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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."
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.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
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.
Is there anywhare a statistic pf granted vs. denied patants by the PTO. Otherwise it seems save to assume the PTO is just rubberstamping ...
Move where ? China ?
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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
aha! i just knew this book would come in handy one day! (The author is the late Georges Perec, who in 1969 took up the challenge of producing an entire novel without once using the letter "e." and was translated into english by Gilbert Adair, also without using an "e")
I'm curious... was she ever confronted directly about this ?
I.e. by a journalist or otherwise quoting their earlier statement about being vehemently against software patents, and then voting otherwise ?
I'd love to know what her explanation for this about-face would be.
I know that in practice this is what politics has come down to - pay lipservice to your voters, even if it means saying the opposite of what you said even just a few hours ago to a different group of constituents, but I'd still be interested.
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.
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
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.
There must be a new way of running the system that would work. Or at least work better. The first suggestion that comes to my mind is the PO could put the patent to the public to submit proir art BEFORE it is granted. Then the PO could examine use any submissions against the patent. That would have to be a cheaper way of doing research.
But as one of the parents of this post stated, the big companies like it the way it is. The pessimist in me thinks this, or any process, that might work, has been patented that's why we won't see a change.
Yep, Network Associates aquired Deersoft,
the makers of spamassassin in Jan 2003
(one month after this patent was filed).
I know the main guy behind spamassassin
Justin Mason
is very opposed to software patents.
Thanks for that link. That paper references this paper (PDF) by M. Sahami, S. Dumais, D. Heckerman, and E. Horvitz."
They seem to be the first Bayesian Spam Filterers. So if the patent belongs to anyone, its Microsoft and Stanford University.
Doesn't that make you feel better.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Yeah, but Sahami et all didn't get it to work; they were still letting through an embarrasingly large amount of spam. Graham achieved 98+% accuracy which makes it practical. His is really the key insight IMO; with his overall scheme you get almost no spam at all.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"The filing date of the patent is Decemeber 2002, so this Dec 2001 date you're coming up with is totally and completely irrevelevant.
Speaking as someone who is about to take the patent bar exam (so I acutally know what I am talking about) you're wrong.
Yes, McAfee would have to be the original inventors to get a patent. However, it's going to be hard, if not impossible, to prove they aren't. What can be done is show that the information on this invention was in the public domain prior to filing of the patent.
35 USC 102(b) provides that you can't get a patent on your invention if the invention has been published over a year prior to the filing of the application. That's where December 2001 comes from.
Paul's article may still be relevant. However it does not prove that McAfee didn't invent it first. If you really think Paul's article shows prior invention, why not submit a third party request for reexamination based on that article?
Oh, I forgot, you're just a slashtroll who doesn't actually know what you're talking about.
"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 */
Except that the USPO does not keep the majority of the money they get in patent fees. Congress put the hit on them a number of years ago to finance yet another Pork Project.
I'm against process patents as a matter of principal but in this case I feel that the USPO is not the bad guy. Go complain to your congresscritter so that the USPO keeps all its fees so that they can do some decent research in prior art instead of rubber staming everything.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
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.
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.
Not a meaningful statistic (sample of one), but... My name is on four different software or software architecture patents. Of the four, two were denied on initial filing. Of the two that were denied, one was granted after several claims covered by prior art were removed, and the other was granted after writing a several-page submission that showed how the prior art cited by the patent office did not apply to our situation. Casual conversation with other people listed as inventors on patent applications made by the giant corporation where we worked suggested that my experience was not unusual -- a substantial portion of applications seem to be initially rejected.
Let's run through it: (Non-junk anti-lamness characters.)
1862 the Anti-Bigamy Act disallowed Mormons in the Utah territory from practicing polygamy, an article of their religion.
First, let's be clear about what Militia meant in context. The first Congress passed the Militia Act of 1792, which said, in part:
Militia was only meant to restrict who possessed firearms on a basis of race and sex, not based on military service. Every federal "gun control" law is, therefore, unconstitutional.
This has never been a problem AFAIK. (Non-junk anti-lamness characters.)
Since this is Slashdot I won't drone on about the onerus nature of the PATRIOT act. I'm sure you have heard it here before.
You might read the text of the law and see if you can reconsile it to the above article.
Another popular Slashdot example: Kevin Mitnick.
Hey, Kevin's a two-fer.
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..
The big problem with our nation's constitutional form is that we wrote our Federal Constitution over 200 years ago. The Founders, the authors, were both brilliant and men of their times. Being men of their times, they created a system of limited, enumerated powers. By the letter of the federal constitution, the federal government has only a finite grant of power: what is not granted, is forbidden. That grant of power was sufficient for the time. Times have changed.
Today, we have a federal constitution where the legal doctrines that permit the federal regulation of minute aspects of our economic and personal lives are based on assinine reasoning and interpretation of the text. e.g. Stream of Commerce: a farmer growing his own potatoes for subsistance, who did not engage in commerce, is subject to federal regulation under the aegis of regulation of inter-state trade, because by not buying those potatoes, he didn't buy potatoes that may have come from another state, and therefore impacted the market in potatoes being sold in inter-state commerce, and therefore his not engaging in commerce is still an action within the power of the federal government to regulate. In other words, NOTHING it outside of the federal power to regulate.
How does the federal government administer the highway system? Get uniform national speed limits? Interact with our educational system? It has no power whatsoever to do these things directly. You do not see United States of America construction trucks filling potholes. Teachers do not take their instructions from the federal Department of Education. The federal government simply uses its unlimited taxation power, and then sends that money to states, with strings on how it may be used. It starves the states of tax revenue by mandating that every citizen nationwide pay into a big pot, and then holds that pot of money over the heads of the states as a club. Set such and such speed limit (or environmental law, or labor standard, or...) lest we not give you back the money which your citizens paid.
This arcane system is how it works. Bizarre legal doctrines, money passed around with strings, a federal government under basically no functional restraint since 1937 (look up 'constitutional revolution of 1937' or 'a switch in time that saved nine').
The power to 'interpret' makes the constitution a largely meaningless piece of paper today. We are loath to formally amend the constitution, as that is a difficult thing to do, and could be a Pandora's box. So instead our courts twist and wring meanings out of the text that simply aren't there. We speak of a flexible document. Is it really that flexible? And if it is, does it really have meaning?
We are taught that we have a written constitution. But in fact, we have a common-law constitution. The text of the constitution itself is largely useless in determining constitutional law in the year 2004. It must be understood within the context of the last two hundred years of jurisprudence.
And then there is the Bill of Rights, which causes great confusion in the minds of the average person. In fact, the average person likely thinks that the Bill of Rights *IS* the constitution. The federal constitution proper is a positive document: it positively grants powers. It is THE SOURCE of power (well, as a proxy for us, the sovereigns), and if the power is not granted, it doesn't exist. The Bill of Rights, however, is negative. It restricts, it does not grant. That has led to confusion in the popular mind, to where people (the electorate, Congress, the President, various courts...) now believe that if the government isn't literally restricted from doing something, then it must be able to do it.
Hence, the focus by courts to find hidden meaning inside (or within the 'penumbra' -- what asses) of particular amendments to restrict the power to government to meddle with our lives (which I suppose makes sense in the context of the 14th amendment and incorporation against states). In the case of the federal government, though
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