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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."
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.
why the "logo" for this article on Slashdot is "fork, knife and spoon"
Because they are well known, common items and they have the word patented stamped on them - trying to point out the problem with patents for things that are "obvious to those versed in the art".
Sure the English language has an equivalent to "Besteck". Actually, it has multiple. "Cutlery" would be a good choice, while in the US "silverware" would be even better.
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.
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....
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.
It was first published in 1990.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
What matters is date of invention, not filing.
If NAI can demonstrate that they were working on a Bayes approach prior to Graham's work, then they may indeed have thougth up the idea first.
<researching> ....
Clearly Graham was not the first to think of Bayes as an approach to spam This paper ca 2000 predates both and is cited by the USPTO in the patent as a reference.
Contrary to prevailing /. wisdom the patent process does actually involve research on both the Patent office and the applicants part.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
Yes he does. It's why he wrote "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."
It doesn't matter whether that HTML form uses SMTP or whatever, it's the same form to the user. So for those, E-Mail can be easily replaced with something else.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
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.
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.
I guess I don't understand how the USPTO works. How do they get paid big bucks for granting garbage patents? I was under the impression that they were funded by tax dollars.
-Turkey
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
The European Commission (appointed by ministers in each state) proposed to introduce software patents along US lines. The European Parliament (the only democratically elected pillar) amended the proposed directive to prevent software patents. The Council of Ministers (made up of ministers of each state (the ones who appoint the Commission)) have just voted for an even more extreme pro-patent position than the original Commission proposal. In order to defeat this, an absolute majority* of all the Parliament's MEPs must vote against the Council's new version.
* this is an absolute majority of all elected MEPs, not just a majority of those who bother to vote.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
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
Patent fees. Getting a patent is not a free service, in fact its quite expensive. Its gotten to the point that an individual can't even begin to patent anything unless he is wealthy or has a large corporate backer. Without spending much on research the USPTO become quite profitable for the government.
I'm a programmer, I don't have to spell correctly; I just have to spell consistently
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.
"fork, knife and spoon" (in German we call it "Besteck" but I know that the english language has no equivalent for it)?
The english equivalent of Besteck is cutlery.
In the USA they refer to it as silverware. (Even if it is made out of white plastic.)
I am going to take these out of order.
The lying-est politicians ever known.
And been that way for about 228 years, same as in every country on Earth.
A constitution that has no meaning, because not a single line of it hasn't been overruled.
The Constitution has been trampled, both by the left and the right, for their own purposes. However, I do believe you are stretching the truth a wee bit!
An obesity epidemic that is among the world's most severe.
As a result of the success of America, many of our citizens have too much food to eat and are lazy. I still prefer this to a famine.
The US's last election was rigged (at least the Florida portion of it was) and no one cared.
God, I am so tired of hearing this complete and utter bullshit. People actually believe this. I live in Florida. What the people that repeat the above lie never mention:
- The initial count in Florida had Bush winning.
- The official recount showed Bush winning.
- Many of the nation's newspapers came down and oversaw another recount of all votes, and BUSH WON THAT ALSO.
Then these people say, well it was rigged for Bush! Prove it, or STFU. I still remember Gore sending a team of lawyers to Florida with the objective of discounting as many votes from the military as they possibly could. One tactic was to try and get the votes thrown out because the soldier left the date or similar detail off the absentee ballot.
Then you say, "well, those kinds of details matter!"
Well, what about the details of punching the hole for your choice all the way through the ballot, especially when other holes in your ballot have been disturbed? Don't those details matter, also?
Both sides fucked around legally after the fact, but that doesn't discount the main point, that Bush came out ahead in the three major recounts.
P.S. I am a registered Libertarian and vote that way, so I'm right between the two parties and have no vested interest in Bush or Gore. But lies are lies.
I'd bitch about the US more, but my own country (Canada) is trying to become the US as fast as it can.
No, please, keep going. We love to hear the uninformed bitchings of our Canadian brethren.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
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.
Indeed, it appears that there is some money to be made from patent applications. Upon some quick research, a patent application is quite expensive...and it's clear that the USPTO is not spending that money researching prior art. However, to shut the anti-corporate camp up a little (and Cyberlync, this is not a rip into you by any stretch)...if you read the fee schedule, there are separate fees for a small entity and "other than a small entity". The latter half have to pay double for everything.
-Turkey
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
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.
I worked at McAfee too back when it was Network Associates, after they bought Deersoft, which I founded. Deersoft you'll recall was the company that made and marketed commercial versions of SpamAssassin. I'd just like to point out that we, the Deersoft folks, had nothing whatever to do with this patent. It appears to have originated with the prior-to-Deersoft SpamKiller product (the windows desktop app).
Also, the open source SpamAssassin project is likely 100% in the clear on this patent, even if it is valid (which is a separate question), since Network Associates and all of its employees who worked on the open source project have filed CLAs or CCLAs with the Apache Foundation. Section 4 of each document is worth a read. Looks like anyone who licenses a copy of the SpamAssassin code from ASF gets the right to use Network Associate's patent. Though IANAL.
See this page.
Bleh!
I played with ifile at one time...
Hmmm...
I distinctly remember utilizing VirusX on the Amiga in the EARLY 90s. Along with many other virus tools of the 80s...