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Epicrealm Uses Vague Patents to sue Web Sites
An anonymous reader writes "InfoSpinner/epicRealm holds two patents that basically describe every dynamic Web site in existence and is now using them to sue companies like eHarmony.
This patent seems to describe a standard web/application server setup.
This one describes 'dynamically generating a Web page in response to the request, the Web page including data dynamically retrieved from one or more data sources.'
If enforced, these patents could shut down almost every dynamic site on the Internet, including the USPTO."
If enforced, these patents could shut down almost every dynamic site on the Internet, including the USPTO
Ahh the wonders of living in Europe. Let's just hope it lasts.
Simon
Then get him good and soused and get him to sign off on a lawsuit against the USPTO. Should be good for five years worth of Slashdot fun.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
right on
Well, they could always do /. by hand... that would kinda fun actually
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
IANAL, but if I understand patent law, part of what you get for the goverment enforcing your monolopy to practice a patent is that they can arbitrarily use it and ignore your complaints...
In other words, the goverment can simply ignore them (and it will be legal too). Of course every other site on the planet is in trouble.
Spell check? Why bother. That is what grammer/spelling Nazi freaks who waiste band width posting "spell right" are for.
it does not deserve to live. If the patent office itself has prior art, than the patent must die.
Well, there goes their chance of finding a lasting, loving relationship.
It seems to me they site a number of other patents in their patent(s)......of whcih I am assuming they have not paid for. This would render their patent meaningless. Also, have they paid for the rights to reference OLE, and such? I doubt it.
This sig is o Unfunny o Funny
It's being enforced because the VCR running it couldn't adapt to the new time change.
Go to the w3.org and put Slashdot.org through the validator.
Umm Amazon existed in 1998.
Well, I think it's a good thing to happen because of the massive irony it introduces. Now, the US Government itself can be sued due to a vague and shitty patent! If this doesn't introduce any sort of patent reform, then someone will need to patent "the act of patenting something".
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
If enforced, these patents could shut down almost every dynamic site on the Internet, including the USPTO
Perhaps that would facilitate some change. It seems that, throughout history, things only got better after they got much worse. Gas prices will probably continue soaring until we have a Boston Gas Party (which will probably be a lot more fun than the Boston Tea Party - at least in the south). The combination of asinine software patents and litigious bastards will most likely continue on too, at least until things get so bad that some as insane as suing the USPTO actually does happen - or until we have our own little patent reform party =)
Where is the link to evidence that Epicrealm is *actually* sueing companies? *sigh*, typical bloody Slashdot scaremongering....
Slashdot, being completely free of any and all dynamic individuals, will be completely immune to anything Epicrealm can throw at it.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Ha! Gotcha! I don't really care. ;-)
Can this be for real? Every dynamic site on the net could be affected? Hmmm... Wonder how long it would take to sue everyone? So much for the Random Alien Fashion Show
As such, I'm not as concerned about "woe unto all dynamic web sites," but if I managed one that offloads and caches page generation work (i.e., Slashdot, LiveJournal, and probably a lot more) I'd probably be calling my lawyer this morning.
I hereby patent any/all form(s) of thought(s). You all owe me $.02 for each thought you have. Gotta love being able to put a patent on something you didn't come up with, especially since it's virtual, and not even physically existent.
Okay, a party it is. We'll seize the cabinets, vaults, and servers that hold all the current patents, and we dump them into the Boston Harbor! Now, all we need to figure out is how to get the required documents...
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Seriously, mainframes are so cool. And they offer patent protection, too.
Would Einstein have let these patents through? Maybe the problem we have is that our patent officials are TOO smart and are busy discovering the next major breakthrough in quantum physics instead of batting back nonsense patents of wheels and such. Bless 'em
is what you do to convince the examiner that you've done your prior art search before submission and that you're not a sloppy schlub who's wasting the USPTO's time. Citations of prior art are used to distinguish the inventor's application from the prior art, establishing the required novelty component. Citations of prior art do not mean that these patents are art you have to license.
Sounds like a brand of hair growth products.
Couldn't this be interpreted to to mean all websites? Web server process the request then asks the file server for the file, based on a request for a file. Goodbye WWW :D Though I also think 1999 seems a little late to be inventing this technology since I was writting ASP in 1998.
Amazon using itself as an example of prior art in a patent dispute. That would be a first.
Even further back, the search engines for the Gopher and WAIS systems were much the same way. Methinks Epicrealm's website does NOT predate Gopher.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
USPTO shuts itself down for patent infringement.
-----
Without a God, life is only a matter of opinion.
--Douglas Adams
I'm frankly excited about the suit. No sitting judge could possibly hope to rule in favor of Epicrealm (at least not without an embarassing overturning by another judge). Every loss by a software-patent holding party weakens the whole idea of software patents, and hopefully expedites the severe restriction/outright end thereof. Kudos to Epicrealm for fighting for the right side, even if it is only accidentally.
"Fight for lost causes. You may discover they weren't."
From their Claim #1:
1. A computer-implemented method for managing a dynamic Web page generation request to a Web server, said computer-implemented method comprising the steps of:
routing a request from a Web server to a page server, said page server receiving said request and releasing said Web server to process other requests wherein said routing step further includes the steps of:
intercepting said request at said Web server and routing said request to said page server;
processing said request, said processing being performed by said page server while said Web server concurrently processes said other requests; and
dynamically generating a Web page in response to said request, said Web page including data dynamically retrieved from one or more data sources.
Have no fear, I shall patent the word 'said' and venge the Web!
[alk]
Just remember, when the USPTO vacates this patent because it threatens them, be sure to complain to the USPTO that they're playing favorites. Either abuse of the patent system is a problem for everyone, or it's not, and the USPTO can't make an exception for themselves.
I have prior art from 1992.
MIT has prior art from 1994, the open meeting.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
You just made me realise that every single porn site on the 'net is vulnerable to this patent!
*quickly runs off to download all the porn contained on the Internet*
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
The patent date is January 1999, so this could be a very real barrier to many companies. IANAL, caveat emptor.
They've effectively patented server-side scripting. Not only any site using Java, C#, et al is effected, but potentially Sun and Microsoft with regard to their software products that perform server-side scripting. Yes boys and girls, this is huge. Or a tempest in a tea cup if there are overlapping patents, prior art, obviousness, or any of the other usual arguements (famine, plague, dogs and cats sleeping together, etc).
Should they be suing the company that made the server software, instead of the client who purchased it? Unless eHarmony developed they're on webserver, in which case, how did they find out??
The Digital Couture Collection
I Give up! I'm going to become a lawyer, unless they've patented that too.
For a company that makes a web product, they have a pretty scarce web presence:
...
www.epicrealm.com == 'under construction'
www.infospinner.com == non existant
the only thing Googling for either name turns up press releases
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
Oh man would it be sweet to use the USPTO website as prior art to challenge the patent.
this will be the patent nonsense outrage that will break the poor man's back.
But probably not. It's cheaper and easier to throw money around the problem then to actually do the real work fix the problem. Hell, the US Govt doesn't even seem to think that any patent reform legislation is necessary AFAIK.
*sigh*
First Prior Art Post!!
Woohhoo!!
I found a vague reference to this at Linux Today, dated back in 1999, but nothing else. Is there anything more current on this? Or matbe Slashdot is just a bit late on this story?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I recently filed for a patent through my company. It wasn't an overly complex invention and I thought I described it very well with a one page email. By the time the lawyers where done with it that one page had turned into 45 pages of text that I hardly understand. There is something wrong with the system when the inventer has a difficult time understanding the invention that is being submitted to the patent office. After seeing how much the company lawyers obfuscated the facts I'm not surprised that the patent office sometimes lets bogus patents through.
The patent is not called 'dynamically generating a Web page in response to the request', as the poster would have you believe, but 'System and method for managing dynamic web page generation requests'. It describes a system in which a dispather takes the dynamic page requests and distributes them to the least loaded 'page servers' which actually do the data retrieving and page generation. It's a system for reducing the load on the main web server if it generally receives a lot of dynamic page requests.
It's not a particularly novel system, but if enforced, it will most certainly not 'shut down almost every dynamic site on the Internet'.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
You can't patent a word. You might be able to trademark "said" as it applies to software, software patents, and software patent applications. Then you could sue for dilution.
Good luck on that. I'd even buy a T-Shirt.
Google has been doing this since when? Before '99 at any rate. There is no way in hell this will stand up to a prior art attack.
Hopefully eHarmony et al. counter-sue for whatever charge it is you can leverage for frivolous lawsuits.
a method and apparatus for using the Earth's magnetic field to levitate an object or vehicle.
There. Now nothing will ever get off the ground.
Is there even the remote possibility that a QuickTime movie of one of these asshats wearing a flaming tire would give patent schmucks pause? Where's the Mafia when you actually need them?
I got sued once. Copyright infringement and breach of contract. The case was nonsuited about six months later. Dropped, in other words, prior to discovery or any court appearances. It seems my contract was with a company they bought their assets from, twice removed, it had a dispute mediation clause they weren't honoring and the software (which I wrote) was no longer in my posession anyway.
The moral of the story is: anybody can sue anybody for anything. It means nothing. If they obviously have no case, just tell 'em to get bent. More precisely, pay a lawyer for two hours of time to very formally tell them to get bent, and then get on with your life.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Inventors: Lowery; Keith (Richardson, TX); Levine; Andrew B. (Plano, TX); Howell; Ronald L. (Rowlett, TX)
Assignee: InfoSpinner, Inc. (Richardson, TX)
Appl. No.: 636477
Filed: April 23, 1996
Submarine patent? Or not? Just lucky, I guess - will will now see how much law is an ass more than the SCO case.
We need a high-profile case of a patent abuser getting a stiff fine. Or even frogmarched to jail for a stint. If I got the County Clerk to hand me a title deed to some "real property", without proper boundaries drawn on it, then went around the countryside demanding rent, there would be hell to pay. The first time, I'd probably just get a spanking from the cops and the District Attorney. After that, I'd be in jail for harrassment. And if the Clerk did that more than once, they'd be fired. If not, their boss would be fired. If not, then the obvious collusion to enable me to harrass and defraud property owners would send them to jail, too. If I were doing this to collect rent on land that no one owned, like a public forest, I'd go to jail the first time around.
Patent abuse is not only a fraud exactly like that scam. It also destroys the fragile system defended only virtually, without the actual land that backs real estate, and makes the whole economy more solid. Patents, the office that issues them and the laws that back them are already pretty stupid and abusable, even when they're administered as carefully as possible - particularly on software. Now it's obvious that they are a tool for interfering with "progress in science and the useful arts", rather than promoting it. Heads must roll before the crooks are running the entire landscape.
--
make install -not war
Gas prices will probably continue soaring until we have a Boston Gas Party (which will probably be a lot more fun than the Boston Tea Party - at least in the south).
I certainly hope you're not insinuating that people from the South are predisposed to finding entertainment value in setting stuff on fire / blowing stuff up or nothing like that.
If you write software for a living, you'll be done soon. Very done. Toasty done. This has simply got to stop, and everyone in this forum, and anywhere else, who supports software patents of any kind, has to be beaten with a clue stick until they understand why it is the end of the world as we know it.
Bill Gates, are you out there? Here's a suggestion that will forever alter my opinion of you and of Microsoft -- in fact alter it to one of unconditional positive regard. Please save us, and donate all of Microsoft's software patents to the FSF. Then endow the FSF's anti-patent fight with $1B/year in perpetuity. Thank you for listening.
If these cowards were out for something more than extortion they should be suing Microsoft for selling the tools (ASP, .NET, IIS) for doing exactly this.
Come to think of it, what tools have they used to build their own web-site that implements these patents?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I thought we were talking about Epi-cream! Whew, slashdot is saved.
Nonsense. Even if they had enough money to go around suing every dynamic site on the internet (think 8,168,684,336 web pages indexed by Google and divide by, say, 1,000), it would halted by the court which would find these patents "obvious" and with "prior use" and invalidate them. They have to prove all this stuff, and of course, it's simply not possible.
Now, let's have an actual look at the patent, shall we? What's interesting is that they have lots of diagrams of prior art. Let us examine what exactly these figures describe. Fig 2 (if it doesn't show up for you, try reloading the page, it's some stupid Quicktime implementation) shows a client sending a request to a "web server executable" which serves a page among an array of pages. Hmph. Static web server. Clear prior art. Fig 3 shows a CGI setup, where the browser requests a CGI application and it is executed. Figure 1, which is not prior art, and it gets interesting. (you see, I'm not sure whether or not the claims of the Slashdot blurb are correct).
So... 105 = web browser, 106 = mouse. But wait! Aren't parameters in dynamic websites part of the request headers? What's this "Command selections and information input at input device 106?" Hmm, that's weird, ::skips ahead:: This clears up things:
Wake me when Amazon, Apple, and eBay agree to pay licensing fees on this bad boy.
Free Adam Smith! (Or best offer.)
Is that right after the Boston Baked Beans potluck?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
as a simple example, the Inktomi and AltaVista search engines were publicly available before April, 1996 (the filing date) and they used dynamic content generation (by definition).
...because under US Patent Law, the government is an automatic licensee of every patent it issues, as the granting authority.
In addition, shouldn't they be suing the person who created the product, not the user? I would think that they should sue Microsoft (ASP, MS-SQL) or the Apache/PHP teams, since they are the partys creating the patent violating technology.
Or perhaps they are afraid of what will happen when they file a suit like this against MS...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Wake up,
EU Commission is busy trying to make patent infringment as crime (it was in that Criminialise-all-IP-infingements directive they just released). Not only could they close down the EU Patent office website, they could get them locked up for up to 4 years if this patent existed in Europe.....
The EU Commission really has to be raked in before its too late. How about their power to propose directives is removed. That would be similar to a proper Parliamentary directive where the civil servants don't create the laws.
You're trying to tell me that dynamic content didn't exist before January 1999? C'mon. They didn't invent that.
I call shenanigans!
How great would it be if the USPTO had to shut down because they infringed a stupid patent the passed..oh the irony! Hell maybe it could lead to the patent reform we have been asking for.
Otherwise someone might read that company name as epiCream.
...did anyone else misread that the way I did:
;P
"Epilcream uses Vague Patents to Sue Web Sites"
???
I guess my mind must be stuck on depilatories too much lately.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
All of you guys owe me money. Oh, wait. This is slashdot. Never mind...
You mean to tell me that those SOB's are still a going concern after all this time? Worse, they've turned to litigation. Nice. Very nice. Someone needs to tell Keith (if he's still even there and it's not Lawyers running the show...) that he's not at all lilly-white pure in the IP violations game and he'd be better off trying to make product instead of litigating money out of people.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
All you need to do is invalidate the patent.. That's probably what any large scale company they filed lawsuit against will do.
Which should be easy in this case..
Prove that that functionality existed before the patent was filed which it clearly did, spend some bucks on a lawyer to invalidate it on that basis and boom! Patent = gone.
They are called patent squatters, and their days are numbered.
I remember working on some of this back in 1993/early 94 on NCSA. This patent is a total joke.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
WebObjects.
It existed before this BS was fielded to the USPTO.
As for InfoSpinner/epicRealm, the game is on. Prior art mucks up what they've tried to claim and they're guilty as a cat caught in a goldfish bowl of IP infringement themselves. If I have to, I'll cut loose with my own pain as I never signed the waiver to not sue them for 3 extra months worth of insurance when they did the 150 person mass-layoff back nearly five years ago.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Unless they want to face the music for a GPL violation of epic proportions (apt, their choice of corporate names...) by way of their resale and distribution to numerous people their modified NLANR Squid engine code- they need to back off NOW.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The present invention teaches a method and apparatus for creating and managing custom Web sites. Specifically, one embodiment of the present invention claims a computer-implemented method for managing a dynamic Web page generation request to a Web server, the computer-implemented method comprising the steps of routing the request from the Web server to a page server, the page server receiving the request and releasing the Web server to process other requests, processing the request, the processing being performed by the page server concurrently with the Web server, as the Web server processes the other requests, and dynamically generating a Web page in response to the request, the Web page including data dynamically retrieved from one or more data sources.
A reverse proxy, in other words, that contacts more than one back end server for the same server name. That's a pretty easy one to bust. Reverse proxies were already in the open source Squid and Harvest caches prior to this patent's filing in 1996.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I would say more than anything J2EE violates these patents. Basically it is a patent on the tiered architecture approach of putting a web server out front that hands requests off to an app server in the background. I've been doing setups like these with apache and tomcat/jboss for the last 5 years (although not before the patent was filed). I'd imagine someone was doing tiered architecture besides these guys in 98/97 etc?
Certainly ebay or amazon, altavista, one of the huge sites from the 90's has to have prior art on this. It's basically a load balancing setup.
With the rulings recently that make "user intent" the responsibility of software developers, what would this mean for companies who develop software specifically to do load balancing across web servers?
What I mean is, if this is enforceable, are those companies now liable for their customers' use of their software to manage websites?
IANAL= 20050402193202442#patentlaw
1) Prior art needs to exist before the filing, not issuing date, to matter.
2) If a web site used this method, but didn't explain it, that's called a trade secret. It was still patentable. The risk they ran was that someone else would come up with the secret and patent it.
3a) Until thrown out, claims must be read as valid but:
3b) If prior art exists, the claim must be read in such a way that it doesn't cover the prior art, yet is still valid. Strange but true.
4) Only claims matter, but the specification defines terms used in the claims. No "But it could also cover..." unless the specification made terms that flexible. Beware "doctrine of equivalence" however.
5) check out http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page
It's *not* so intense that any particular act deserves a bullet between the eyes, but in aggregate the result is certain to be an avalanche of sand into the gears of progress. And that's where /. Justice comes in!
Come on people: We need to get creative and figure out appropriate punishments for the scum sucking freeeks who make the world of technology a demonstrably worse place.
Here's my list:
#1 (with a bullet in the nutz): Bill Gates. His crimes are so well known and so overwhelmingly documented, well: nuff' said. First, a bullet in the nuts. Then we chop him up and feed him to the penguins...
#2 Darl MacBride: Seething little shit deserves to be boiled in his own excrement. So first we chain him up in big pot and feed him well, and force him to poop and pee through the chainlink floor. After we get enough of the stuff, we set it to boil, and lower the floor.
#3 These latest fuckwits from Brylcream or whatever the fuck they're called. chain them up in an Amazon forest. Cover their face and nads with honey and let the ants get 'em.
Suggestions?
AC
Maybe it's time that the OSS community began to get 'investors' to patent obvious ideas...
The concept is simple: Start a dynamiclly driven web site (Oops... ;-), which lets users add ideas for patents and vote on what they think are the most likely to actually be implemented. Then find donors to fund the EFF to write patent applications, and to submit them.
If the patent succeeds, licence it under an OSS licence, that gives unlimited use unless the site's portfolio is challenged in court. If this happens, all users must come to the rescue of the site.
But the better outcome is that the patent office rejects the patent as 'obvious'. If the average /.'er can think of it then it must be obvious ;-)... And then when you get sued by someone, you can take your site and the rejected 'obvious' patent and ask the court to rule how that someone else's patent is not obvious, because you implemented based on what the patent office already declared obvious...
Regards,
-Jeremy
I saw no mention a an "easy to use graphical interface" in the mentioned patent. That sounds like it would be a great addition to the invention. Go patent it then sue the offending company for infringment.
Either that or show that the company has until now shown no interest in preventing others from recreating the invention, and thus it has fallen into public domain.
Or find any company that has a product that does the same thing that predates the patent to show prior art.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
If enforced, these patents could shut down almost every dynamic site on the Internet, including the USPTO
Maybe this wouldn't be such a bad thing after all? I mean I am sure we could figure away against the suit, but in the mean-time the USPTO would have to reconsider their effectiveness.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Coming soon:
Tagline: "patent or be sued!"
Object: Patent everything you can and profit from the work of others.
Method of play:
-Everybody starts with venture capital of $100,000.
-As you go around the board you collect cash (via sales cards), Patents (via patents cards)that you can buy if you want, and inventions (via inventions cards).
-sales cards: gives you the option to sell a product if you have the invention card for it.
-patents cards: You buy them If you want. Any patents not bought are put into the "Public domain" pile. A player can only hold a patent card for up to 10 turns, after which they go the the "Public domain" pile.
-invention cards: Are free when you land on the square on the board. If the "invention" is already patented by another player, that other player CAN sue for the cost of the patent. The patent owner can also not reveal that he/she hold that patent cards for up to 10 turns. The player with the patent card can, at the time of his choosing, sue the player with the Invention card for twice the "Sales" that player has received.
Note: If a patent card is bought and another player already has the "Invention card", each place $10000 in a pile and each spin their own USPTO wheel (Patent Wins - Invention wins -settlement). Both wheels must match. If not, each player adds another $5000 to the pile, and spin again. This can continue until one or both players run out of money. If Settlement is the outcome, the pot is split between players.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
UMMM.. this will get over thrown, its a patent that is too stupid to live.
http://www.dbmsmag.com/9612d08.html
So it's unlikely they're going to sue the USPTO, right.
But, statistically speaking, the USPTO must be violating a number of patents, some of which are critical to its operation.
What we need is the sympathetic owner of any of these other patents to sue them! (I don't know if that's even possible, but hey, one can dream of software patent elimination, by hook or by crook.)
There were already a number of search engines available (1999), what could be more dynamic that that, there's your prior art. End of discussion i'd say
You never catch me alive
No matter how many times i read that, "Epicrealm" looks like "EpiCREAM". Then I can't help but wonder why they aren't going after adult websites.
It's part of W's new energy bill.
If you produce enough energy for you and your family and still have some left over you get compensation!
Filed in 1996? Are they out of their freaking minds? There is so much prior art, it's hard to even quantify it.
I think there should be a special type of punishment for people who apply for patents like this, long after the technology has gone into use, and it should go double for any moron who approves it. Perferably something with ants, fire, or boards studded with nails.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
epicRealm pretty much imploded a couple of years ago. I suspect all that remains is a holding company that retains the IPR associated with their patents. (I worked with a couple of the guys that pretty much shut the lights off on their way out of the company -- some of the most brilliant engineers I've had the pleasure of working with).
Another very useful observation about epicRealm is that the letters of its name can be rearranged to spell "Ripe camel." I can't take credit for this observation, however; that honor goes to an anonymous employee who made that physical rearrangement of their official logo on the entrance to their main offices around the time everything started going down the tubes.
The Slashdot quote at the bottom says "Be dirty"...
Candy gives you gas?
Your parents must have barred you from trick-or-treating.
;)
Escape Pod Films: Sketch Comedy and Web Series
InfoSpinner was formed sometime in the late 1990's, I think they sold web middleware, working with Weblogic/WebSphere. On or about 1999 the company transformed to EpicRealm, with a distributed web caching offering. (50 global pop's running a (heavily?) modified squid.)
In 2001 EpicRealm, having failed utterly to compete with Akamai (the CDN did work, but you couldn't deploy or manage it effectively), decided to go in the direction of database caching with a box to sit between the db and the application. They laid off all but a core technical staff of 15-30 while they made the transition. Their website was updated in mid 2001 with information about their upcoming offering and then disappeared from the face of the earth later that year. And there was much rejoicing.
The company was based in Dallas (Dallasites may remember their banner on the big glass building at 75/campbell). It was founded (Keith Lowery) and run by a group of local Baptists and constantly expoused that it was a Christian company - "This is a Christian company, we accept people of any faith, but I don't want to hear any swearing in the halls" quoth CEO John Ferguson. at orientation. Ironically, it was one of the least Christian (in the sense of behaviour) companies I have ever worked for.
A funny story: One day somebody sent an email announcing a Bible study on Wednesday's at lunch in the break room. No comment from Manangement. Two days later a developer sent an email announcing a "Pylon of Set" to meet on Thursday's in the break room. Two hours later he sent out an apology (forced by his VP), and was not fired on assumes b/c someone in HR had the sense to point out the Freedom of Religion issues.
Search fuckedcompany.com for more ranting/info on EpicRealm.
If enforced, these patents could shut down almost every dynamic site on the Internet, including the USPTO.
Hmmm, something tells me this is not exactly what they're after. They're most likely just looking for a big stinky wad of money, without actually having to earn it. Just like most 'companies' who are in the patent-then-sue business.
From the US Constitution:
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 and copyrights are a means to and end, the end being promoting the progress of science and useful arts.
If a given enforcement of given patent or copyright threatens the progress of science or the useful arts, does that mean the enforcement action is itself unconstitutional, or at least that it's not provided for under this particular section of the Constitution?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This really has nothing to do with software patents, other than the fact that the patent in question just happens to be a software patent. The problem is that you can patent something and then sit on it for half the patent's life before you do anything about it, all the while watching as the rest of the world independently invents your idea and puts it into widespread use. The chances that eHarmony (or anyone else) was inspired by these patents are slim-to-none. It's also slim-to-none that anyone else knew anything about these patents before Epic Realm started suing people over them. Also, as far as I can tell, Epic Realm has never produced anything related to these patents.
What needs to happen to fix this problem is some sort of requirement on the part of patent law that invalidates (or at least limits) a patent if the owner of that patent makes no attempt to produce or license the patented process. If these guys had started pushing the older patent back in 1996, when it may have been arguably novel, I'd have no problem with them profiting from their idea. As it stands now though, they're just a bunch of hustlers shaking down the real producers so they can get rich off someone else's work.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
...for "a profitable invention" -- then I could sue everyone who infringes on my patent.
There ought to be a copyright version of the game with three players: The MPAA/RIAA, the Artist, and the Consumer. The goal of the game is for the consumer to be able to enjoy the artist's efforts by acquiring copyrights under systems like Creative Commons or public domain, while the media industry's goal is to make sure they control how it's done by gobbling up copyrights and severely restricting usage. The rules would grant vaguely stated abilities to the media industries whereby they can do things like surreptitiously extend the terms of their copyrights. The game would include weighted "legal" dice so the media industries always win and the consumers always lose. The artist doesn't get anything and can't play the game, but he has to draw the gameboard each time.
...then it would be worth it.
404 INTERWEBNET NOT FOUND
But can't everyone just say F#*k you to these patents. I mean if every person says screw you to certain or all software patents that are blatently stupid, and uses that stuff anyway, what are they really going to do. Throw 5+ million people in jail? I mean every single person could just not go to court for their patent infirngment hearing. Is the government going to issue 5+ million warrants for arrest and spend, how many millions of dollars just to enforce some asshats, obviosly i'd hope by this point, stupid patent. People seem to forget that if enough of us just say screw you there isn't a whole lot they can do asside from not make said software anymore, but then I'm sure someone else would be more than willing to start.
w00t
You're the one that looks to be lacking knowledge of Europe. Your comparison of North America and Europe as continents is not an accurate one. You say Europe is not a country, but then again we're actually organized into one political organization seeking ever greater integration (see founding treaty). On the other hand North America IS just a continent. NAFTA is just another FTA, the EU is actively trying to become the United States of Europe - the EU is more than just trade.
On the jurisdiction issue - I believe you would have to have an office in the US to become a target. If the website was hosted in Europe, but serving Americans, it would be hard to get at. The US might be powerful but it's legal power ends where national sovereignty begins.
The patent specifically limits itself to sites that dynamically generate HTML.
Simple solution, use XHTML.
It is PRECISELY that. I know, I worked on part of their hacked up Squid engine. Combine the mods to Squid with some DNS hackery and you've got a CDN to die for- if you sell the services for it (epicRealm couldn't for some reason beyond me at that and this time...).
In the context of this patent application, Page Server refers to a caching proxy that resides "local" to the server instead of the clients and has several modifications to it to allow it to be a vast pool of dumb bit shovels amplifying the app server and web server plant of a given site.
If you hack the Squid to accept expiry requests against the cache by a remote transponder network (one of my mods..) including wildcard removals (another one...), tell Squid to never expire content unless the cache is full or on a given timed event per domain or even URL (another one of my mods...), stack a raftload of them on a peering point, and have a DNS server network that points someone when they ask for say, http://www.dell.com/ for example, to the Squid rack nearest to the caller and then let the Squids in the rack look up normally, you have a CDN that's easier to use than Akamai ever was- and these stupid idiots couldn't even sell it to people; they were so enamoured with the ability to handle "dynamic" content that they forgot that the bulk wasn't even close to that and that they could have mopped the floor with Akamai with the static abilities of the whole system.
Burned through 70-80 million of private placement funds in less than a year they did. Now they've resorted to bottom feeding. Keith, how low can you stoop, man?
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
They dropped off the face of the earth sometime in 2003... They were first an app server company (InfoSpinner) who sold the bulk of the tech to IBM as a relabeled by IBM product (WebSphere). They then decided, because of a downturn in fortunes caused by an severe glut of better competitors in that arena, to go into the content delivery network business (epicRealm). Keith patented the "invention" in question during that timeframe. However, I don't know for certain, but I doubt that Keith or the others came up with it all on their own- I think Sanjay might have had a hand in this whole thing and I'm kind of surprised that he's not listed on the patent. Anyhow, with this in hand and roughly $90 million in private placement money, they moved forward in the year of 2000 to offer the first CDN that could manage dynamic content delivery, in other words, they could handle caching requests for things like stock updates, etc. for thousands of people and know when the caches should immediately expire. This was impressive in and of itself. The problem with all of this is that they couldn't seem to hire any sales people that could sell their way out of a wet paper bag- of which, the sales staff always seemed to have time to play ping-pong or fooseball in the break room on the fourth floor. They were too enamored with the ability to do the dynamic website delivery and couldn't just mop the floor up with Akamai with a better product- so in the end, they burned 75 of the 90 mil placement funds in less than a year's time.
Now, they seem to be a litigation bottom feeder like TSG- sad, really.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
And I quote:
"releasing the Web server to process other requests, processing the request, the processing being performed by the page server concurrently with the Web server, as the Web server processes the other requests, and dynamically generating a Web page in response to the request"
Go ahead, say processing the request again Mother&&#*$#
What?
Processing the request....
What?!?!?
**BAM**
Just for the record, I have yet more prior art on this. In 1994 I developed, for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a system that dynamically generated and cached GIF images of particular rectangular subregions of biology data as a web-based interface to same. In fact, I gave a presentation on it at the Second International Web Conference and talked specifically about its caching capabilities and so on. And I know I'm not the only one with prior art on this stupidity.
Check out the Apostrophe open-source CMS: http://www.apostrophenow.com/
http://www.epicrealm.com/ Nothing to see here...move along..
Install, Then Run
It's high time to elect a U.S. President who is both capable of getting things done and has a serious interest in changing the United States back to the country it ought to be.
Marwan for President in 2008!
If epic games are going to do this, yall should boycott these losers...
I patented the burning of people being eaten by ants while beaten. That'll be $10 million.
Want to find other gamers to play board and role playing game
"truth is we're in for a moderate price climb, but it'll result in a pardigm shift."
With all due respect, I'd like to see you prove that statement.
As former CEO of Haliburton, and now for better or worse, Vice President, consider what Dick Cheney had to say on the matter in a 1999 speech:
"By some estimates, there will be an average of two-percent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead, along with, conservatively, a three-percent natural decline in production from existing reserves.That means by 2010 we will need on the order of anadditional 50 million barrels a day."
Only now, I believe the situation is worse.
Checkout this site for a viewpoint that differs. They are too apocolyptic for me, but it provides some good links and interesting data.
I believe that there will be some major changes, but not pandaemonium, and yes a change to alternate energy sources. I also believe that based on the data that is available--all indicators point to the fact that we have indeed reached peak oil (see the above site for more info).
There are a couple of wildcards, however. Do a search for Alan Chamberlin, Eden Energy or The Great Basin (in Nevada/Utah). Chamberlin is a geologist who believes to have found oil prospects in Nevada that exceed even Saudi reserves and has spent the last 20 years of his life (privately) on this quest after leaving Exxon, Gulf and Marathon. While major corporations such as Shell Oil spent nearly $200 million a half century ago sampling and measuring the area, then later abandoning it (along with others), advances in geological analysis might prove they left to soon. I recently stumbled across some of Dr. Chamerlin's literature and it was an interesting read. His company Eden Enegy, purchased 210,000 acres at the epicenter of the basin and begin drilling this fall. Just a few months ago, a company known as Wolverine announced a prospect on the eastern edge of the basin estimated at ~1 billion barrels that they have already drilled to success (they sat on this for nearly a year allegedly, as they purchased more property).
In any case, there is a lot of oil activity now going on in that area and my whole point is to illustrate that we may have a lot more petrolium than the current status quo agreement leads you to believe. I also believe that demand will exceed our expectations (led by China), along with environmental impact and that the switch to alternative energies might be more abrupt and driven by a greater necessity than a "gradual shift".
Some food for thought.
Ok so I did a dynamic web page project for my senior design project in college. 1994!!!! You think I could hit them with a prior work suit? My project included a cgi app that parsed custom tags and retrieved data from a database based on input....
I answered honestly and I was given matches. And some of thse macthes were from atheists. The $400 a year price is what turned me away.
+++
I once was a great hacker.
I run an informational website and don't charge anyone money to access it. I put together all the information on it, and I wrote the code for the php search engine. It sounds to me like these folks are just trying to copy Amazon and Microsoft, and sue anybody who comes up with a cool idea. And anyway I don't think I've ever heard of them until today.
It's called "job security".
I have prior art from at least 1998
How about they lose the right to patent anything else ever again?
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
Like 95% of patents this one is bogus. Yet again, the USPTO relies on the pockets of the victims of these "attacks" to weed out the "bad" patents.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
I know I've seen a geek dating site somewhere. google would know. of course, it probably has the problem that girl geeks like me are taken before we even find the site... :)
The distinction between naming the program in the URL explicitly and naming the program as a "handler" then implicitly referring to it via, say, an extension (eg:
Indeed, to differentiate is to basically say that they can patent a specific level of abstraction. It is not so much the process they are patenting as the level of indirectness with which the process is triggered.
That is the SOLE way you can differentiate between a CGI script and a handler. Since abstraction is a damn sight older than the web, or even computers, the "invention" they must logically be claiming is the ability to run a program remotely over the web by abstract reference rather than direct naming.
It needs to be that precise, as remote execution is positively ancient - rsh and rexec certainly predate HTTP - and even the abstract reference bit was done by Gopher and WAIS.
However, can they even claim to have invented abstract handlers for the web? No, not really. NCSA had a limited ability to do abstraction, as I recall. Apache's "Server-Side Includes" are certainly done via an abstract handler and always have been. (You could either use the
You could actually do quite a bit with SSI's - I used them to parse the HTTP header to get the browser type and then #include any page hacks needed to get the HTML to work right.
Multiviews would be another implicit handler - if it can't find the file directly, multiviews attempts to pick up a language-specific version. (I don't know if there's any extensions yet that let you select on any other variable in the HTTP header, though that would be nice.)
I don't know what handlers the CERN server supported, but that would be the "Ultimate" in Prior Art, as that was the first web server ever written. It would be hard for anyone to claim to have invented a web technology prior to the invention of the web.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
After reading the patent I see that back in 1995 they come up with the idea of off-loading rendering to another computer leaving the primary web-server free to do it's work.
Well, excuse my going against popular opinion, but that seems to be a novel and unique approach for the time. All prior art they mentioned the technique of using CGI on the same machine for rendering not offloading the work to another processor.
If they were clever enough to come up with an idea, that 10 years later seems obvious or impacts on multiprocessors - then bad luck! They came up with the idea and they have the right to get benefits from it's use by others.
Stop winging!
Orationem pulchram non habens, scribo ista linea in lingua Latina
Perhaps if we look into all these little companies patenting everything we'd find Al Gore behind everything. After all, what better way to support the claim of inventing the Internet than by patenting all the related technologies through companies he controls?
if i had something trivial to patent, lived in the us, and money to burn, i would sue the USPTO for infringing on my patents, that would get the bastards to reform (presuming it actually cost them enough money).
i wonder if the big companies that want patent reform would do this.
WTF is "asyncrous"/"syncrously"/"asyncrously"?
ITYM "asyncronous"/"syncronously"/"asynchronously"!
HTH, HAND
AC
Paul Kunz was generating dynamic web pages from database queries on the IBM mainframe at SLAC that hosted the very first web server in the United States.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I think the penalty for this sort of behavior needs to be higher. Keep people from thinking there's any benefit to trying to be "clever".
Burning at the stake comes to mind.
Isn't just about every website they could target considered prior art?
Apply honey, fire ants, burning brands, and red hot pokers in unpleasant places
Optional pre step of flagulating the victim with stinging nettles beforehand. They will squeal/cease and desist in no time
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
:-)
Let me clue you in on a secret... Women can show you naked women too. Figuring out how is an exercise left to the reader.
They claim patent for the principle to figure out some dynamic stuff first, and then delegate to pure webservers.
I was hoping to be able to say that prior art of this principle could be found on slashdot, but the patent is '96, and slashdot '97 as far as I can see.
Here (the Netherlands) a patent should be "non-obvious to someone in the trade, faced with the problem". I claim that this is NOT the case. It IS obvious that with limited resources, lots of stuff of a site like slashdot still has lots of sub-elements that can be served from a simple page-serving server. Invented independedly by the slashdot guys when faced with the problem.
I always thought christianity was a good way to pick up chicks. Forget finding women in school, bars, clubs, and dating services - im goin to Church.
"The EU Commission really has to be raked in before its too late. How about their power to propose directives is removed. That would be similar to a proper Parliamentary directive where the civil servants don't create the laws."
More to the point, how about they just stop awarding stupid Patents? Both the EUC and the USPTO are guilty of that one.... how about somebody patent something that is really earth-shattering for a change, and fight over THAT, like a water-powered vehicular engine? THAT would be worth it. Otherwise, all you see is a bunch of the smartest DUMB people trying to get rich like SCO tried to.
==>dim strStatus = "DONE."<==