Slashdot Mirror
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 your email address is any indication of where you live then be aware that the UK has a patent office that is eager to outdo their american counterparts in patenting the patently obvious.
Umm Amazon existed in 1998.
In fact, it just the opposite. Any claims that would already be covered would not be allowed in the current patent. So they do not need to pay anything for the other patents referenced since their invention has been found to be different from all of those.
Of course, they do not need to pay anything to reference OLE.
They're prior art references; they don't do anything to the linked patent whatsoever. You don't have to pay to cite them, and they don't effect the claims.
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)
Obviously not. If you were a lawyer or knew any patent law you would have looked for priority data, such as:Both of these patents have the same effective filing date (the date you have to beat for something to qualify as prior art under 35 USC 102): April 23, 1996. The second patent is a division of the first patent.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
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.
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:
See United States Code Title 28, Part IV, Chapter 91, Section 1498. This actually covers the claim procedures when the government makes use of a patent, but if you use this to key some Google searches, you'll get plenty of background on what it is about.
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
And the patent application was filed on April 23, 1996. "Prior art" must predate the filing date (04/23/1996), not the date the patent was granted (04/13/1999).
Also, if you compare the remedies available for claims against government infringement with those available for non-government infringement (found in United States Code Title 35 Part II Chapter 29), the government does get the better part of the deal. In particular, a patent claimant cannot get an injunction to stop the government from using a patent.
From what I recall, part of the reasoning behind this distinction goes back to World War I, where the government wanted to make sure patent claims could not be used to stop the development and production of new weapons.
Fucking "Ajax". IT'S A CLEANING PRODUCT!
I think the Greeks had the cleaning product beaten by a couple thousand years.
You completely missed the point- because you are looking solely at the patent and naught else because you apparently think you know more than someone who WORKED for these people in the past.
You don't know how they accomplished what they did- you couldn't have, dude. It was the patents that covered epicRealm's content delivery network- and it was Squid that was used to accomplish the same. By the way, they're not patenting dynamic page generation per se, only cached thereof- and as such, you'd need a cobbled up Squid or something similar to accomplish it along with a hacked together DNS server network and telemetry transponder network.
I know, I was one of the people working on the modifications they made to accomplish it. As for unlicensing things, you don't get to re-license the stuff if you breach the agreement, they were substantively in breach of the licensing grant given by the GPL in 2000. They continued to distribute systems that included this code throughout at least 2001 and 2002 before apparently ceasing operations (They pulled the signs from the building they were operating out of and their website went black around that timeframe...)
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
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/
Neither Russia nor Turkey are European countries, neither geologically nor culturally.
Both have holdings on European soil, but that is insufficient to make them European countries - after all, USA has military bases in Europe, but it most certainly is not an European country. The majority of both Turkey and Russia are in Asia and Middle-East, respectively.
As for culture, Russia never made the transition to democracy the European countries managed, and is arguably sliding back to dictatorship after a very short period of weaker central power due to the collapse of Soviet government. Turkey is a muslim nation with a history of military coups and constant human rights abuses.
I really wish that people would stop making the absurd claim that Russia was a part of Europe, and the even more absurd claim that Turkey was that too. They are not and have never been.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.