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. :-)
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
- 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.
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.
...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 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.
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.
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
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
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 */
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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..
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.
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.
Bleh!
I played with ifile at one time...
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
Hmmm...
I distinctly remember utilizing VirusX on the Amiga in the EARLY 90s. Along with many other virus tools of the 80s...