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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."
When it comes to software isn't this just tautology?
"Nothing can shake my belief that this world is the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend." - Emil Michel Cioran
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.
Well, that was suppose to be anonymous. Ahh well.
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...?
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.
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.
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?