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McAfee Granted Far-Reaching Spam-Control Patent

Posted by timothy on from the what-the-system-isn't-meant-for dept.

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."

6 of 449 comments (clear)

  1. I worked at McAfee... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    ...and the management were not well-regarded by the techies. (This was when they were still Network Associates.) There were a number of practices which I personally had profound moral qualms about, which later lead indirectly to my leaving. So far as I know later events lead to those practices being stopped, but the general demeanour of the NAI execs can be seen in the string of Slashdot stories (over the years.)

    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 ".

  2. Prior art dates to 1764 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Mr Bayes published some of his early work in the 1764 edition of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

    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.

  3. FSF Patents? by cuban321 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  4. patent is useless and possibly fraudulent by dekeji · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. Knuth on Patents by rbowles · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "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 */
  6. Re:Invalid stupid patent. by michael_cain · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Is there anywhare a statistic pf granted vs. denied patants by the PTO. Otherwise it seems save to assume the PTO is just rubberstamping ...

    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.