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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."
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...?
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.
I had to look this up :D
y
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=tautolog
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.
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.
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.