Altnet Threatens P2P Companies Over File Hash Patents

devil_doll writes "I saw over on p2pnet that Altnet is trying to 'mug' a number of P2P companies with seemingly bogus patents. One of them is titled 'Data processing system using substantially unique identifiers to identify data items, whereby identical data items have the same identifiers,' and appears to be nothing more than a simple hash table."

Comments

Another great move in the patent office

[n0dalus]

Next they'll be patenting making dumb patents.

Re:Another great move in the patent office

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you looked at US patent Number 27750221?

Re:Another great move in the patent office

[sh0dan]

404 Patent doesn't exist.

Do you mean 2750221 (Luggage rack for cars) - pretty stupid.
Or is it 2775021 (Burial Casket - from 1956) - also pretty silly.

Guess you can throw up any random patent number, and the patent will seem rather obvious. ;)

Re:Another great move in the patent office

[Anonymous Coward]

US - Entertainment for the rest of the world.

Re:Another great move in the patent office

[Anonymous Coward]

Next they'll be patenting making dumb patents.

I'm pretty sure we can find prior art :P

'Bogus patents'

[sebFlyte]

When it comes to software isn't this just tautology?

Re:'Bogus patents'

[Ized]

I had to look this up :D

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=tautology

tautology Audio pronunciation of "tautology" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (tô-tl-j)
n. pl. tautologies
1.
1. Needless repetition of the same sense in different words; redundancy.
2. An instance of such repetition.
2. Logic. An empty or vacuous statement composed of simpler statements in a fashion that makes it logically true whether the simpler statements are factually true or false; for example, the statement Either it will rain tomorrow or it will not rain tomorrow.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[Negatyfus]

Well, actually, that would be a pleonasm, because 'bogus' and 'patent' aren't the same word type. :)

Flame ahead :)

Re:'Bogus patents'

[mumblestheclown]

Tell that to somebody who has spent years developing a new algorithm for something like facial recognition. Explain to me again why a clever person who comes up with a novel algorithm (note: I said NOVEL - I am NOT denying that there are horrible abuses in the patent system, esp. wrt software - I am just countering your claim that software patents shouldn't exist at all) to produce something useful and novel shouldn't enjoy a temporary monopoly from the fruits of his labour and research just because his invention happens to be in software rather than being hydraulic or pneumatic?

/ incidentally, any "all patents must be abolished" responders need not bother. go visit economic history 101 instead.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[Troed]

Tell that to someone who speant years on coming up with a totally new plot for a book.

Uhm.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[moderators_are_w*nke]

Software code is subject to copyright, physical inventions are not. Physical inventions therefore require patents, software code does not. Mark

Re:'Bogus patents'

[leonmergen]

:)

You're just waiting for us to respond with all kinds of arguments you've heard all before, just for the fun of it, eh ? :)

Re:'Bogus patents'

[miu]

There are situations in which software can be an actual invention, but they are vanishingly rare. With benefit so rare and abuse so common it may be that trade secrets are the only way to benefit and protect such inventors. Either that or institute some serious penalties against entities that abuse the patent system.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[mumblestheclown]

No, I'd actually like to hear some.

So far, I've heard: the "copyright" argument-- that software is like the plot of a novel. Bullshiat, says I. Copyright covers only the specific instantiation of an idea, not the idea itself. If you spent 10 years coming up with a novel software algorithm that could, say, accurately detect a person's diseases from a facial photograph, then by the copyright explanation, i'd only be covered in m specific code. anybody else could reverse engineer this in a week and sell their own clone version. The idea of this discourages you from investing the 10 years of work.

then of course there's the "economic" arugment that says that people are developing useful stuff without the help of patents and that patents deter from innovation. but this is really an unfairly directed argument. the argument should not be that all software patents are bad, but that they are currnetly being granted too liberally and for obvious evolutionary things that the law explicitly says they should not be. this is a problem with the implementation of software patents - the basic idea is still valid.

I dont at all disagree that many granted software / bm patents have been bullshiat. however, my argument is baby/bathwater - there are many good reasons for keeping patents for legitimatly patentable software ideas. Software is protected by copyright. This argument is bullshiat.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to somebody who has spent years developing a new algorithm for something like facial recognition.

Be glad to, because:

1. They couldn't have made their innovation without the contributions of thousands before them.

2. All "original ideas" exist in nature already. Assigning ownership to an individual with the force of a government is nothing more than the theft of this property from the public commons.

3. The devil is in the implementation, not thinking up an idea or filing a patent application.

Over and over, useless parasites who have made no effort ot actually implement an idea they claim to have do nothing more than act as a road block to progress and steal from the public. It is nothing more than modern day highway robbery at best. I've innovated ideas and carried it out to companies three times - the real difficulty is in executing your business to actually carry the idea out. I give people ZERO credit for just conceptualizing...

Re:'Bogus patents'

[_KiTA_]

Tell that to somebody who has spent years developing a new algorithm for something like facial recognition. Explain to me again why a clever person who comes up with a novel algorithm (note: I said NOVEL - I am NOT denying that there are horrible abuses in the patent system, esp. wrt software - I am just countering your claim that software patents shouldn't exist at all) to produce something useful and novel shouldn't enjoy a temporary monopoly from the fruits of his labour and research just because his invention happens to be in software rather than being hydraulic or pneumatic?

The counter of course, is that you shouldn't be able to shut down ALL Facial Recognition innovation by patenting the idea of "using a computer to digitalize and analize a human face, therefore allowing the computer to pick that face from a database of other faces.". In the same way I can't patent a cog, a piston, or (wait for it) the wheel, you shouldn't be able to get a blanket patent on ANYTHING in software. Period. Specifics may or may not be ok -- But honestly, copyright handles "distribution of a literary, musical, dramatic, or artistic work". It does not grant you exclusive use of a mere idea.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[Anonymous Coward]

" Tell that to somebody who has spent years developing a new algorithm for something like facial recognition."

Okay:

"Dear Mr. Software developer:
Congrats on that fab new program you've written for facial recongition. I'm sure your terrific implemmentation will make you lots of money. I'll bet that it will be a few years before people will reverse engineer your software, because obviously, something so thoughtful and complex cannot be figured out by someone simply using the program. So enjoy and make your money now!"

Does that help at all?

Re:'Bogus patents'

[arkanes]

Well, I kinda look at it like this. We can't judge the merits of a system we don't have. So lets look at the history of our existing system and see how much innovation has been spurred by software patents, and how much has been supressed. The first is really easy to measure by how many novel patents are granted, how many products based on those patents are created, and how sucessfull those patents are.

Patents work really good for protecting mature industries where true innovation is both revolutionary and rare. Incidently, these are also the industries where small players are the least likely to be able to make a dent - you're going to have a tough time selling a new car even if you have some nifty new engine that has all the performance of a V8 but 100x the gas mileage. Patents work really poorly in rapidly evolving new industries (and there's never been an industry that's moved as fast as software is).

Further, patents are supposed to be on an INVENTION, not a PROCESS. That's why you can't patent mathematical theorems.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[hackstraw]

Tell that to somebody who has spent years developing a new algorithm for something like facial recognition.

I know this is totally anti /. thinking here, but you know, if I had spent years developing a new algorithm for something like facial recognition I probably would not put it in an open source application.

There are such things as trade secrets.

Plus, after developing a new algorithm for facial recognition and spending all of one's money on developing such item and then patenting that item you would still be shit out of luck if you then didn't have the money left over to sue every person that was using said patented item.

A patent is simply a gift to the government that says you have the right to sue somebody (if you want to) in order to defend such patent. And you are not guaranteed to win either.

A simple legal contract that says "don't use my algorithm unless you pay me and don't distribute my algorithm unless you pay me" is more than sufficient.

End of story, the patent office may close now.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[mumblestheclown]

you're going to have a tough time selling a new car even if you have some nifty new engine that has all the performance of a V8 but 100x the gas mileage.

You must live on Bizzaro world. If you did this, you would quickly sell the rights to 1% of the future earnings of this invention to a few mbas/lawyers who would take care of the paperwork for you of selling or licensnig this to the fords and mercedes of the world for billions of dollars. there are basically tens of thousands of small research driven companies and individuals who work like this, with buyout of their company or their idea by a big company capable of taking it to market as their goal.

explain to me how mature the lightbulb industry was when edison invented it for what appears to be a good healthy mix of inventivene spirit and capitalist greed?

your argument is nonsense. go back to school.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[j0nb0y]

Hehe, actually, historically, you have been able to patent processes. You're right about math though, at least historically. I'd argue that math can be patented now. How else could RSA have been patented? If RSA isn't math, what is?

Re:'Bogus patents'

[Anonymous Coward]

A number of reasons
1) Suppose I give you a DVD containing some software. 32 thousand million '0's and '1's. There's no objective way to tell whether the DVD infringes the patent.
2) It stops me from teaching my children how to program computers.
3) A general purpose computer will run any bit string. Your algorithm is a bit string; one of those that a general purpose computer will run. That's prior art.
4) You have to describe your algorithm well enough so that after the patent expires, the rest of us will be able to use it for free. Are you sure you did so ?
5) Suppose I give you a DVD. 32 thousand million '0's and '1's. You have a magic way of telling whether it infringes, and you say it does. Then it turns out that the DVD was cut before your patent was granted. Prior art, your patent goes poof.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[arkanes]

I didn't say you couldn't get sucessful by selling your engine design to existing companies. I said you'd have a hard time marketing a new car. I know the difference, do you?

And Edison is actually a really good example. Maybe you don't remember when we broke up the energy monopolies and forced a market? It's hard to play what-if in economics, but I'd say that we weren't served in the long run by Edison's capitalist greed - we had to take measures after the fact to correct the situation.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[mumblestheclown]

sigh. perhaps you've never heard of Dyson, which came out of nowhere with a new patent to become a leading player in an old old market (vaccuum cleaners?) Please do get several clues.

even with your auto example, the distinction is stupid. either way your invention has value that can be equivalently explouted.

as far as energy goes. oil OLIGOPOLIES have little to do with edison's ELECTRICIY example. in fact, oligopoly economics have relatively little to do with patent economics. again, get clues.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[arkanes]

Process patents are a recent concept. I don't remember the exact date, and I'm too lazy to search, but I believe they were introduced in the 70s, more or less at the behest of genetic research companies (software companies didn't have enough leverage then). I should clarify what I mean by a process patent - you could always patent the MECHANICS of a process, like a smelter for creating steel. You couldn't patent the process of creating steel. With software/business process patents, you can do the equivilent. The Eolas patent on embedded objects was a great example - the actual mechanics of doing the embedding are the hard part, and were not adressed at all by the patent. Note that this patent was upheld in multiple court decisions.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[Whumpsnatz]

"analize a human face"? No problem. Stick a cigarette in the mouth, and you have an instant butthead.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[j0nb0y]

Yeah, the big problem now is that the floodgates have been opened to patenting all kinds of things that could never have been patented before. Since the USPTO seems to be incapable of using sources other than the existing patent database for prior art, there's all kinds of crazy patents. The other problem, being, of course that patent reviewers don't have enough education in the appropriate areas to recognize obvious patents. The infamous 1-click patent is a great example. You have parts A, B, C, and D, which all have already been done, you put them together in a trivial way to accomplishing 1-click shopping, and new patent. If you had asked any web programmer to come up with a design for a 1-click shopping app, any good programmer would have come up with a design in 15 minutes. And most of the designs would have looked very similar, because all of them would have used the kinds of technology that were available, parts A,B,C,D, etc. that I mentioned earlier. It's obvious to any programmer, but apparently not to whomever reviewed the patent.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[Szaman2]

Ok, so you patent the algorithm. Let's say I use your algo, improve on it and make a closed source application and sell it cheeper than you. Now how do you prove that I stole your algorithm if my code is closed? Now you can sue me and demand to see my code, but you can be preaty sure I will fight like hell to avoid that. And did I really did infringe upon your patent if I gleemed at your algorithm and then developed the software myself using different language, different platform and different techniques? And if I improved upon it and lets say made it run in O(n) when yours was O(n^2), isn't that kindoff like making my own algorithm anyway? Patenting algorithm, while seemingly logical is dumb because it would be really tough to prove that someone infringed your patent. Unless of course you make your patent vague as hell - for example: "Using graphical pattern recognition techniques for facial recognition and storing the pattern maps in a database". But if you patent that, then you bassically claim than anyone working on facial recognition software is infringig (because they are likely to do some pattern recognition, and database backend). If you make it to specific (like algorithm or implementation details) - it will be really hard to prove anything in the land of closed source. If you make it to broad, you bassically do what the altnet guys do - making a ridiculus patent which will be dropped in the court after it is scrutinized by a team of experts. Software patents are dumb - period.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[obi]

One should always look at laws - or in this case, state-sanctioned time-limited monopolies - not in light of what their potential benefit might be, but in light of its potential for abuse. Patents are most definately not something natural, they're a privilege given so as to make sure that inventors don't keep their inventions secret.

However if in certain areas they cause more harm than good, the governement should simply not issue them. I think in the case of software, a good case can be made that copyright protection is more than adequate. If a game company (id software) makes their living on selling their engines - basically novel algorithms - but still feels that they not only don't need to file for patents to protect their business, but doesn't even need to keep their techniques secret, then I don't see what other algorithms _do_ need patent protection.

I'm pretty much convinced that the software industry would not collapse or even be hindered by the absence of patent protection for their field. I even doubt much would be kept secret, because come on, how many of these things are truly novel? For every truly novel application, there's probably 100 obvious ones. So I think it's only right to ask if there's a societal benefit.

My impression is that most software patents these days are filed for defensive purposes, or cartel-forming (cross-licencing).

It just seems to be an impediment to free market economies.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[iminplaya]

Great. Then let me have a temporary monopoly on your car after I fix it. Say for a day or two just to run a few "errands". Yeah that's it. You wouldn't mind if I take a dump and use the shower after I fix your plumbing, right? If I fix the oven or your fridge, I'll be expecting a nice turkey dinner and breakfast for a week at least. Any electrical work should net me the use of the TV for a month os so. There's just no reason to treat your work any different than mine. IP is a gov't subsidy just like tobacco, dairy, and oil. Once we remove the ability to speculate on IP the way we do with real estate, we will progress so much faster. IP law does not encourage innovation. It promotes speculation and squatting to the benefit of nobody but the speculator. If a guy spends years producing a new algorithm because he needs a new algorithm or someone contracts him to do so(without exclusivity), then I'll believe it will be a good algorithm. If he produces it simply on the hope he'll makes tons of money, he's probably selling junk. Like too many others, you seem to think we would still be in the stone age without IP. Well, I contend that we are still stuck in the "horse and buggy and other useless contraptions" age precisely due to IP.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[Surt]

Copyright is what protects you for that algorithm. For many years longer than patent will.

If it takes some other guy 2 days to come up with the same algorithm independently, it just means you were slow, not that you deserved a patent, and he should have to pay you.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[wizard_of_wor]

What we're dicussing here is an algorithm, not the code. There's a difference. (And how the hell did this get modded to +4 insightful?)

Re:'Bogus patents'

[sacrilicious]

Explain to me... why a clever person who comes up with a novel algorithm... shouldn't enjoy a temporary monopoly

I'd first say that abuses of patents are costing society far more than they are worth. The existing system is badly broken. When a government sets policy, the rule should be to maximize benefits for the governed; that is not happening. True, a few lawsuit-happy people are getting wealthy, and true, a few mega-corporations are enjoying their use of patent cross-licensing ("I won't sue you if you don't sue me") to bar the entry of competition, but the wealth produced there is concentrated in a tiny (and may I say non-deserving) segment. When economies suffer from an skewed distribution of supply and demand, very bad things have been known to happen... for everybody.

I'd also say that even if patents were functioning to the spirit of the original intent (i.e. only non-obvious patents granted, and - I'd argue in the world of software - a MUCH shorter span than 17 years) I'd still have a problem with them. I agree that it's in society's interest to stimulate innovation by rewarding those who innovate... but I disagree that possessing a patent should be like printing money. Reward should be commensurate with effort. If a person works unpaid for five years to produce Wonderful Algorithm X, I'd want the patent to grant them the ability to get ahead by five years of nominal salary plus some standard reward factor (perhaps another five years nominal salary) at which point the patent would expire and the inventor would have to compete on market merits. This gets complicated because of the need to account for how much unpaid time a person has put into an invention, though I suspect not impossible. Pointedly, my compensation formula does not include "degree of genius" that went into the effort, other than the (hypothetically well-applied) standard of "non-obvious". And most importantly, patents should not be a license to print money; there should be reward, but it should not be unmetered.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[arkanes]

I think this is really one of the problems with business process patents - one-click shopping is innovative. But it's not technically innovative - it's trchnically pretty trivial. The innovative part is recognizing that customers want this and delivering it to them. This is traditionally the sort of thing that good companies do and gain market advantage from. But by extending patents to this, we basically extend first-mover advantage from some arbitrary market-defined amount of time (quite short for fast-moving markets like the Internet) to a flat 14 years. Worse, we then close off benefits to consumers (consumers would be benefited if other stores had one-click, too) just to protect this idea.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[HiThere]

It wasn't even very innovative in a business sense. The field was moving fast, and people were pushing into new areas. People were just getting comfortable with buying things over the web. So the web store designs were in flux. (And Amazon probably weren't the first...they just patented it. I don't remember noticing any difference between their page and the other pages. So what they did certainly wasn't significantly different.)

Getting the patent doesn't prove that you invented it, much less that you were the only one who invented it, or that it wasn't obvious. This didn't qualify for a patent under any rule that I can think of except "the first person to put the money down gets the patent".

Re:'Bogus patents'

[dunng808]

The fallacy in this argument is that someone could spend ten years secretly developing an algorithm that blows the doors off of anyone else's. The truth is that progress happens in smaller steps, and goes faster and is more successful when ideas are shared and work is done by groups of programmers. Give us some examples of great software patents that reflect more than a year's effort. I'll start this off with one, the RSA patent. That thing crippled the U.S. in the PKI field for years. RSA did not take off until after the patent expired.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[Troed]

Yes. Like machines using algorithms have. That was the whole point.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[TheoMurpse]

An algorithm is a mathematical expression. Are you trying to say that you can copyright mathematical expressions? I shudder to think what the world wou ld be like if that was so.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[TheoMurpse]

I meant "patent mathematical expressions" not "copyright mathematical expressions."

Re:'Bogus patents'

[TheoMurpse]

I don't think RSA should have been allowed to be patented.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[wizard_of_wor]

Theoretically, yes, an algorithm is a mathematical expression. If I design a new type of cam that maximizes torque efficiency for a certain mechanical application, it's likely that the cam can be described by a mathematical expression as well. Does that mean I shouldn't be able to patent it? Of course not. Simply stating that an algorithm is "a mathematical expression" does not address the legal and economic arguments for allowing algorithms to be patented.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up you litigious bastards!

Re:'Bogus patents'

[cronius]

I've got one, and it might even fit with the american way of thinking (just maybe..), you've probably heard a lot of this before though:

Being granted a patent means full disclosure of the technology involved, and thus giving the owner exclusive rights over that particular technology (whatever is patented). If someone else where to lets say invent something extraordinary similar in his own basement sometime later (maybe the products with the new patented technology haven't even made the stores yet) then he would be denied his own invention (he did make it all by himself after all), just because someone came up with something basicly the same before him (and filed a patent).

Yes, the second guy could have read the patent papers, but lets say he didn't, in which case he would be denied the rights to his own invention. Se because of patents, whoever comes up with something first has certain rights (exclusive rights actually), and everyone else has butt kiss, no matter what. First guy: everything, runner up: nothing. It means that when it comes to software because of patents you have no rights what so ever, absolutely nothing, _unless_ you by any chance happen to be the first guy that _ever_ wrote something remotely like this.

This is flawed logic in my eyes. The same analogy can be used for genes. They're all there, just waiting to be labeled with a "function" or a role if you will. And whoever manages to do that first (it doesn't matter if it's somewhat obvious and a bunch of scientists figure it out 2 weeks later) gets all the rights, everyone else: nothing. Being "the first guy" somehow makes you "own" whatever you discover (for a limited time, but still). Why is this fair? It's like having the olympics, but only once every 30 years, 'cause only one guy is allowed to be "number one" (just like patents).

Copyright does not work this way, it only protects copying. This is much more fair. Anyone who figures out some great technology is allowed rights to that technology as long as they didn't copy it off someone else.

Obviously there is one flaw here, which is reverse engineering.

But commercial software still lives prosperously, and European companies aren't reverse engineering US software and duplicating this into their own products are they? The whole idea that "patents is a good thing and must exist or else everyone will rip off everyone else" is flawed, Europe does not have patents on software, and yet they aren't taking advantage of this supposedly "glaringly obvious rip off potential." Software existed quite nicely without patents. We simply don't need them, reverse engineering is only done when there's no other alternatives (like reverse engineering hardware drivers), not to ripp off competing software (which wouldn't be competing, it would be playing catch up).

IMHO.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[cronius]

Damn it, one more thing:

I didn't mean to bash against obvious patents, my point is that anything that can be invented many times by different people at different times (because it's basicly logic after all, and all it requires is time) should not have anything to do with patents. Patents deny other people to "figure something out" just because someone "figured it out" first.

Re:'Bogus patents'

[bit01]

Tell that to somebody who has spent years developing a new algorithm for something like facial recognition.

In the real world that is so rare as to be pretty much non-existent. Rare cases should not be driving law for the common cases. Most software inventions are incremental improvements or gee-that's-neat ideas requiring little investment.

... shouldn't enjoy a temporary monopoly from the fruits of his labour and research ...

You are being hypocritical: your 'significant investment' clause, OTOH, is pure evil and one of the worst ideas I have heard in a long time. It is anti-democractic, anti-individual (vs big business) and absolute nonsense..

In nice small sentences so maliciously obtuse people like you can understand:

1. The entry bar to software inventions is very low.
2. There are 6,500,000,000 people in the world.
3. With that many people (and increasing!) and the low entry bar it is a statistical certainty that most software inventions will be independently invented by more than one person.
4. Creating artificial scarcity when something is likely to be independently invented multiple times is economically stupid.
5. Well formulated copyright protects actual investment.

Oh, and also:

• Temporary in the software world means 6 months not 6 years.
• Lack of prior art does not mean an invention is in any way innovative and deserving protection. Many inventions are simply for ideas "whose time has come" and are going to be independently invented many times because the conditions are right. In a democratic country no one inventor should be entitled to a government subsidy at the expense of other inventors.
• It is not humanly possible for a small government office to check all human knowledge for prior art. To pretend otherwise is dishonest. Only a scientist with a life time's experience in a narrow field can do that and even then they make mistakes. If a patent office can't realistically assess prior art what is the point in it existing at all? Just rubber stamp patents like copyright.
• Patents are bad until proven otherwise because every new patent is a new law and every new law is government interference in the citizens' business. And another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the rest of the community.
• Patents are bad law because persons who infringe patents are assumed to be guilty until proven innocent. Yes, I know it's more complicated than that but that's basically what happens.
• One software package can potentially infringe on thousands of software patents even though the developers have worked independently and done absolutely nothing to deliberately infringe. What is fair about that?
• Patents should not be protecting development and marketing work, that's what copyright is for.
• Language in the software world is a mess. It is ambiguous and overlapping. It is abstract and not grounded in physical realities like non-software inventions. One man's hash table is another man's index. The patent office has proven completely incapable of distinguishing between a new invention and new terminology for the same thing. Not surprising; attorneys are very word minded for obvious reasons and not good at thinking about abstract concepts unrelated to language.
• The onus should be on the patent office to prove they have the right to interfere in the citizen's business, not, in a free country, for citizens to have to justify why software patents should not exist. The patent office has provided bug-all proof that software patents help the industry (in fact quite the reverse!) and until they do they should be told to butt out.

/ incidentally, any "all patents must be abolished" responders need not bother. go visit economic history 101 instead.

Typical straw man argum

"appears to be ... a hash table"

[Dancin_Santa]

But that hash table is patented. It's a hell of a fight to get around a government-granted monopoly.

Then again, this is P2P we're talking about, so it's not like we're expecting them to close up shop because they are violating some ambiguous law.

P2P is here to stay. It's doubtful that this company will win in the long term because the technology is already out there used by millions of users. The genie, so to speak, is out of the bottle.

Re:"appears to be ... a hash table"

[PhilHibbs]

That's irrelevant. They aren't trying to stop p2p, they're trying to milk it for some cash. P2P being "here to stay" is nothing but good news for this company, since if they win, they profit from P2P.

p2p _companies_?

[ine8181]

I did RTFA, and to be quite honest, I never knew that there were commercial p2p companies after the fall of Napster and co...

It seems that PiXPO, the company referred by the article is selling a p2p application that lets its users share photos (not trolling, but I don't see the point) - does any Slashdotter use commercial p2p products? If so, for what reason?

Re:p2p _companies_?

[LiquidCoooled]

I use Steam :)

I try not to, and have an itchy uncomfortable feeling after playing hl2, but I think thats more life mirroring art than anything else.

Re:p2p _companies_?

[ine8181]

Isn't Steam server/client application? Or are you saying Pay 2 Play? I'm consufed :(

Re:p2p _companies_?

[CarrionBird]

Actually, it could be a great idea for project colloraboration. As long as it included some sort of version tracking, that is.

Re:p2p _companies_?

[anakin357]

A better example would be World of Warcraft, since Steam does NOT use your upload bandwidth, except for

Blizzard uses a customized BitTorrent client to download patches, instead of getting the patches right from Blizzard ... all you download is the BT client designed to only download that one specific file, and then it exits, runs the downloaded patch and then you've got the latest content.

Smart usage of BT to distribute their patches... otherwise sending out a patch would be much more costly - think a few hundred gigs of upload, instead of multi-terabyte... very cost efficient for them.

Re:p2p _companies_?

[LiquidCoooled]

I think I made a mistake.
Apparantly, Steam *does* still use the old central server for its updates.
There was news that Bram Cohen had been contracted by Valve, and he was working on it, I thought it had changed over to the p2p distribution, but obviously not.
Another reply to my original post gives the correct version of it (WoW).

Re:p2p _companies_?

[j.bellone]

Bram worked at Valve for a bit to refine the protocol that was used to distribut everything. It seems they didn't want to go the BitTorrent approach embedded within Steam (which would have been a brilliant idea).

Re:p2p _companies_?

[Tony Hoyle]

Blizzard uses a customized BitTorrent client to download patches

And it sucks. Hard.

We pay for their bandwidth - waiting a week for their sucky client to download at 1k/second isn't acceptable (no I do *not* port forward on my network. I give a shit about security, for some insane reason).

That's why I wait for someone to mirror the patch before downloading.. means I can't play for a day or so though.

prior art

[zenst]

Any old databse basicly gets data and hashed it to generate an internal index key, ie not the real data but a unique identifyer to said data. Now given that and this approach was even taught in my days at school and were talking 20+ years ago. So just counter sue for extortion/intimidation/blackmailing and stuff these IP wannabe's. People who try to enforce silly patents are worse than organised crime, because the law dont see them for what they are; Well at least for now. Things change, just need bigger loo paper to handle it.

Re:prior art

[Anonymous Coward]

It is worth noting database programs don't work how they teach you they do. Actually, it is quite complicated theory. There is a whole subsection of mathematics about it.

They do use hashing, but prob. not as they taught in school.

(This isn't too insightful, but I'm getting annoying with Computing lessons teaching us things which are vaguely right, but teaching them to us completely wrongly.)

Re:prior art

[hackstraw]

prior art -- HA!

All p2p applications have to do is use a data processing system using substantially similar identifiers to identify data items, whereby identical data items have the different identifiers.

Come on. Using unique identifiers to uniquely differentiate one item from another, bah, thats so 20th century. Think about how easy but unnecessary it would be to steal one's identity once we all have the same social security number.

Damn, then money will all have the same numbers on it too, so a penny would equal a 1,000,000 bill and vice versa. This could be much more fun!

Re:prior art

[zenst]

Well without sidetracking onto how databases also have to distribute the data.... as a basic comparrision and example of prior art as a challange to what is effectivly hashing a file, who could argue. The point I was making was that it isn't anything that hasn;t already been done before, as with alot of these silly patents that IP hoarders seem to like. As for computer leasons grip, man CERT's and adverts about do you want a job in computers. I know what you mean and trust me whilst a easy on dB formulae can be fascinating I've probably dealt with enough managers/end-users to know that a simple bullit list type fact is all they generaly need/understand, alas ;(. One positive thing patents like this do actualy have a positive effect in is that they help/force people to actualy look at how things are done and alot of the time come up with something way way better, GIF/JPG/PNG and the whole compression area being the more well known one about. But as far as simply hashing files if you realy want to look at it at its most basic simplest eliment could be considered nothing more than a a rather large checkdigit or at its lowest common denominater parity checking, its nothing new. Hopefully P2P will look at this as an opertunity to push forward to the next level, but then tracing files and anonymous transfer/hashing of said files is totaly seperate issue for totaly different reasons. A combination of distibuted storage/process over a P2P network were you also had redundant backup and the ability to tag files for levels of access. thats were its going to go. bit then some would say Plan9 already pointed the way on that, and were still to outgrow Unix. Can often wonder if human evolution had gone the same way as software evolution had gone, would we be paying royalties to monkeys or would they be paying us or claiming prior art. Its a tough call and alot of hassel, mainly why alot of these patents get through and why alot of people blindly give creadance to them by just hadning over the few extra cents per use, only when we get open source does the truth run cold.

Re:prior art

[HiThere]

Databases don't generally hash data. They generally use B+Trees. I think hash tables are older than B+Trees, but they aren't the same at all.B+Trees, e.g., maintain things in order, where hash tables intentionally scramble the order as much as possible.

OTOH, Python, e.g., has hash tables built into the language, and it wasn't new then, so there's LOTS of examples of prior art.

P.S.: In memory databases may use hashing for lookup, or databases that depend on a large virtual memory may use them, but my main comment is WRT traditional databases and how they store table data.

What's a bogus patent?

[artifex2004]

If it's not a real patent, wouldn't they get accused of fraud and fraud with the intent to extort, or whatever?

Or do you mean it's a real patent, but one that should be indefensible? That's a different matter.
If this is the case, maybe they're doing the standard trick of going after people too small to challenge the patent in court, who will settle quickly.

Re:What's a bogus patent?

[idiotnot]

No, it's a real patent.

But where the problem lies is that there's no requirement for the applicant to do due dilligence in seeking out prior art -- that's the job for the patent office. As many recent events have shown, they're not doing a very good job of it. So, the patent gets granted. Then it's a real pain to get it overturned, obvious prior art or not.

Re:What's a bogus patent?

[iamwahoo2]

Yes, but could you not make the argument that it borders on impossible for anyone involved in computer programming to never have been taught about hash tables? Hell, I am an engineer and have only had a handful of programming classes, but we were at least taught a little about it. Given that so many p2p apps were around before altnet and many possibly built on pre=existing code, it would be pretty hard for them to argue: "Oh, we didn't know about any prior art, Sorry!" Given that hashtables exist in so many other areas other than p2p apps, it is clear that they are trying to stifle the competition.

Re:What's a bogus patent?

[hackstraw]

No, it's a real patent.

Its also a real mistake to be patented.

Re:What's a bogus patent?

[idiotnot]

But, you have to remember that patent attorneys aren't programmers. They search through prior patents to see if this particular method has been patented. If it has, the application is rejected. If not, the application is granted. There really isn't a way for them to search for prior art easily, especially if it's a subject they, themselves, don't understand.

The answer, of course, is to change the law, and make due dilligence incumbent upon the applicant. Then you build in punative laws that discourage patenting things for which prior art obviously exists. And you make the patent holder pay for all litigation costs incurred by whoever sues them when the patent is overturned.

What?!

[EMIce]

You need a special table to make hash?

Here is s simpler way -

1) Powder dry herb
2) Place in a jar of 90% isopropyl alcohol
3) Shake vigorously for 2 minutes
4) Strain, filter
5) Evaporate on a plate over a source of steam
6) Scrape up the goodies
7) Profit

Re:What?!

[EMIce]

Well, that was suppose to be anonymous. Ahh well.

Re:What?!

[SlashdotMeNow]

Tip: Spread the mixture in a thin film over a table (the 'hash table') to help evaporate faster.

Re:What?!

[eclectro]

Well, that was suppose to be anonymous. Ahh well.

The Dept. of Homeland security has just dispatched the black helicopters. Please get up from your hash table and exit your mom's basement with your hands on your head.

Re:What?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that MY PATENTED RECIPE for HASH OIL????

I'm sorry, but I'll have to sue you immediately!!!

Re:What?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent post wins the 2005 "Best use of the word hash table on slashdot" prize.

Re:What?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do I get isopropyl alcohol?
Can I use ethanol instead?

(not trollin. Posting as AC because I'm serious.)

Re:What?!

[krautcanman]

Well, that was suppose to be anonymous. Ahh well.

Don't worry, I'm sure it was your "friend" who told you what to type...

Re:What?!

[krautcanman]

isn't isopropyl alcohol/isopropanol simply rubbing alcohol? Get it cheap at the drug store.

Re:What?!

[SinaSa]

That's a pretty wasteful way of doing it. You should leave the alcohol + herb solution for a few days for optimal first run extraction, and repeat it at least twice on the plant material to obtain maximum extraction.

Re:What?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Isopropanol is found (in a good degree of purity) in tape cleaning liquid.

Re:What?!

[Dogtanian]

>>Well, that was suppose to be anonymous. Ahh well.
> Don't worry, I'm sure it was your "friend" who told you what to type...

"Erm.... some guys put spyware on my PC and stole my password.... Sorry, didn't catch that.... Oh, I mean, you're right, it *was* the same paedophile hackers that store child porn on other people's machines. I think they're terrorists as well, you can't trust anyone these days."

Re:What?!

[Anonymous Coward]

What ever that gives, it's definitely not hash. At least not hash as we understand it.

Re:What?!

[Anonymous Coward]

That could get a bit expensive I think? Plus I don't know what other kind of poisons they may add to it...
Won't ethanol do? I have two fresh 1l bottles from Russia of 95% spirit, about $4 a piece. Thing is I have herb of my own, so it's rather cheap for me, while stuff like ether, isopropyl alcohol etc may be pretty hard to get or expensive.

Re:What?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just use a mixture of bleach, anti-freeze, and amonia, I find that this combo works best.

Re:What?!

[Anonymous Coward]

He wants to make hash, not darwin-hash. Although the anti-freeze does give the darwin-hash a tasty and distintive flavor.

Re:What?!

[Anonymous Coward]

don't use rubbing alcohol.

Use a consumable grade grain alcohol. It is much less toxic.

In NH you can get everclear which is 99% alcohol.

Also, you don't just "shake" the mixture.

You shoudl slowley (veeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrryyyyyy) slowley heat it to get the THC to dissolve in the alcohol.

NOt to hot or it evaporates though.

Re:What?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Best way to do it is Supercritical Fluid Extraction.

Re:What?!

[GigsVT]

Isopropyl alcohol shouldn't have much residues in it. It's not like anyone is drinking it, it's evaporating off.

Re:What?!

[Fallen_Knight]

here in vancouver canada i can go to zellers (and i gues spretty much anywhere) and get a fair sized bottle, 70% pure, for ~5$.

Re:What?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that was suppose to be anonymous. Ahh well.

Hum... looks like a bad idea crawling Slashdot using your hash table.

Hey dude, I don't get it...

[KontinMonet]

...isn't a hash table just something to stop your hash dropping on the floor? I know the USPTO has made some weird decisions, but still...

Re:Hey dude, I don't get it...

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole idea is crazy.

I don't see how the patent attaches.....

[idiotnot]

What, from my reading, the patented technology does, is find dupes, and reassign the "truename." to the dupes, whether remotely or locally.

For example, you have foo.txt. Someone copies foo.txt to bar.txt, without changing any of the data contained within foo.txt (it's some pretty piece of ascii art, just to keep you amused for a moment....).

This thing would keep tables on the files, and when run, would go back and rename bar.txt to foo.txt if wanted, or could delete bar.txt if the user requested.

But still, it's pretty obtuse. Even as someone with legal training, and a computing background, I had a hard time making out exactly what they were patenting.

A link to the Washington Post article mentioned in the p2pnet article would be nice, too, if someone can find it...?

Re:I don't see how the patent attaches.....

[ankhank]

So this would be something like a plagiarism-finder, or a copyright-detective, or a stolen-goods-searcher?

It finds "mymovie" and renames it "Bambi" and then dials Disney and reports it stolen?

Well, it's rather simple to compare...

[Ray Alloc]

Just refer to the http://oopweb.com/Algorithms/Documents/Sman/Volume Frames.html?/Algorithms/Documents/Sman/Volume/Hash Tables_files/s_has.htmhash table algorithm... And yes, it matches. I wonder how that "patent" could be patented in the first place.

Re:Well, it's rather simple to compare...

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming their goal is to shut down the P2P companies (i.e. they are a tool of the RIAA, like OverPeer) then it really doesn't matter whether they are morally in the right. They just get injunctions against the P2P companies, and their ISP's, to stop distributing "infringing" P2P apps.

US way of doing business

[NoSuchGuy]

That's the way business is done in the US:

No need for innovation - you can sue your competitors and/or customers for your profit.

Re:US way of doing business

[maxpublic]

How is is flamebait to point out a real and growing trend? What idiot modded this post?

Max

Bullshit they are patenting the hash table...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet more evidence that reporters are idiots.

When I did my own patent last year, part of the process involved the patent lawyer explaining how to read patent'ese. It's just like a programming language.

Claim 1 - hashed files
Claim 2 == Claim 1 && something else
Claim 3 == Claim 2 && something else
etc
etc

So claim 1 probably has no chance of being enforced whatsoever.

However, claim 25 may be enforcable.

"some incredibibly specific thing in the context of some bigger thing in the context of some bigger thing... etc... in the context of a bunch of hashed files"

If they wrote it all in one claim, then it would only take the most minute difference to invalidate the whole thing.

So they do this 1 && 2 && 3 etc etc thing so that they get real coverage.

Nobody expects claim 1 to be upheld.

Think of it as a giant complex regular expression on the field of computing.

That said, it does appear like it's an attempt to create a blanket patent of the entire field of manipulation and distribution of hashed files, and so it's probably still qualifiable as a mugging :)

But it's not an attempt to patent the hash table.

Re:Bullshit they are patenting the hash table...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nothing like a programming language, but more like Boolean expressions, kid.

Re:Bullshit they are patenting the hash table...

[91degrees]

Claim 25 may be enforceable, but it will also be a lot more specific. The claim has to be enforcable, and the application has to actually violate that specific claim.

Re:Bullshit they are patenting the hash table...

[Dogtanian]

That's nothing like a programming language, but more like Boolean expressions, kid.

Really? You'll be telling us next that our u83r-1337 HTML-coding skills don't count as "programming". Hah!

Re:Bullshit they are patenting the hash table...

[AndroidCat]

It sounds like a crumple-zone in case they get into a legal head-on.

Re:Bullshit they are patenting the hash table...

[Halo1]

So claim 1 probably has no chance of being enforced whatsoever.

That's irrelevant. You can still (threaten to and actually) sue people over the fact that they violate the claim. Each claim is a separate monopoly that has been granted, and each claim must be individually struck down.

If one claim simply covers using hashes to determine whether two files are equal, then they did receive a state-mandated monopoly on that (regardless of how likely it is enforceable in court).

Re:Bullshit they are patenting the hash table...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still confused.

Is the combination of claim 25->24->23->... the sole and actual claim that covers the invention? Can the grantee of a patent make a legal claim for a violation of any of the basic claims? Sure it may be guaranteed to fail - but could legal action even start based on a violation of claim 1?

Re:Bullshit they are patenting the hash table...

[iamwahoo2]

Yes, but you only have to prove prior art on one claim to invalidate the entire patent, the reasoning being that if you want to make a patent you should ONLY include those claims that make your product unique. Patents cannot be partially valid. Either they are 100% valid, or 100% invalid.

Re:Bullshit they are patenting the hash table...

[Anonymous Coward]

Claim 2-xx are dependant claims. If claim 1 is invalidated, then 2-xx are invalidated as well.

This patent will not hold in court.

Re:Bullshit they are patenting the hash table...

[the big v]

You are totally wrong. You can invalidate any single claim of the patent while not affecting others. That's why they have so many individual claims in them. Kind of like shooting buck shot to kill a rat sometimes.

Re:Bullshit they are patenting the hash table...

[bradkittenbrink]

Umm, there's an entire genre of programming languages where the program is considered a single big expression. It's called functional programming. For example, see http://www.haskell.org/aboutHaskell.html in the "What is functional programming?" section. The fact that an expression might be boolean wouldn't make such a programming language any less expressive since all integer and character operations are ultimately just optimized combinations of bitwise operations. This is particularly true since the purpose of the language in question is to express boolean predicates concerning whether or not a particular system infringes on the patented system's design.

I remember

[coolcold]

there was once a /. story stating one of the hash method is not as "perfect" as expected, giving the same hash for two different files. Can someone post the /. story to back me up? In that way, they can't charge the patent on that algorithm since it does not satisfy "unique identifiers to identify data items"

Re:I remember

[munkt0n]

is this what you're thinking of? http://slashdot.org/articles/04/08/17/0030243.shtm l

Re:I remember

[Sumocide]

Dude, any hash method is not perfect, and nobody expects them to be.

Hashes are shorter than the original file, so there always multiple files reducing to the same hash.

Re:I remember

[Vo0k]

Not necessarily.
Consider contents of the file, compressed, to be the hash. It fulfills the premises: depends on the file contents, is shorter than the file (or at least not longer), uniquely identifies the file. So, while md5 is not unique, bzip2 can be treated as a 100% duplicate-free hash creation program.
Of course such "granted" hashes are MUCH longer than what is typically used, but they still fulfill the premises of a hash.

Note it's still possible to create a hash that is unique (like the above) but retrieving the content of the file from it (decompressing) is impossible. Just take your .bz2 "hash" and encrypt it, using its own MD5 as password. You can't decrypt without knowing the MD5, you won't know the MD5 without owning the unencrypted content.

Re:I remember

[Hast]

A cryptographic hash is constructed so that you can't find a H(x) == H(y) without doing a brute force attack. Naturally doing a brute force on a 128-bit hash is useless.

BTW wouldn't it be theoretically possible that you take two different bz2 files but when you encrypt them you get the same result? Since the input files and thus md5-hashes would be different.

Re:I remember

[Sam Nitzberg]

Hash functions
f(x) = y
generally contain values of x (inputs) that produce 'collissions'

That is -

f(x) = y and f(x') = y
does not imply that x = x'
for some x,x'

You are right - the resultant values (y) are not unique.

In general, a 'good' has function means that for x and another value, with a small difference from x, produces a 'big' difference in the hash value (y).

If it's that obvious...

[Vo0k]

...why patent it?
I mean, they HAD to know the patent is bogus. They hoped it will pass through USPTO, and they hoped right. But how can they hope anyone will agree to pay them money for that? ...while the lawsuit will be thrown out of court as soon as the P2P company will show: "We use MD5 which expired even before this patent was granted, and this patent covers exactly the same thing as MD5 only without technical details how to accomplish the task." And even if not, sooner or later some company WILL start a lawsuit, and once the obvious result makes the patent invalid, all companies that actually paid, may counter-sue for damages.

If I wanted to sell Eiffel Tower, I don't think I'd avoid jail. Why people who try to sell (force!) idea they don't own could go free?

Re:If it's that obvious...

[Znork]

"while the lawsuit will be thrown out of court"

No, it wont. You need to get the patent overturned, and to do that you need up to about $1M.

As it is so expensive to get the bogus patent thrown out, they can easily get many companies to pay them lesser amounts to get rid of them.

Prior Art coming out the ying yang

[Gilesx]

When I was much much younger, I used to purchase a magazine - Micro User for my BBC Micro. For about 10+ years, this published code listings ever month. You typed in 500ish lines of code, and were rewarded with a game or a useful little utility.

It was very frustrating to enter all of the code and not have the program run. Therefore, they introduced a checksum program. This ran on the code and gave you a string of digits back, which you could compare with the digits issued in the magazine. This was active from 1984 onwards, and most likely even before that.

Prior art?

Re:Prior Art coming out the ying yang

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember the April fool issue one year where they had a little program that would drastically reduce the amount of time it took to key in a type-in program: simply type in the checksum for each line and, voila, it would re-create the line of code the checksum was derived from.

C'mon, I was only 10 at the time. How was I to know??

Re:Prior Art coming out the ying yang

[MysteriousPreacher]

Oh man that brings back memories.

I had a similar experience on my Commodore 64. My favourite would be when you have one of these BASIC programs with 60 lines of data statements full seemingly random numbers.

Many an evening spent checking numbers. Probably explains my poor eye-sight.

That checksum program sounds like an excellent idea.

Re:Prior Art coming out the ying yang

[lovswr]

There was one...if you were reading at Computer Gazzette. PEEK or POKE...NOW that is the question.

Amazon sues Patent Office

[Anonymous Coward]

[ Add This Patent to your Cart ]

Customers who bought this patent also purchased Dynamic interoperability contract for web services

One of the downfalls of the patent process.....

[Kjella]

But still, it's pretty obtuse. Even as someone with legal training, and a computing background, I had a hard time making out exactly what they were patenting.

Patents were supposed to be monopolies granted for disclosing a discovery - that's what sets them apart from trade secrets.

In reality, most patents can barely be understood by anyone but other patent lawyers. They are designed to be obtuse, complex, uninformative and in legalese. Why? So the patent will have no actual value, it is basicly a free monopoly.

At least we in Europe got away from the abomination called software patents, this round. But there'll be more...

Kjella

Re:One of the downfalls of the patent process.....

[dvNull]

Your sig is awesome

Proof of the overabundance of lawyers

[Crashmarik]

I saw david Boies last night on Fox news talking about the fact that our justice system was broke. Even though he still didn't get it, he had to admit that it had serious problems. His scenario for effective jurisprudence was when large entities bought expensive lawyers or when poor people couldnt afford lawyers at all. He just didn't get the fact that large companies to wasting capitol on lawsuits is very bad for the whole economy and having poor people accepting rough justice is very bad for society.

It doesn't matter wheather the patent is right or wrong, it doesn't matter how rediculous the tort, what matter is if it will generate collectible fees for a lawyer. If you are upset about rediculous government granted monopolies get upset about the monopoly on justice granted to lawyers. The fact that one of the most common tactics employed by large companies to eliminate competition is litigation to death should be enough for anyone to realize its time to do something.

More information and prior art

[Sanity]

I started a thread on the P2P-Hackers mailing list abuot this, and a number of people have responded with examples of prior art and other relevant information. You can find the post that starts this thread here.

Somebody inform USPTO they violate law.

[Vo0k]

Unique association of identification string ("the patent number") with the content of the patent is obviously patented under patent# 5,978,791 for which USPTO most obviously doesn't have patent rights. So most obviously they are in violation of a patent they have granted.

we need progress in p2p apps

[Anonymous Coward]

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=132865&cid =11092112

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=133235 &cid=11127228

if p2p wants to be successfull in the future, you gotta make sure you can publish information about it in the first place. actually its all about freedom of speech. nothing more nothing less.

Re:As an attorney...

[Gilesx]

Nice. Your disustingly obscene fees are just giving the fatcats yet another statistic - "We had to spent xxx thousands of dollars per hour to defend against these criminals!"

Maybe you should try actually talking to your esteemed clients, and suggesting to them that if, quoting the music industry as an example, they didn't want to make $8 of PURE PROFIT on a CD, whilst giving artists a 50 cents share that they may be able to reduce prices, and make the cost of a CD lower to the point that it becomes less attractive to download music than to buy an inexpensive plastic disc. But then you might be actually making a difference and changing things for the better, and I guess if you wanted to do that, you wouldn't be an attorney.

Too many patents (i may have bad information here)

[gazz]

Warning: Rant ahead
Given that there are about 6,842,907 patents currently in place from 1790 to the present day (if i searched correctly on uspto.gov), is it even possible for the patent office to check that what is described in each new patent doesn't contravene any of the other patents?
My basic understanding is that each patent is essentially a set of terms and conditions, and as a part of the patent process, each application is compared and contrasted to all previous patents. Surely there's no single person in the patent office who has all that data in their heads, so I'd like to know what criteria they use to identify what is a unique piece.
As an example, within some of the recent granted applications there seems to be one for determining when a threaded process has died ( 6,842,901)...it was filed in 1999, yet offhand I would have thought that this kind of "invention" has been in play since way before that.
I suppose this comes back down to the idea of software patents: Design patents, at least, have traditionally been used to document a manufacturing procedure - can software be considered a manufactured product? I can see the grounds for "invention" being a valid term to use when relating to software, but in my experience there are certain things that a developer will be forced to "invent" in the process of any project (regardless of their knowledge or lack thereof about existing processes), simply because there's a connection that needs to be made between 2 concepts to get the whole thing working - why should that developer, or the company they are working for, be considered to be trespassing on "someone else's" invention?

Did any of that make any sense?

End of Rant

Re:As an IGNORANTattorney...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are just another old fart who is to lazy or stupid to know how the internet works.Let me guess, I'll bet your speciality is political law, or personal injury.
You should stay off computers and do what you do best, chase ambulances.

Re:As an attorney...

[Anonymous Coward]

As an attorney... for one of the aggrieved parties, let me just say that [snip!]

No, you're a TROLL.

TROLL, TROLL, TROLL, TROLL. :-P

The earliest prior art ....

[$tefan]

...is natural language. Let's see...

Data processing system ( Verbal communication) using substantially unique identifiers (words) to identify data items (complex real life objects), whereby identical data items (complex real life objects) have the same identifiers (names).

Plain silly, but patentable because the method involves computers. I just hope someone doesn't patent basic concepts of natural languages.

Tripwire is prior art

[kindofblue]

There are certainly hundreds of cases of prior art, and Tripwire is probably one of them. It computes and maintains a database of hashes for all the files on a file system to check for intrusions and corruption. The wiki entry says it first surfaced in 1992.

Re:Tripwire is prior art

[northcat]

And according the Wikipedia article, MD5 was invented in 1991.

Re:Tripwire is prior art

[the real darkskye]

Thats nothing! MD2 was invented in 1989!

I couldn't find MD1 :\

Re:Tripwire is prior art

[snooo53]

You know, this is an excellent idea. If they opened up the review process to let anyone find instances of prior art, like you just did, we could stop a lot of these before they became patents. And then, if there was no instance of prior art, at least the patent and author would get more publicity, which is a good thing IMO

Yer All wrong...

[nostromo.operator]

Alcohol extraction is gross if done perfectly or in laboratory conditions. the best method is Ice extraction. and the filtration screens need to be silkscreen quality. 120 microns, or whatever. you can buy equipment to do this but crafty ones will make their own. http://www.high-land.co.uk/acatalog/bubblesac.html

Re:Too many patents (i may have bad information he

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't check. Doing so would be a practically impossible task, as they would not be comparing against existing patents but against the whole world of inventions, even unpatented ones. That's what state of the art is. To make things more complicated, extensions of existing patents are not contradictory. Only patenting the same thing is a problem. Yes, it's a mess.

Sued RIAA too

[northcat]

Previously, Altnet sued RIAA over, IIRC, the same patent. previous story. Please read the comments of slashdotters on that story.

first post

[Anonymous Coward]

first post

Re:Too many patents (i may have bad information he

[johannesg]

Surely there's no single person in the patent office who has all that data in their heads, so I'd like to know what criteria they use to identify what is a unique piece.

Maybe they could use a hash table to uniquely identify previous patents?

Bha-dum-ching!

Thanks, I'll show myself out...

Well well

[ewe2]

It seems that my purchase of An Introduction to Algorithms has borne fruit. I actually understood the patent application, although it's probably the worst description of a hash table ever. It's worth reading the patent, BTW, it has an unintentionally silly background history for its case.

Insofar as it's a specialized implementation of a hash table, how altnet thinks it has a case is beyond me. Code containing the word TrueName would be a dead giveaway, otherwise this is just harrassment litigation.

Re:wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no compression method that always gives a compressed output that is shorter than the input. Moreover, one usually wants a finite set of hashes, not of arbitraty size.

Patent Law

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a common thing in US patent law. A patent in the US isn't really granted until it is upheld by a court. Often, one company will target a smaller, weaker company with a similar product for patent infringement on the hopes that they can beat the company in court, have their patent upheld thereby, and then go after bigger fish with requests for royalties.

I was once involved in a patent case where a medium sized company was suing a smaller company over their use of "laser etched checking fixtures" (an industry standard item). The larger company's patent documentation was so vague that part of it actually seemed to be claiming the invention of the Cartesian coordinate system and the idea of graph paper.

It was laughed out of court but just think who they could have sued if that patent would have been upheld.

Good patents

[johannesg]

Tell that to somebody who has spent years developing a new algorithm for something like facial recognition. Explain to me again why a clever person who comes up with a novel algorithm to produce something useful and novel shouldn't enjoy a temporary monopoly from the fruits of his labour and research just because his invention happens to be in software rather than being hydraulic or pneumatic?

I suspect we would never have given software patents a second thought, were it not for the countless abuses that were foisted on the world. In other words, the people getting the patents brought our rage down on themselves by being total asses about it. One-click patent indeed...

I'd love to see a list of top-ten "good software patents". In other words, patents that meet (at least) the following criteria:

- The patent is on software (duh).

- The patent covers something not entirely obvious to an experienced programmer (the "five minute test": given the problem, could an experienced problem come up with a solution in less than five minutes?).

- The patent represents an innovation, rather than a restating of previous known techniques (as this one appears to be).

- The patent describes something that actually exists, as opposed to wishful thinking (like patents on artificial intelligence)

And since everyone who is in favor of software patents mentions that the poor inventor spent so much of his time and resources, I'll also add:

- The patent protects significant investment.

To me the "five minute test" is the most important: any problem that can be solved in that time isn't worthy of a patent, and any patents in that category will only hamper development of the field as a whole. Maybe the patent office should have panels of experienced programmers who get five minutes to reproduce each patent, immediately invalidating it if they do? That would certainly cut down on a lot of crap...

incidentally, any "all patents must be abolished" responders need not bother. go visit economic history 101 instead.

Is that the one where you learn that the USA became an industrial and economic powerhouse by shamelessly stealing every invention they could from Europe during its formative years, i.e. before it acknowledged any so-called intellectual property from other places in the world?

Re:Good patents

[mbrx]

Well said, however one minor comment:
> - The patent covers something not entirely obvious to an experienced programmer (the "five minute test": given the problem, could an experienced problem come up with a solution in less than five minutes?).
I would like to argue rather a "one-year" test. Considering that the total cost for getting a patent approved in many cases are equiveaent to a few years salary for a professional in the field (think good programmer, univeristy PhD etc) I would argue that the limit for the depth if invention should be that it would take a professional at least one year to come up with a solution to the problem.
/ M

Re:Good patents

[mumblestheclown]

I like where you are going with the list, but it needs significant refinement.

the five minute test is not as simple as it seems. the way you stated it, a problem is presented to an experienced programmer who then tries to find a solution. sometimes, the real genius is in defining the problem. at any rate, there is an 'nonobviousness' clause in every patent scheme in the world, albeit the problem that it is imperfectly enforced.

the idea that it not be a combination of existing techniques is likewise invalid. many significant inventions have been made by realizing a novel combination of existing ones.

the idea that the patented item must exist and must not be wishful thinking is, again, already in every patenting scheme in the world. again, alas, occasionally imperfectly administered.

your 'significant investment' clause, OTOH, is pure evil and one of the worst ideas I have heard in a long time. It is anti-democractic, anti-individual (vs big business) and absolute nonsense. If I invent a novel, useful, nonobvious wunderalgorithm in 2 minutes, more power to me.

But your general idea that there is "a lot of crap" is a good one. the problem is that its a lot harder to cut the crap than it might first appear.

history: the idea that every anti-IP revolution in history soon returned to a patent system within a few years after recognizing that patents are overall an economic good and a necessity. that developing countries, be it the USA then or india now, have a perverse disinsentive to adopt strong IP in their formative years is nothing new.

Re:Good patents

[Qzukk]

Picture how the world would have been if IBM patented the BIOS? Brother patented the Word Processor?

You say that patents are "overall an economic good and a necessity" but what innovation has come out of Microsoft since 1998's State Street decision establishing "Business Process" patents? Just years before that they radically changed the look and feel their operating systems. Of course, according to you that must have been trivial, since NOBODY would have invested any work in software if it couldn't be patented. People wrote whole operating systems with nothing more than copyright protection, and made money off of it!

The purpose of a patent is twofold: protect a temporary monopoly, with the people of this country (or in this day and age, the world) receiving the benefit of that creation when the patent expires. How about we call for all patented software to be opensourced when the patent expires? As it is, even after the patent expires the code is still protected by copyright. If you don't like that plan, don't patent it. Thats why the government created copyright and trade secret classes of intellectual property.

Re:Good patents

[mumblestheclown]

Yet again, listen CLOSELY.

there are a lot of BAD software patents out there. Your naming one or two of them (hypothetical ones, in this case) and then asking me to argue against them only indicates that you have not actually read what I have to say.

What I have been saying in my posts is threefold:

• there are a lot of bad software patents out there
• however, the idea of software patents is fundamentally sound. it is the IMPLEMENTATION that needs to be cleaned up.
• that said, the implementation is not easy to do... though it is doable.

With regard to your idea that patented software be OSd after the patent expires: YOU MISS THE POINT ENTIRELY: the CODE is COPYRIGHTED. The IDEA is patented. Your idea to open source the code is IRRELEVANT. Learn the difference between copyright and patent, for god's sake.

Re:Good patents

[fizbin]

Well, as a demonstration that the idea is fundamentally sound, can you point to any currently-in-force software patents that are "good" in some sense? We have enough examples on the bad side of the fence - perhaps if we had examples on both sides it would be easier to tell where the line is.

If, on the other hand, there are no current software patents that are easily defineable as good, then I'd doubt your premise that the idea is fundamentally sound.

Re:Good patents

[mumblestheclown]

http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/articles/int-prop /heckel-debunking.html

read it. from 1992. if you havent read this before, then ask yourself why you are spouting off in public forums about software patents without informing yourself of some of the basics first.

Re:Good patents

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, the people getting the patents brought our rage down on themselves by being total asses about it.

The problem is that it is not people, but multinationals. Originally, patents were intended to protect the individual inventor from large companies. Among other things because a big company could have stuff on the market faster than an individual, and that is still the case.

However, big companies now use patents to create a sort of government-mandated monopoly, i.e. keep everyone else out of their (part of the) market.
And are asses about it, too, yes.

Even worse, the patent-approach to monopoly has been so successful that now everybody gets tons of half-assed patents, use them to corner the market, and with the ?illegal? ?immoral? ?unethical? profits thereof make it prohibitively expensive to enter this market or even cry "Foul" (or "bug" in some cases) by sueing your ass off.

And yes, you can substitute copyright for patent here, and it stays more or less accurate too.

It is not that there is anything wrong with patents or copyright (as originally meant), it is that they get misused with blessings from the law and government.

Sorry for belabouring the obvious

Re:Good patents

[Anonymous Coward]

The patent covers something not entirely obvious to an experienced programmer (the "five minute test": given the problem, could an experienced problem come up with a solution in less than five minutes?).

This is your definition of non-obviousness? 5 minutes agains 20 years of monopoly?

The purpose of patents is not to reward the inventor but to *promote* invention. If something can be invented in five minutes it would be invented anyway so there is no value in patent system allowing that. Reasonably you could say:

Only invention which probably would not be discovered otherwise (that means without patent system, due to lack of interest without protection) in next several (20?) years should be a subject of granted patent.

If something can be invented in 5 minutes I would grant a patent but for limited duration of 5 minutes.

Roman

Re:Good patents

[StillNeedMoreCoffee]

I agree that patents and copyrights were originally designed to protect the inventor/creator. But the large companies with legal aggreements own your work. A subversion of the protection from the system.

The fostering of invention only happens when it is economical for someone to make invention/creation. With the system now with extended copyright the system has turned around and it is starting to stifle invention. With patents the controls on what constitutes a patent are not well done and invention in software is starting to be stifled.

Another more radical model is followed by the academic world with PHD's required to add something new to the field. There work is essentially public domain and the whole feild progresses. They have innovation built into the system at the beginning. Maybe we should publictize the system if we really want invention in ideas. For patents we are talking product. Software we might argue straddles the fence of ideas and product in the sense that they are virtual products. There needs to be a new view, a new system.

It is tremendously burdensome when you write a new software program for someone to even think of doing a patent search on your code to see if you are using any ideas that someone got awarded a patent for because they applied for it first. We see the same thing with the speculation on Internet domains. There is no value added here, no fostering of innovation. Just someone trying to cash in.

(appologies to the true innovators with inventions that are worthy of patent and should have thier ideas protected and should benefit from the unique creations they made).

Re:Good patents

[Anonymous Coward]

>> incidentally, any "all patents must be abolished" responders need not bother. go visit economic history 101 instead.

> Is that the one where you learn that the USA became an industrial and economic powerhouse by shamelessly stealing every invention they could from Europe during its formative years, i.e. before it acknowledged any so-called intellectual property from other places in the world?

Ha ha ha ha ha! pWN3d!!

Re:Good patents

[salesgeek]

I'd love to see a list of top-ten "good software patents". In other words, patents that meet (at least) the following criteria:

There is no such thing as a good software patent First, you are patenting the use of a general purpose constructed of general purpose devices being used as it was intended by it's inventor. Second, you are using development tools and software components for their intended purpose. At the end of the day you are riding on the backs of too many others who have far more claim to a novel invention than your software ever ever can.

Re:Good patents

[Taladar]

It wouldn't be the worst idea to make open sourcing the reference implementation from their patent application mandatory when the patent expires.

Re:Good patents

[johannesg]

This is a pretty weak article, but I would recommend that people read it anyway because it shows just how weak the case in favor of software patents really is. A great quote from about half way through:

The paradox of Marxism is not just a theoretical issue. Stallman, the founder of the League for Programming Freedom, heads the Free Software Foundation which is developing and planning to distribute a clone of the Unix operating system. AT&T has invested in Unix based on its ownership as manifest in patents and copyrights. AT&T can't be pleased when Mr. Stallman comes along and gives away free copies of a clone of a product it invested millions in developing and marketing.

If AT&T had not used patents and user interface copyrights to protect its intellectual property rights, Mr. Stallman would have no trouble making and distributing a Unix clone. But AT&T must pay its bills with money it receives from customers and has asserted its rights. If it is acceptable to clone Unix or any program, will anyone invest in new ideas? Should we optimize an intellectual property jurisprudence for, not large entities, not small entities, but companies that distribute free clones of other people's software?

Great stuff! It is good to see someone argue in 1992 that if UNIX were unprotected, innovation would come to a complete halt. With hindsight we can now see how unfounded those fears really were. And they still are today.

This one's nice too:

From the time the world's oldest profession began, professionals have accepted that others give it away, but they bristle if they are expected to work at the same rates.

I wonder if the author knows what the world's oldest profession is? ;-)

And another prediction from the article:

The Japanese are aggressively filing for U.S. patents on software. While our strength is innovation, Japan's is in adapting innovations and steady improvement. If they have the improvement patents and we did not file for the basic patents, we lose. If we arrogantly dismiss the Japanese as incapable of creating good software or cavalierly dismiss patents as undesirable, then 20 years from now we will be trying to get back the software market from Japan just as today we are trying to get back the automobile and semiconductor markets. We aren't even trying to get back the consumer electronics market.

As it happens Japans' patents has not saved their economy. Meanwhile India, without the benefit of software patents, became a software power house that threatens jobs and companies throughout the world. The USA, despite its software patents, is losing out to them.

Similarly, if we should eliminate patents to avoid patent litigation as the League suggests, should we not eliminate all laws so as to avoid all litigation?

Is this even supposed to be a serious article?

Re:Good patents

[Wolfbone]

It isn't just pretty weak - it's nothing more than a feeble-minded rant. It is meant to be a serious article but it was written by a crank with a personal stake in representing his own patents as something other than absurdly trivial, something which he mysteriously forgets to do (either for his own or the others) in his 'analysis'. It is so full of flaws like those you have quoted: absurd non-sequiturs, assertions presented as facts, generalisations from the particular and from anecdote etc. that it is not really worth worrying about - especially given it's vintage.

Opinions are rather more convincing if they are demonstrably representative of a wider community:

http://www.ccp14.ac.uk/maths/software-patents/

and there is of course plenty more (up to date) material at the swpat.FFII.org site.

Re:Good patents

[maxpublic]

Patenting an IDEA is an idiotic notion, especially when it only applies to favored cases. Under the current law I could patent the IDEA of a locked-room murder mystery (assuming no obvious prior art - sometimes) and no one else in the world could write about that concept unless I granted them use of my patent.

Oh, but wait! We give special treatment to certain types of ideas in specific fields! It doesn't apply to fiction...and why? Because perhaps doing so would highlight the absolute absurdity of current law?

Max

Re:Good patents

[Qzukk]

You realize that that article proves everything I've had to say about software patents?

From the article:
HyperCard created expectations that Zoomracks could not meet, and other companies began to develop HyperCard clones. Meanwhile, I asserted my rights, sued and settled with Apple

Reads, word for word, as: "Oh shit! My technology is 6 years old and at the end of the product cycle. I better start suing rather than innovating a new product because my inferior crap is protected for another 10 years!"

So tell me, how exactly does software patents create innovation again?

Re:Good patents

[cduffy]

I agree that patents and copyrights were originally designed to protect the inventor/creator.

I disagree. I believe the Founding Fathers meant what they said when they said that the government was given the right to grant limited monopolies on works and inventions to promote the sciences and the useful arts. Not to protect the creator, but rather to enrich the sum set of knowledge available to the public. That the way this enrichment of the public is done happens to benefit authors and inventors is well and good -- but forgetting which is the goal and which is the pleasant side effect represents a lack of perspective.

Re:Good patents

[StillNeedMoreCoffee]

The model described is an economic model. That is a limited monopoly so the "protected creator" would be able to "profit" exclusively from that invention. The idea was that if one could profit from an invention (helped by this artificial legal concept, patent) then more invention would be done. I don't think the Founding Fathers forsaw the limited monolpoly to span more than a lifetime as in the extended copyright laws for "Steamboat Willy" protection for the Disney Corp.

They probably did not invision, nor I conjecture would condone the practice of buying patents to suppress there use.

The patent protection of profit from use is one model to promote sciences and useful arts. The acedemic model I described has the same goal and I would submit has been equally if not more successful in furthing the knowledge of the sciences and the useful arts. Especially or more so in the pure sciences.

We can see with the open source movement which is a threat to the patent model, a more acedemic model of promoting innovation and making it freely available without cost or hinderance to others who want to continue to innovate on that base of innovation. The patents and license fees only get in the way of development and innovation in many areas.

You can look at another shift in economic model to innovation that occured not too many decades ago when all language compilers were vary expensive. That is until Borland came out with Turbo Pascal for $19.95 (or some such price) and took over the computer market in a short time, until people understood that the large price of compilers was short sighted against the huge latent demand of people wanting to use the innovations of the computer and computer languages to do work and play. That was an important shift that started a boom period in general software development that we still feel the effects of.

The open source movement, Linux, and Java as still freely or cheaply available alternatives provide the basis for continued development by keen mines that do not necesarily have the money to contend with the very high prices you say pay for a lot of the application framework producsts say on the market today.

The perspective was of the founding fathers the promotion of innovation. We should monitor the existing system and any changes to it to see if it is still achieving that goal or if there are adjustments or even other models that can or should be adopted instead of or in parallel to what is in place.

Re:Good patents

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, but this is required by law for ANY patent. That's part of the basic definition of a patent.

Re:Good patents

[d34thm0nk3y]

How about mp3? Novel, useful, and revolutionary.

Playing devils advocate here, I personally think copyright is sufficient.

Re:Good patents

[Wyzard]

How about the RSA public-key encryption algorithm?

• It's a software process. (Note that particular implementations are covered by copyright; a patent covers the more abstract task that the software is doing.)
• It's non-obvious and innovative. (Most of the cryptographic community thought public-key cyryptography was an impossible concept until someone actually did it).
• It exists.
• It protects significant investment (RSA Data Security, Incorporated). Well, protected, past tense -- the patent is expired now -- but I think it still counts.

The Washington Post Article (registration req)

[Momoru]

The Article

Re:The Washington Post Article (registration req)

[idiotnot]

Thank you. The thing about this, though, is it has some far-reaching consequences outside the p2p community....

Think, for example, of pretty much any internet-based software distribution. cd /usr/pkgsrc/misc/screen; make install clean

The scripts go and fetch the source to GNU Screen from ftp.gnu.org, or a mirror site. It then checks the hash against the hash recorded in the distinfo file.

Imagine if the non-profits like Debian, the BSDs, etc. would have to license this just to distribute software. It's not a pretty picture.

Re:hi

[Anonymous Coward]

2) Do not eat your base.
3) Profit!

Hrm

[Anonymous Coward]

A hash-table is a data-structure, not a 'data processing system' (a system that performs operations on data-structures).

I think a better example of prior 'art' would have been something like Token Ring Networks, a Relational DBMS, the TCP/IP Suite, etc...

Copyright

[CarrionBird]

Software can and should be protected by copyright rather than patent. Perhaps if it's something truely novel, then I can see getting a patent for it. But that's not how the system is being used. Companies are patenting simple ideas rather than novel implementations.

With some patented hydraulic invention, I am still free to come up with a better way of doing the same thing.

With these software patents, I'm prohibited from making anything that accomplishes X, even if I have a novel method, because company Y has a patent on software that does that.

Re:Copyright

[mumblestheclown]

With these software patents, I'm prohibited from making anything that accomplishes X, even if I have a novel method, because company Y has a patent on software that does that.

Nonsense. If i come up with a novel compression algorithm 10 times better than any known compression algorithm, you are still welcome to come up with your own compression algorithm. Try to beat mine!

Re:Copyright

[CarrionBird]

But then your employer or whatever IP bought out your patents will eventually sue me because they have the patent on compression on a digital computer. Sure a patent could be written that was specfic enough to just cover your method, but it won't be.

Re:Copyright

[duffahtolla]

Listen CLOSELY!

From the Article: 'Data processing system using substantially unique identifiers to identify data items, whereby identical data items have the same identifiers,'

From the grandparent: With these software patents, I'm prohibited from making anything that accomplishes X, even if I have a novel method, because company Y has a patent on software that does that.

What is getting under everyones skin is OVER BROAD patents.

Read the grandparent AGAIN.

Let me show you why your response doesn't show you understand his point.

From the grandparent (with a hint): With these software patents, I'm prohibited from making anything that accomplishes (compression), even if I have a novel method, because company Y has a patent on software that does that.

OVERBROAD patents are not patents on Particular algorithms (a 10x better compression). Rather, they are patents on IDEAS (a unique number that identifies an object).

post 11360699 also tried to explain this to you.

Re:Copyright

[psyon1]

If one company develops a facial recognition system, using laser scanners to map the 3D surface of a persons face. Later someone comes along and makes use of a digital camera, and color comparisons. With patents, thats allowed (IIRC).

With software patents, someone is just patenting "A method of recognizing facial features using digitizing methods", which covers both implementations.

Just imagine if someone patented "a method of reducing the size of a file on disk, by using an algorithm."

Re:Copyright

[HiThere]

The system CAN'T be used that way because of:
1) the patent examiners
2) the legal system

Either of those alone would suffice to prevent the patent system being used to protect the not-already-wealthy (i.e., those who don't *need* protection). In combination they allow the current atrocious situation where large companies can, at will, patent whatever they want, and extract tolls against those not wealthy enough to hire a lawyer and fight an expensive AND RISKY court battle. (Risky because you can't reasonably guess how the patent court will decide. It has a pretty vile history of favoring those with power no matter what the appearant merits of the case. And claiming that you understand the patent makes you liable for increased damages.)

Patents are a socially risky gamble. I'll accept that there is a conceivable set of patent laws that would be a good bargain, but we don't have that set of laws. And nobody has been able to point to a period of time when we did have such a set of laws, merely to periods of time when patents were less obtrusive and less obnoxious. This is, essentially, and argument against patents, though those proposing such don't normally seem to realize it.

In particular, I have not seen any evidence that software patents have done society any good. Certain individuals have benefited, but one can generally show quite easily that their gain was a net social detriment. (And this can be rephrased as generally those winning were suing a company over a patent that should not have been issued, and should have been quickly invalidated UNDER THE CURRENT RULES, but was not because there was no feasible way to mount a challenge.) Patents are generally used as an extortion racket.

And, NO, I don't believe that you should get a right to a monopoly on an invention. Certainly not if you don't need to disclose any more about it than the current law, as implemented, requires. Why should another person who has independently invented a procedure be denied the ability to use their work? Do you really thing that anything you invent won't be duplicated by SOMEONE within the next five years? They may already be using it, and you just don't know about it. Copyright is much more reasonable here.

Re:Copyright

[HiThere]

A patent on a 10X better compression would definitely be an overbroad patent. A patent on a particular 10X better compression IMPLEMENTATION would be acceptable.

People despise the patent system because of the laws that it depends on and the people that implement it. Change both of those, and we'll be willing to evaluate the new system. Until you do, you have what is the current patent system, and I, at least, find it an abomination. And not only in the area of software, though I'm most familiar with it in that area, and therefore it is in that area that I despise it the most.

Resistance is futile

[incabulos]

I am utterly certain this will be _the_ decisive blow in the great saga of MPAA/RIAA vs P2P. The P2P companies have nothing but the utmost respect for all Intellectual Property, Copyright in particular. I'm sure they revere and respect Patents equally and will hasten to ensure that they are free of all infringement immediately.

Re:Resistance is futile

[Oddly_Drac]

" I'm sure they revere and respect Patents equally and will hasten to ensure that they are free of all infringement immediately."

Sarcasm aside, it could have the effect of driving P2P software completely underground/free and chill the rest of software development, particularly as it's overbroad.

The counting argument

[Zed Too]

Consider contents of the file, compressed, to be the hash. It fulfills the premises: depends on the file contents, is shorter than the file (or at least not longer), uniquely identifies the file. So, while md5 is not unique, bzip2 can be treated as a 100% duplicate-free hash creation program.

Not necessarily :-)
The "counting argument" can be used to show that no compression algorithm can hope to reduce the size of every file. Hence most (all?) compression programs will, from time to time, have to store an uncompressed version of the input file, and will thus have to have some mechanism for signalling to the decompressor that they have done so. Even if this "flag" is one bit long it will still represent an increase in size compared to the input file.

Real-life compression programs will of course be storing other information in the output file (e.g. original filename, size/checksum) so in practice we are talking about several bytes increase rather than one bit.

Note it's still possible to create a hash that is unique (like the above) but retrieving the content of the file from it (decompressing) is impossible. Just take your .bz2 "hash" and encrypt it, using its own MD5 as password.

Not actually impossible, just decidedly time-consuming. As mentioned above, a .bz2 file will have a recognizable internal structure. It's then just a matter of brute-forcing the decryption until a file of the appropriate format appears. With 128 bits of MD5 "key" this will take quite a while, but it's theoretically possible.

Stop press - new lawsuit..

[adeyadey]

Unfortunately further comments will cease, because I have served Slashdot with a writ for infringing my US software patent (#230754729835) - "Arranging letters on a web page to make words and sentences"..

Negociations between me and Slashdot for back-payment of royalty fees ($1.20 per word)have commenced..

Re:Stop press - new lawsuit..

[Anonymous Coward]

"-1 troll" m2'ed unfair.

Re:foot poop

[Anonymous Coward]

HERE is a collection of the SuperNova torrents

Semantics

[Anonymous Coward]

Hash codes have been in use for decades prior to the patent grant but have traditionally been used to identify data as being different. Yes, even in databases. If the premise that same = !different holds then there is no validity to the patent because this concept is 'obivious' even to people with no knowledge of data processing. IANAL.

DAMN!

[Anonymous Coward]

That facial recognition thingy took me 6 minutes. My eyes aren't what they used to be.

Re: Not applicable to ./

[Johan Veenstra]

Unfortunately for you, the spelling on slashdot is so poor, that your patent does not apply to slashdot.

Wikipedia?? Why not link to tripwire.com?

[sczimme]

There are certainly hundreds of cases of prior art, and Tripwire is probably one of them. It computes and maintains a database of hashes for all the files on a file system to check for intrusions and corruption. The wiki entry says it first surfaced in 1992

This is [to me] the most irksome characteristic of wiki-people: even when there is an obviously better link , e.g. this page (which also provides the 1992 date), they insist on linking to a non-vetted, potentially spurious source like wikipedia.

There is also Tripwire.org for those people that get hives reading about commercial products.

You don't need patents for algorithms

[Chemisor]

> I am just countering your claim that software
> patents shouldn't exist at all) to produce
> something useful and novel shouldn't enjoy a
> temporary monopoly from the fruits of his labour

If you want to protect your algorithm, just don't release the source code. If you really have a novel idea, chances are that others would not be able to duplicate it just by using the program. This way you get your temporary monopoly without incurring the cost of filing patent lawsuits.

> "all patents must be abolished" responders need
> not bother. go visit economic history 101 instead.

There is no evidence whatever that patents promote innovation. In fact, the most pressing problem in modern business is avoiding the use of any patented methods.

Re:As an attorney...

[shark72]

"Maybe you should try actually talking to your esteemed clients, and suggesting to them that if, quoting the music industry as an example, they didn't want to make $8 of PURE PROFIT on a CD"

I'm not sure I understand you. Are you talking Australian dollars? In the US, CDs are sold into the channel for around $8 and are sold to the consumer for about $12.95. That $5 delta is used to pay for employees, keeping the lights on, etc. shrinkage and so on and is not "pure profit." More importantly, it's money the record company never sees.

Of the $8 that the record company gets for the CD, about two bucks goes to cost of manufacturing, a buck goes to royalties, and some goes to marketing, accural for returns (the record company eats the cost when the retailer returns it) and various other realities of selling something on the retail market. Even if sales, marketing and shipping were free, and no CDs ever got returned or damaged, you're still looking at a gross of about four or five bucks, which is, percentage-wise, about what Logitech makes on mice.

I'm guessing you're confusing gross profit with net profit, but as people who work in retail know, all that matters is the actual money you have left after paying for all the expenses. The term "pure profit" would more typically be applied to the net, and not the gross. Overall, the record industry gets by with pretty shitty net margins compared to most of the stuff that you buy. It's good to argue against unfair IP laws, but claiming that "record companies make too much selling CDs" is the wrong approach.

Re:As an attorney...

[hesiod]

> CDs are sold into the channel for around $8 and are sold to the consumer for about $12.95.

Holy crap, man, where are you buying CDs? Maybe that price includes the cost of used CDs and extra-rackspace (the $3 CDs at Drug Stores, etc) CDs, but new discs at chain music stores are rarely lower than $17.

A history lesson and a reality check

[Anonymous Coward]

History 101 tells us that patents were introduced to encourage disclosure, and in some cases, mostly long ago, they have done that.

Patents were never intended to encourage innovation, because innovation has its own rewards - people want innovation, so they will pay for research to be done. In fact, they discourage innovation, because now other would-be innovators must pay a premium to make incremental improvements, and because researchers must operate under a veil of secrecy that prevents the collaboration and cross-pollenization that is behind most truly novel innovations.

Once you understand that (historically and at present) patents are only useful to encourage disclosure, it becomes apparent that software patents are especially worthless: how many of the ridiculous software patents you've seen could really be kept secret?

Should all patents be abolished? Maybe some are useful if they encourage disclosure, but how do you draw the line? (and who do you entrust to do it?*) The modern patent system is such a fiasco that you have to wonder whether it is even possible to get it right. Certainly the abolition of patents would be a hell of a lot closer to getting it right than the present free-for-all, and maybe it's the only way we can stop the system from spiralling out of control.

*One interesting idea is that the inventors' direct competitors should be the ones with the best combination of knowledge and incentive to get the decision/balance right.

Oops!

[Nom du Keyboard]

In data communications the CRC is a hash guaranteed to be unique over a specific number of bits. A CRC-16 is unique for files up to 2^16 bits in length

This can only be true if the CRC has the same number of bits as the number it's verifying, in which case my hash algorithm is simple:

CRC = Value

Is this the same "hashing" algorithm which...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uses md5 in addition to some crappy little checksum, but does not hash the whole file, just 300k chunks of it here and there?

More prior art

[Black Art]

Phil Karn wrote a program in 1993 that used MD5 hash colisions to find duplicate files. I know this is an obvious use because I had written a similar program in Perl around 1996. (I have not published it due to it being a giant race condition, not to mention the awful coding style.) I talked to Phil about it when I discovered he had written a similar program that predated mine by a few years.

Anyone who understands file hashes and hash tables will think of using it for finding duplicate files. Especially if they have any archives of code from the net.

incorporate on the moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

is it possible to say your HQ is on the moon or somewhere outside of the boundaries of human law and therefore software patents don't apply?

maybe there needs to be an open source space probe project? fire off a hosting server in a rocket to the moon and begin serving your software outside of the patent enforcement jurisdiction. i know cost would be prohibitive, and it's only a delay tactic as the technologic arms race continues. but regardless it could be a cool project. include a web cam too maybe? sourceforge, and paypal? slashdot link? plausible?

Public peer review of patents?

[ircShot_guN]

What about a public peer-review of new patents.

If, after the USPTO has finished reviewing the patent and is considering passing it, put it on a website?

Let the world see it (as they are going to anyway once it gets passed) and let people who have more knowledge in the area of the patent comment on it.

Give the site an RSS feed and millions of IT experts around the world are better off at thinking of things like prior-art, blanked patents and so forth.

Yes, the $8+ /is/ almost all profit.

[DiscoSnorlax]

Of the $8 that the record company gets for the CD, about two bucks goes to cost of manufacturing, a buck goes to royalties, and some goes to marketing, accural for returns (the record company eats the cost when the retailer returns it) and various other realities of selling something on the retail market. Even if sales, marketing and shipping were free, and no CDs ever got returned or damaged, you're still looking at a gross of about four or five bucks, which is, percentage-wise, about what Logitech makes on mice. 1. It does /not/ cost $2 to make a CD. Otherwise the places that sell cheap lame CDs would be out of business, along with the companies who sell $1 DVDs at places like WalMart, Dollar Tree, etc. And for 'music industry' types it'd be even cheaper, simply because of pressing in such bulk quantities. It costs them at most a cent or two to make a CD. Heck, /burning/ a CD costs less than $2 if you buy a big spindle of discs. 2. A buck for royalties? From what I've heard , artists get less than that. Like, $0.20 or so IIRC. 3. A gross of $4 or $5 minimum? Like I said, if that's the case, all those discount CDs and DVDs that are being sold in the $1-$3 range (or the $5-$6 kids' CDs, like the new Care Bears music CDs - and those probably have huge licensing to pay, too) wouldn't even be available, let alone as common as they are.