk to your candidates and make them tell you their position on patents and copyright. Make it clear to them that this is an important issue.
There was an article in the Globe and Mail yesterday about the new proposals for copyright legislation in Canada. I couldn't finish reading it; it made me sick to my stomach.
Is anyone actually going to post some valid, clear prior art? All I see is a bunch of whining about how obvious it is to filter spam this way and how everyone's been doing it since the 1960's. But I haven't seen anyone link to an actual document prior published to December 2001 describing what the patent does. It's time to put up or shut up.
Read the link in the article. Bayesian spam filters were published in the academic literature in 1998.
Should be easy to challenge. Not just on prior art, but on the grounds that if it works so @%#&_* well, why is my inbox so )^@%^&* full after using their software?
These improper patents have to be fought by someone. See PubPat and, if you agree with what they are doing, make a contribution. The Electronic Freedom Foundation is doing some of this worthwhile work, too.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
It has always been. Face it.
Digress from all the brainwash.
Halls of justice painted green
Money talking
Power wolves beset your door
Hear them stalking
Soon you'll please their appetite
They devour
Hammer of justice crushes you
Overpower
The ultimate in vanity
Exploiting their supremacy
I can't believe the things you say
I can't believe, I can't believe the price you pay
Nothing can save you
Justice is lost
Justice is raped
Justice is gone
Bayesian spam filtering was invented and implemented long before Paul Graham's "A plan for spam". A project I wrote for a course in July 2001 that does Bayesian filtering was based on papers suggesting to do the same for spam, the predated that time. I used the same technique in 2001 to write an internal ad filter (something to filter ads inside mailing list postings) using bayesian methods, so this is clearly prior art.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
And if you knew shit, you would know that prior art has to be ONE YEAR prior to count. December 2001 is close but close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and nuclear bombs dipshit.
See, this is the kind of bullshit that goes on all the time. Look at the Radar industry - one upping itself with each new generation of equipment it sells to law enforcement.
In states like Virginia, where it's illegal to have one, that's ok because you can get 'stealth' radar detectors to help avoid the radar detector detectors.
And when you look at the companies responsible for the development of this tech, you'll find they're the one and the same. That's why I don't completely discount something dispicable like this. Unbelieveable.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
"I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms.
There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people
from making use of one's contributions to computer science."
-- Donald E. Knuth, TAoCP vol 3
And yet this is somehow worse, the only algorithms are "use a combination of other people's algorithms" and "apply some tools to some task". Seems now that NAI owns "combining and applying"...
Perhaps I'll patent a method for "solving problems with obvious solutions" (which isn't done often nowadays in any event).
/* MAGIC THEATRE
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY
MADMEN ONLY */
right or wrong, yeay me...
:(
bought mcaffee stock right before dot-bomb thinking, internet security for consumers is the next big market. apparently consumers are not as smart as me
at least now I might make my moola back.
:Better Evil:
Funny!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
If anyone's research was published before this patent was filed (Dec 2002), you can request an investigation by submitting a letter and a copy of your research (and of course, when it was published) to:
US Patent Office
PO BOX 1450
Alexandria VA 22313
Make sure you reference Patent 6,732,157
I was told it would be routed to the right department. The patent was filed in December 2002, and I know much of everyone's research in the anti-spam arena was published long before that.
This patent is such BS that even the STORY SUBMITTER found prior art. It didn't even take a freakin' comment. I wonder if that EFF patent group will catch this.
What methods are available for challenging a patent, anyway?
$8.95/mo web hosting
Prior art less than one year prior does qualify under USC 102(a). However, that can be overcome simply by showing posession of the invention prior to that date. And that's usually not hard to do. Prior art more than year prior to filing is a bar that cannot be overcome.
And December 12, 2001 is the important date. That's almost half the month of December. The USPTO doesn't count time in whole months.
It's not that simple. Prior art counts if it's, well, prior -- but if the date difference is less than one year, the applicant can submit evidence that he actually invented the subject matter of the application before the date of the prior art.
Prior art more than one year earlier than the filing date of the application is stronger because this option does not exist -- if something was published (even by you) more than a year before you apply for a patent, you're out of luck even if you show that you did invent it earlier.
The relevant statute is 35 USC 102.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
What are they thinking exactly by patenting Bayes rules, etc ?
Easy, cos they are renewing the patent for Mr. Bayes, silly.
IANApatentL but I believe that patents only prevent others from commercializing a claimed invention. OSS is not a commercialization per se. It is simply a public disclosure of a particular method. Patents too are a public disclosure of particular solutions. But it would be hard to prove [to me, anyway] that a patent assignee would be damaged by publicly telling others something they had already publicly disclosed themselves.
As far as I am aware, time-limited monopolies are permitted in exchange for the disclosure. It it completely legal and non-actionable, as far as I understand the law, to use the disclosure for personal non-profit use. So, for an anti-spam filter, it would be hard to argue that anyone, even businesses would be using such a system for profit. I would argue that it is a necessity under law to prevent things in the workplace that harass or oppress or [truly] offend, which a lot of spam does. So, rather than for profit it is a legal necessity (in many countries, certainly in the jurisdictions that would be asked to enforce this patent).
Complaining that the world is unfair -- a fact known to most adults -- is profoundly useless.
Graham himself acknowledges that Microsoft has a patent with a grant date of 1997 and covering his method, as well as all other Bayesian spam filtering methods on the market. (In fact, the classifier system that Microsoft patented shipped as a part of Outlook Express in 1997.)
This limits the NAI patent considerably.
Where I have a problem with all this story is that someone in McAfee had to have known that there was prior art in this area before the patent was applied for. I think that applying for a patent when prior art is known about should be a criminal offense and punishable by a court of law.
This patent needs to be fought.
Another good translation for "Besteck" is "tableware", which bypasses the question of whether it's actually made of/plated with/has not a trace of silver...
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Not quite. In some jurisdictions (such as the US), you have one year to file your patent after you publicly disclose your invention. This can be as simple as selling your product on the open market (in Europe, you must file prior to revealing). Any public disclosure of an invention _by_another_person_ before your initial disclosure/filing, will count as prioir art. It does not matter when you have the idea, it only matters when you reveal it.
bogofilter was released as follows: from their web page
Mr Bayes published some of his early work in the 1764 edition of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
It doesn't matter if Jesus Christ himself wrote that article..
The primary purpose of the US patent system is to generate revenue for the economie and you can patent almost anything already existing, as long as it has a different colour and those who have prior art can't affort a lawsuit to nullify your patent.
For example, McAfee would surely like to patent farting *in public* if they thought it would be enforceable.. And good luck on finding a prior art on that one ..
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
as long as people keep buying via-[g]ra and the p_enis P-a*tch.
It's easier to wear the spandex than to do the crunches. --David Lee Roth
Wasn't the topic that we are no longer free to use various filering techniques for spam because our wonderful patent office decided that one company now has the sole right to allow or deny us use of said techniques.
Oh wait, I can still speak, I must be free.
----
My brain hurts. I've got my head stuck in the cupboard (monty python).
RTFP (Read The Fine Patent) - It only cover these when used together (with some other restrictions such as excluding paragraphs). It is very broad, but not as much as is depicted in the /. article.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
It really shows the McAfee guys for what they are: a bunch greedy ignoramuses who want to make money with other people's ideas and can't even do their homework.
The same is true for the USPTO except they are lazy instead of greedy.
-- Anonycous Moward
At first glance, I thought this said "McAfee Granted Spam Patent," and I immediately thought, "Boy, that's a GREAT idea! Patent the concept of spam, and then sue the bejeezus out of anyone who violates your patent..."
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
Without actually looking at the patent, I would think that a competitor would have to use all of the mentioned techniques. If the patent application has a description of the process, which it should, then I would think that a competitor would have to use the mentioned techniques in the described manner. IANAPL, obviously, but I thought that patents had to be clear and succinct and describe one thing.
Any patent lawyers trolling slashdot?
Now's your chance to speak up.
Companies defend themselves against that by saying "we didn't know, we didn't look, and you can't prove otherwise." Bizarrely enough, this works in court.
Right now, the USPTO has incentives to grant patents, because their budget comes mostly from fees. There's no penalty for them when they grant a bogus patent, because bogosity gets determined in the courts, down the line.
What's needed is a feedback mechanism - say, patent examiners get annual reviews on both their efficiency (patents reviewed/year) and their accuracy (patents upheld/invalidated).
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
What if some OSS-friendly organization (EFF, FSF) were to start offering a patent-filing service?
Open-Source/Free-Software developers are some of the most innovative people on the planet. Can you imagine what would happen if some OSS organization (with the inventor's permission, naturally) were to start filing patents on promising OSS inovations? The terms of the patent would naturally not require a licensing fee as long as the software incorporating it is itself free.
OSS developers are getting shafted by the patent office. While patent reform is clearly the most desirable solution, why aren't we fighting back by using their own weapons against them?
Last year (or perhaps 2 years ago) McAfee sent me an e-mail telling me about their brand new Windows-based product.
I emailed then called explaining how, while it was nice of them to bother e-mailing me a totally useless message, that I didn't want to hear from them unless they had a price for this product on FreeBSD.
The candor of the salesdrone was refreshing - Just install SpamAssassin. He then commented that with the zero cost option of SpamAssassin, making the anti spam software work on FreeBSD made no economic sense.
So, unless their email filtering product runs on every platform SpamAssassin works on, they can take a long walk on a short peer. If I can find the e-mails back and forth, I'll work to make the peer as short as I can.
I kinda thought that was implied. In fact we know neither, and yes the logic works both ways
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
An invention may be closely held (US application anyway) for as long as you wish prior to filing.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
Bush is not "the political class". Perhaps you can establish he is one member of it. "The Class", is much larger and generally related to those with big money and even bigger egos set off nicely with malignant cases of control freak syndrome.
That said, one thing you can NEVER, EVER, forget is the need for marketing. Without the illusion of a "real" election, the few would find it too difficult to control the many to the degree they need to suit themselves.
If you think the American electiorial system is meaningful, or even democratic, you are woefully misinformed. Pick criminal A or B. But, can't blame you, really, those marketing folks are rather good at their jobs.
No? Well, considering we're a pretty big nation and the notion that your peers would likely be the best candidates to decide the "common good" -- then why is it that, by far, the only ones you get to "pick" with your precious "democratic" vote are either uber wealthy and/or lawyers and/or demonstrated and willing crooks (crooks willing to father flat out giveaways (taken from you at the point of the government gun, BTW) such as the Sonny Bono Copyright Extention or DMCA)?
Oh, BTW, a guy at Digital Equipment used to keep an annual report on the US Constitution and what was legally left of it (citing case law along the way). As I recall, it was pretty much dead decades ago. But, now, at the lesiure of Homeland "Security", US citizens are presumed "Enemy Combatants" until proven otherwise.
The US is FAR, FAR, away from any notion of "freedom" or governance under a Constitution.
Sure, there are despot regimes that are worse than living in America - but that does not excuse the level of very real abuse that does exist.
All your Bayes are belong to us.
>
patent "the process of acquiring a patent in lieu of creating an original process, and as a means by which to provide a false sense of value in a venture and as a weapon to employ litigous intimidation to stifle competition"?
I'm sure it could be worded appropriately so the USPTO has no clue (not that they ever had one), and then we can let the fun begin.
I hope they lose their mor.tgage on their buildings, are forced to take 300% the normal dose of v1agra so that their breasts grow 600% and they all show up in web photos with Na$ty Nancy getting FR.EE RECTAL EXAMS!
Table-ized A.I.
.. that is called prior art. it predates the applicaiton by 4 months... now someone needs to prove that the dec filing was not a result of the august note...
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
This is almost what happens already ... their is an opposition period (definitely in UK and Europe and I think in US too) in which you can file comments.
In UK these are observations (Section 21 of Patents Act) and don't require the observer to get involved. That is, you can write to the UKPO and say "this patent application is totally bogus, look at this RFC from 1932" and the examiner will take that into account. The applicant is notified and the document (I believe) if it's available will be placed on file.
Implementing a web-based version would make it difficult (I imagine) to extract proper comments from the background noise. Requiring postage costs cuts alot of the noise.
Of course who sits reading hundreds of patents a day just to check up on the USPTO? (other than businesses of course!).
hmmm... You're probably right. Of course now the dilemma will be deciding if this is a good or bad thing...
Microsoft's Monopoly = bad
Software Patents = bad
Microsoft's Monopoly trashing everyone's software patents = good
tough call!
I guess what it boils down to deciding which is more of a threat to the development and better use of technology (including software). In this case I'd say that software patents are the greater enemy..
It does if it's a patent document, they are legal claims for property. They have to be precise. For preferable features (ie optionally additional) the form is that subsequent "dependent" claims are used.
So, in this instance the parent post is correct. This is quite narrow.
PS: The parent post needs to use "Plain Old Text" option as well, and don't forget to preview!!!
OK.
1 6171 ]
It's a bit much calling the patent examiner "inept" when you only skimmed the document. It's clear from looking at the claims and citations that the claims were narrowed considerably from merely a "bayesian spam filter", that everyone thinks is being claimed, to the current system. The claims are a compound of several spam filtering techniques along with use of a narrowly defined paragraph based hashing mechanism.
I've not looked into the techniques used but it doesn't seem like anyone is using this system.
No, I don't approve of software patents either. But this is far from a bad example.
[Cross reference http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=109666&cid=93
That is not do-able without withholding his claim to authorship on said book... and for his translator also.
P.S. Note that this post is similarly lacking said glyph; I concur that this is difficult!
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think that the innovation that the patent is really about is removeing the first/last paragraph from an email before you apply the usual spam detection methods. Since many spams have a final paragraph that consists of random words, this makes sense, although it seems rather too obvious to get a patent on.
is a material-neutral term in the USA.
Pay a prolific spammer to send out a bulk message that is severely critical of the Church of Scientology.
Now that's a fight I'd LOVE to see.
6,732,157... for those who want to see the primary source of this discussion
That's too fucking bad for them, then. They're going after a monopoly, after all. Going after a monopoly should be risky.
The decision to patent or not is one that should involve significant tradeoffs for everyone who considers patenting something. But right now, there are no real tradeoffs if you're a large corporation: the filing fees are nothing compared to the benefits of having the patent.
We won't see any real improvement in the patent arena until that changes.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Bayesian spam filtering was first added to the Mozilla codebase on September 9, 2002 by Dan Mosedale. The first major release to include it was Mozilla 1.3 Alpha, which was published on December 13, 2002. Is that not prior art?
Here is the reference:
Provost, J (1999). Naive-Bayes vs. Rule-Learning in Classification of Email. The University of Texas at Austin, Artificial Intelligence Lab. Technical Report AI-TR-99-284
I should mention that I don't think I'm the first to use Naive-Bayes on email. I think some folks from Microsoft did it in 1998, and there may be others too.
See this page.
I apologise, I spoke too soon.
It appears a similar treatment has been affected previously however, in this case a novel form is introduced, to whit, the legal posession provided by the patent of treatments involving Bayes theorem, which therefore renders a state of belonging to the third party.
It is apparent now that this joke is new because it works from two oblique perspectives. I stand humbled and self-corrected.
I shall now register myself as a slashdot user so that I can be personally ridiculed for my under-considered opinions.
Bleh!
"And that's the problem. The USPO tends to behave as if they have no familiarity (or willingness to research) the fields in which they grant patents."
;)
Much agreed. I wasn't arguing for nutty patents on the basis that everything is novel, somewhere and to someone. I wish that an icon was the right size to feature the illustration from the cat-with-laser-pointer patent
Cheers,
Tim
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
You've got it half right.
For a published disclosure by others to count as prior art, it must either:
(1) have published more than one year prior to the application's filing date, or
(2) have published before the invention occurred.
For (2), it is possible to get around this prior art if substantial evidence can be produced to the patent office that the inventor invented it prior to the publication date of the reference, if that date is not more than one year prior to the filing date of the application.
And, yes, I would know: I am a practicing patent agent.
I told you it was difficult. :)
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I played with ifile at one time...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I wonder if Network Associates lobbied against proper anti-spam regulations as strongly as Microsoft did.
It makes sense; you don't want the government to legislate against something you're selling protection from. It'd cut into your bottom line.
Suddenly I feel nauseous.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Anyone getting a patent, and who are a true member of the F/OSS community, should dedicate the patent to the public domain.
This would ensure that the knowledge patented can be used by anyone without money-grubbing corporations extracting a found of flesh for the right to do so.
Important info:
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
http://dieoff.org/synopsis.htm
http://www.peakoil.net
For example, McAfee would surely like to patent farting *in public* if they thought it would be enforceable..
Uh... You mean, like, they could force me to fart in public? CHANGE THE PATENT LAW, QUICKLY!
Hmmm...
I distinctly remember utilizing VirusX on the Amiga in the EARLY 90s. Along with many other virus tools of the 80s...
here is another fine example of the PTO's work (or rather lack thereof).
I can picture it in there now: take stack of papers describing BS patent, take check, cash check, take approval stamp, stamp stack of papers, file stack of papers (still sealed in the envelope). Wash, repeat. Why would they need more 'examiners' to do that?? They can hire any old goof (like they clearly have) to do this.
They do say "Don't feed the trolls". Perhaps I should stop feeding you.