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Is Google AutoLink Patent-Pending By Microsoft?
theodp writes "While Google pooh-poohed any comparison of its controversial AutoLink feature to Microsoft's SmartTag technology, Google's generation of dynamic links to maps and use of ISBN numbers to trigger links to booksellers cover the same territory as Microsoft's 2000 patent application for Providing electronic commerce actions based on semantically labeled strings, whose sole inventor - Jeff Reynar - was the lead SmartTag Program Manager while at MS and is reportedly now a Google Product Manager who's being credited as AutoLink's creator. Reynar's patent applications that have been assigned to Microsoft, including one for Smart Links and Tags, describe a world of 'recognizer' plug-ins that automatically look at every document a user creates, receives or views, transmitting messages to 'action' plug-ins - and even to the plug-ins' authors - that can be used to decide what info you'll be presented with, what options you'll be given, what price you'll pay for goods, and even who you'll be permitted to buy from."
For the love of michael, just make a legal section. This is not about our rights. Not yours, not mine, just Google's. Sheesh.
Sure. Everything gets patented these days. Do we really need a separate story every time someone digs up something like this?
wonder how many google posts we can get in a year...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> that can be used to decide what info you'll be presented with,
> what options you'll be given, what price you'll pay for goods,
> and even who you'll be permitted to buy from.
All the better reason to not let anyone online know who you are, where you've been, and where you come from.
RST
...who cares?
Eventually, as in every other case like this, there will be a lawsuit.
One side will win, the other won't. In either case, the loser will just change some small piece of the technology, and it will no longer infringe, if it even did in the first place.
The lawyers will get rich.
None of us will be affected in the slightest.
Cynical? Maybe. But before moderating, ask yourself if I'll end up being right.
Find out about the Lexus Rx400h Hybrid!
But, when I see this, I have this feeling of overlords or something.
Wierd.
would be nice to see how the search results differ for 'Jeff Reynar' on the two search engines. that's a story to tell.
Google will just agree to either pay Microsoft a bunch of money/stock, share something with them in exchange, or promise not to release their own browser/OS for a period of time.
Perhaps Google should now come out against patents in Europe.
Afterall their patents on search technology are worthless, anyone could use Pagerank and Google could not show they had used it -> failed attempt to protect invention.
Their newer search technology (they changed the algo last year), hasn't been disclosed in patent form and so the SEOs & competitors don't know how it works and MS couldn't copy it -> successful defence of invention.
They don't hold enough patents to join the "big company patent exchange club".
I for one, welcome our new price gouging, thought controlling overlords.
Google, the world's most widely used search engine, denied that the AutoLink feature is an attempt to control which destinations Web surfers visit.
I haven't looked that deep into the Google toolbar. How customizable is it? I can only imagine that it doesn't allow you to use any site that you want for maps, directions, etc -- you probably have to choose from Google's list, right? The article mentions a choice between Yahoo and Mapquest. Can I input my own URLs in there (similar to the way Konqueror's URL replacement works)? Can any company that provided maps/driving directions be added to that list? If neither of these are the case, then it's a form of control...
Then again I could always just get the damn map myself without using the Google toolbar...
... and thus prevent you from patenting the business process whereby one patents an obvious business process?
At this point it doesn't matter if it is a breach of the NDA. As soon as Google starts making money form it, Microsoft will send them a take down and sue them for "lost revenues".
In Microsoft vs. the DoJ Microsoft won (even though it doesn't say that in the court documents)
In Microsoft vs. Google who will win?
Slightly off-topic, but I can cite prior art for use of ISBN numbers to trigger links to booksellers back to the mid/late 90s, when Amazon first created their affiliate program. One of the first Wikis would look for ISBN in the text of pages and automatically turn them into links to Amazon.
I have not used the Google toolbar - I use Firefox under linux - however I have RTFA and what is described to me sounds rather dirty play on googles part. The action of modifying web pages containing addresses or ISBN to drive click through traffic seems pretty low to me. While im not sure what to make of the patent infringements allegations (inserting smart tags into html at development time is rather different from using search technology to do this on the fly - although the result may be the same) Im not keen on google using theses kinds of pratices it blackens their reputation and seems more like the kind of stunt Microsoft would pull. Google need to be extra vigilent now that Redmond have stepped up the fight. My advice to google would be to keep their face clean. Its not just surfers that are going to be miffed with this but developers and their customers too.
Nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Google good.
Microsoft bad.
(deep snif)
aaaaahh...i love the smell of lawsuits in the morning.
"..that automatically look at every document a user creates, receives or views, transmitting messages to 'action' plug-ins - and even to the plug-ins' authors - that can be used to decide what info you'll be presented with, what options you'll be given, what price you'll pay for goods, and even who you'll be permitted to buy from."
...
Interesting that anti-spyware has shown fresh installs of MS windows OS has spyware that tracks online use
Where are our privacy laws and fair competition laws?
Or do we really know who has bought them away from us?
The only way for this to be faired up is to allow any and everyone who wants to use such a thing, to be able to. Just like the solution to the "trillion dollar bet">/a> was faired up, via exposure and wide scope use.
Or in other words: nobody gets an unfair (anti-competition) advantage in marketing via patenting some automated privacy invading information collecting marketing process.
Most software is NOT patentable as shown by abstraction physics", and that certainly includes this.
Would anybody care if this feature was pulled from Google's toolbar? In my opinion this is a non-issue.
This doesn't seem like a malicious feature intended to force users to visit certain sites whenever Google should so choose: users don't have to download the toolbar or use the feature. The fact that people use the Google toolbar in the first place suggests that they appreciate the usability enhancements it offers, and auto-linking is more likely to help than hinder. Google Maps, for example, is the most user-friendly map service around, and it's a choice that most people would make anyway. The same argument could be made about Amazon.
from a search engine to the worlds largest e-commerce engine.
When I search for, for instance, HP Laserjet schematics, I get 40 pages of assholes peddling toner cartridges and refill kits.
That's NOT what I asked for, I want to find schematics that I can view. I don't want to buy a frigging CDROM with schematics on ebay, or laddersearch or toner carts or any of the other nonsense that google throws at me.
God I despise google. It has become the most useless of all search engines but the most profitable of all investments for online peddlers..
because when companies start making little green annoying links to advertising sites instead of links they piss me off the web, and it matters not who is doing it, but that it is being done.
damn the web sucks nowwadays.
the problems is, popups, spyware, malware, far less concern for me (I never see any) that the likes of pipipiqipqiqp and his fuck-tard antics.
see sig.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Well, who more better qualified than Mr. Reyner to know that what Google is doing does not conflict with his previous patent, right? ;-)
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Does this cover autolinking of URLs, like every decent mail or IM client does with text messages ?
If it prevents Google from taking over our pages, this might be one of those times when patents prevent a company from doing something bad.
Hey, sometimes two wrongs do make a right...
Is Google finally... EVIL? ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Randomly musing here, but surely Google is creating a derivative work by modifying the pages before they are seen by the user? This would make them in breach of copyright if true (unless they have the permission of the author of the page, which seems pretty unlikely).
Of course, you could argue that the user is creating the derivative work and just using google as the means to do this, but I think modifying content to this extent falls outside fair use.
Ironic then that they are (allegedly) infringing on Microsoft's patent (a form of intellectual property) while they infringe on other people's copyrights (another form of IP).
or is it "Do Know Evil?"
Yes.
I love it when Slashdot uses headlines that can be answered in a single word. Makes commenting so much easier.
Disney had this one, and it should be expired by now. I saw the recognizers in Tron.
SmarTags is not an 'obvious' thing, and definately should be granted a patent.
While SmartTags for IE were THAT as useful (though still useful, IMO), SmartTags for Office is probably the best feature that has been added to Office thus far.
Deja.com, the first major web archive of usenet [news.google.com is built on their archive], has a similar "feature" where it would add advertising links to certain words in the archive. I don't know exactly when this was, but this article is mid-2000 and refers to another now defunct site, Remarq, doing it even earlier.
Interestingly enough, with both Deja and Remark, the users complained enough that the companies dropped the plans.
Apple had an API some years before the entire Microsoft "smart tags" mess which allowed programs to sign up to flag certain types of text anywhere in the system and define operations you could do on them. It was an experimental/research thing, like OpenDoc, and I don't believe it ever was allowed into an OS release, you had to download it. The only plugin that this API came with-- and as far as I know the only one that anyone ever bothered making-- was one that recognized URLs and email addresses whenever they were printed anywhere in the system, and turned them into functional hyperlinks. I am afraid I can't remember the exact name, it was something really generic like "Apple Text Activation Services".
The only thing this patented Microsoft system seems to add is the idea of the link being calculated on a remote server rather than locally; this is a truly trivial step from what Apple's system explicitly did, and one that may not even exactly describe the google toolbar system.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Or perhaps Microsoft, with its high salaries and good benefits program, actually recruits very good programmers from time-to-time? And once in awhile, those programmers leave MS to join a project more exciting, perhaps at Google?
I know someone who works at Google, and he has told me there are quite a few ex-Microsofties who walk the halls there. And they're no stupider than anyone else there, despite what you would like to think.
Google is snapping up Microsoft employees (current and ex) left and right. While there's nothing wrong with that, in this case it is a problem for the part that you failed to quote:
In other words, he's breaking his NDA and knowingly violating a pending patent by carrying over the same ideas he had at Microsoft to Google. It sounds silly, but when he filed for a patent while a Microsoft employee, he gave those thoughts to Microsoft. To use them now at Google would require a licensing agreement with Microsoft.This is the kind of problem I'm surprised we haven't seen more of in the software industry. Developers are highly mobile, often changing jobs (voluntarily or involuntarily), and part of the reason to hire you over someone else is your skills and ideas. If the main idea you're bringing to the plate for my company is the same idea you patented at your last job, I don't want you. You'll only get me in legal trouble (and get yourself in legal trouble, violating your previous NDA).
It'll be interesting to see how this turns out, whether Microsoft goes after the person as well as the company. (The majority of Microsoft's legal history involves them as the defendent. They haven't often initiated lawsuits of their own.)
SmarTags is not an 'obvious' thing, and definately should be granted a patent.
99% of computing mechanisms that designers, engineers, programmers etc "invent" in computing are non-obvious, because only the self-taught and inexperienced newcomers to computing (re)invent the obvious and think it's new.
As soon as you put a couple of dozen components together, you end up with a non-obvious system. The whole mess that is US patents is based on the ridiculous assumption that this means that it's worthy of patenting, and therefore of removing that arrangement from the sea of free ideas. All you're doing is hampering all subsequent design.
No wonder the US is in an utter mess, with only the lawyers benefitting.
Whenever I get a google search result that is full of spam, I usually try several other search engines, but the other engines results are normally worse than what Google gives me.
If you know a search engine that is less susceptible to spam than Google, please share!
Doug Moen.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
It's not "Microsoft's technology", they didn't invent it--they are only trying to patent it. Whether the patent holds up despite that remains to be seen, but Google has enough money and clout to at least fight it.
The application was filed November 26, 2001. By that time, there were several client-side applications for adding arbitrary links. Only some of the dependent claims in that application are probably valid, such as the use of an automatic update for link patterns and targets. (By "valid" I don't mean "nonobvious" though.)
We could do a search on Google to find out.
.......to the worlds economy. It hasn't happened completely yet but that is what all the indicators say are coming soon to a reality near you. Here me out on this, this IP patent nonsense is tied to global power play economics in a big way..
We no longer are the premier manufacturer, and soon we won't be the largest customer/consumer base either. Within this decade this is happening, all the think tank analysts have said more or less the same thing, because the raw data is just raw data and it's just not that hard to see it.
Software can be written anywhere, it is no longer the arcane and exclusive province of a few thousand people in high level corporate or governmental/academic circles. It's a cheap commoditised "product" that x-millions create daily and x-tens of millions will be doing shortly within a few years. And most of the rest of the world is going to a FOSS model a lot quicker than we are, because of the benefits they see in it. That's not my call, just what you can see happening and read about.
Manufacturing of tangibles goes to those who care to do it, see Asia,the west made a decision via their "leaders" to minimise that because it was "too hard" or something, so there ya go. And despite people thinking software is all that important, tangibles still rule economically and in geopolitical importance, people eat real food, not virtual food, they drive real cars, not video game cars,they live in real homes not some ridiculous sim city environment. And etc, etc, etc.
Software is important,no one will deny that, but it's still the tool, not the product. Software more exists (outside of "entertainments") to facilitate production of Tangible Stuff mostly, of and by itself it's not as important except for that task, and the freer the better the faster the gooder it is,and patenting really balls up that process, s-o-o-o-o, software is coming from the FOSS world now, and it will only get better. and the two just don't mix, patents and FOSS. It's a bad idea really to even try.
Raw materials and energy come from where they come from, the US uses a lot more than we produce, so we fail it there as well economically. Just this year we even switched to a net ag products importer from exporter, the last thing we were the world leader in.
In short, all we have are weapons and hollywood and music as exports of note,all the other traditional exports are in decline,they are not going to recover, and patents on dubious software advances are a phony way to say we are still producing ultra valuable commodities, and are a last ditch paper work shuffling effort to make that fantasy come true, but the rest of the world ain't buying that. It's like calling all the stock market numbers the same as real money, it just ain't so. Patented "IP" is beyond a "tech bubble" phenomenon, it actually serves as a form of economic strangulatory suicide, except for a few people for a relatively short period of time. It's a smokescreen to feed to the US public to keep them faked out we still produce much.
Really, the only thing keeping the US afloat and uberimportant economically right this second is we have a force projection expansionist based military, a doofus at the top who is more than willing to use it, for all practical purposes a mercenary military dedicated to a small handful of transnationals and their controllers (I am sorry for that but it's true and I wish it weren't so...sorry), and the amount of our global debt we have accumulated. And we are in no position to actually pay this debt with anything real or intrinsically valuable, so they came up with this whopper fantasy game of "patenting" IP so that we could demand real stuff-money,goods and services for it, from "everyone else", that guy, and coincidently help to assuage the day of reckoning with this debt and no-tangible-work fiasco they got us into.
And it won't work, because the rest of the planet just ain't that dumb no mo' no mo'
Better come lock me up! I know how things work and how to program; I'm a dangerous fellow!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I agree. This has nothing to do with patents. If this story is true, it seems Microsoft could easily win this case, and wants to spin it so it looks like patents are why it won, when they are irrelevant, they will win because it was a violation of their employment contract.
The new toolbar creates links on specific text if no links exist, but you can shield this text with a null link and make the toolbar look like it's broken. Instructions here.
If someone who coded OSS suddenly started working for a company that produced proprietary software remarkably similar to the OSS product he was working on, you'd all be screaming for lawsuits.
a simple matter of emphasis...
Advertisers have every right to entice, convince and ensnare me into their advertisements.
They have absolutely NO right to BUY my my eyeballs by showing me only links that they have purchased!
IF their product is that good, then they shouldn't have to worry about purchasing exclusive links to my eyeballs; it should be able to stand on its own. The mere fact that they have to purchase exclusive rights to my clicks says just how worthless their product is!
Oh really? Have you heard about the BSA?
Wake up Neo! Microsoft has been sueing people for the violation of their IP rights for a long time.
It's really sad when people can't speak English and have to explain things to each other in D&D terms.
This patent should not be granted.
c m.html
I can't for the life of me remember the name for it, but back in the days of MacOS 9, Apple had some software that would parse any text on the screen and present you with a contextual menu that would be full of links to various things you could do with it.
It would be able to recognize a physical address and present you with a map. It could recognize email and web addresses in any application. It would add dates to your calendar and any number of other definable things.
Thats the name...
Apple Data Detectors.
http://www.miramontes.com/writing/add-cacm/add-ca
Would this not be exactly what the SmartTags patent is all about?
Certainly seems like a breach of the non-competition clause. Not really a breach of NDA since the idea has been disclosed (we knew about it right?).
Anyways I think that MS will squash this, and furthermore the team of lawyers that killed smart tags from MS should have the same arguments about autolinks from Google. If changing someones content during delivery is bad shouldn't it be bad regardless of what company does it?
I personally think that the world should be allowed to have smart tags and autolinks and the like, but we will see how this goes.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Otherwise, it would depend how broadly written any NDA/non-compete/whatever agreement was that he had signed with Microsoft. Some companies in the past were notorious for overly-broad non-compete agreements, so broad as to render you virtually unemployable if you left the company. However, I've never heard that Microsoft went in for that sort of thing.
I hope Microsoft and Google take it to court fight it out to death, we might lose two monopolies at once!
Well, at least make both lose money.
Good and bad companies alike will be forced to dance this silly legal jig.
The only real voice we have in this battle is our wallets. I'm sending my spare dimes where they can best help fight this stuff.
Don't hate the players - fix the game.
Rob Enderle's excellent new book: Everything I needed to know about Computer Science I learned in Marketing School
You say "..creating monopolies of technology through the patent system."
...
I hate to tell you this but...
U.S. Constitution - Article 1 (The Legislative Branch) Section 8 (Powers of Congress):
The Congress shall have Power
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;..
Patents are intended to provide the inventors with a time limited monopoly.
Personally, I find your post disturbing. Reading it, it is clear your only conclusion is that anybody who is pro-Microsoft is merely doing it to appear as an independent thinker, which is absolute rubbish. Some of us have been visiting Slashdot for a long time, and there has always been somewhat of a balance of opinion.
What you're advocating is that everyone adopt your viewpoint because you just so happen not to consider it groupthink as you do for someone who might--gasp--not personally hate Microsoft, a computer software company. Such people should really get a life.
'recognizer' plug-ins that automatically look at every document a user creates, receives or views, transmitting messages to 'action' plug-ins - and even to the plug-ins' authors - that can be used to decide what info you'll be presented with, what options you'll be given, what price you'll pay for goods, and even who you'll be permitted to buy from.
Great, a plug-in recognizer that sniffs for 'password' - any one see a problem here, how about 'Visa'. With IE and ActiveX, who feels comfortable heh? We do logical XOR's on all memory afterwards - right?
A dimwit would see the patent is nonsense, obvious and prior art, except the bit about 'who you'll be permitted to buy from', which is NEW.
Besides many trade practices laws that make it flat out illegal to fix prices and collude/conspire/ price fix amoungst suppliers, if I don't like the opinion of say Amazon,I try other favorites. They can suggest, but so far, my PC does not point a gun at me.
If they change the patent, to say blackmail users into submission, yeah, that one will be a patent goer.
Remember the "1-click" patent? How about the "shopping basket" patent?
Those and many others like them, affect any business using the web for sales. Other more general sw patents affect any business using the Internet or WWW for anything business related.
And no, so called defensive patents won't work against portfolio companies, they don't produce or sell anything.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
yes, I have seen that, part of my overall conclusions that lead me to the original premises. I think a good place to look at for US foreign policy as regards these issues is to look at what they literally forced onto the Iraqis,think of it as a testbed, everything from IP protected seeds being mandatory for the farmers (mandatory!) to the software and entertainment media IP issues. Also note that over there you need a "license to be legitimately working" from a private corporation, Haliburton.
I am not sure how FOSS is going to deal with this, even with the support of industry heavyweights like Novell and IBM. I can see we are at a critical juncture now with these patenting issues, and frankly, I think we are going to see "patented" software, especially for machines connected to the net, become the only "approved" software, via some legislative act. They need a bit more major net security screwups first, but they can arrange that I would guess. They'll use the excuse of "terrorism" and "hackers cost the economy billions and billions" and "we have to protect the children" "we need to be able to police the internet" and so on and so forth, just do it all at once in a big way. I could easily see some government agency establishing "standards" for software to make sure it is "legitimate" and "not pirated" and "safe to use on the net" and "we have to stop piracy" so on. Might not happen this year or next year, but I can see it happening sometime. The internet is just too juicy a target for government interference and for corporate monopolisation,(same thing really) they simply won't keep ignoring it like they have half way like now. They keep trying in smaller ways and I think they can see that isn't working fast enough, so that's why I expect a "shock and awe" campaign sometime via the laws, and patents will definetly be in the mix.
I can even come up with a scenario where they can kill off stuff too, via front conmpanies or a forced co operation with legit companies who also would like to see their stuff be "officialised" so they can profit from it. Example: They could back write code into closed source propietary patented software that they modify on purpose for this reason, then "discover" that open source equivalents are "running patented pirated code". KIll that software off, lather rinse repeat. Think of it as a SCOesque gambit on steroids, with the exception that it would actually *look* like they had a beef that would fly, and who would be able to tell different? Create a semi plausible development paper trail with the "patented" stuff, and that's all you need, that and the code, which is just swiped character by character. Literally create a reverse counterfeit that makes the legit open source stuff *look* like it has violated a patent. Would be easy to do, too.
Who cares if Microsoft or Google do it, someone will eventually, then will they begin to obscufate the mouseover on links, or status bar display?
Someone is going to do it and there is nothing to stop anyone from doing it. We are witnessing an evolution in a huge business, my guess is those who miss the ads miss the potential business and what it means as well.
Using Google and the likes of Moreover you can make a self writing newspaper in a few lines of code. Really gets the cogs spinning when looking at our UK tabloids!
Now imagine that I am an employee browsing some important internal documentation on an Intranet ... The toolbar will send these documents to Google, and according to the privacy policy, Google will be able to collect and reuse these documents.... Bill G. better not install the G Toolbar 3 on his company computer!
All the talk about patents and violation thereof... sure that is one topic, but is of any real concern to designers/developers and website owners? I think you have hit the nail on the head... copyright is the issue at hand from there standpoint. And I believe copyright is twofold here... there is the visual, final rendered product, and there is the underlying code that delivers that product. On the one hand, perhaps the content isn't being changed, just the way it is being viewed, and the end user has at his or her disposal the ability to do that already, depending on how they configure their browser. However, if something or someone is adding or removing anything to my code, that in my mind is a violation of copyright. The printing of a book may not be copyrightable, but the process to do that may be patentable. However the process of printing it though, the final finished product, the book itself, is copyrighted... and regardless of the delivery vehicle... small print, large print, softcover or hard, audiotape or braille. What is worse is that they may also be impacting the owner of said work financially... what if I have banners or offer a service on my site, or even Google's AdSense, but their autolink function ends up taking someone from my site for something that I might have been able to profit from, that perhaps helps sustain my website to begin with. Now, as the owner of said work, I should not only have the easy option of allowing this or not, but it should be similar to AdSense and I should receive a payment for this service, especially since this offering, if well received, is financially beneficial to Google to begin with.
http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/ on google's role in the future of media...
It is very interesting that rather than forming independent opinions about this subject, that moderators tend to herd around an opinion.
Here's Tim Bray's opinion on google's autolink "feature", just to prove that Google is actually being evil. (BTW slashbots, Tim Bray is at Sun and co-invented XML, so he can't be evil).
It seems so obvious that this move is not only evil but stupid; I keep hearing that MSN is pretty good these days, but Microsoft isn't trustworthy, so I don't go there. If I don't trust Google either, all bets are off. Anyhow, this is a policy problem not a technical problem, so here's a suggestion: perhaps our friends at Creative Commons could have a look and develop a professional legal opinion as to whether their licenses, like the one I use, are infringed by AutoLink (my non-professional opinion is that Google's damn close to the edge). If not, perhaps they could create a variant license that clearly rules it out of order. Then Google stops, or we sue their ass.
Tim Bray
So there you have it. Unpopular as my opinions are, they are shared by eminent folks in the computing world.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax