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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."
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".
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
"A bayesian approach to filtering junk e-mail"
In AAAI-98 Workshop on Learning for Text Categorization, 1998.
sorry officer, left my sig in my other computer.
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.
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
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
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.
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.