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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."
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.
Seriously, mainframes are so cool. And they offer patent protection, too.
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/
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?
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.
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!
Tolerate the day pass to read this article at Salon:
If you don't feel like wading through the entire thing, skip ahead to page 3. There, the whole "refusing atheists" urban myth is explained:
This sig intentionally left blank.
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.
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
Your rationale for Russia is just ridiculous - Russia has most of its population in Europe. Maybe not land, but the people in western Russia are a far more important asset than the tundra in Siberia.
As for history, the Russia monarchy has a long history of blood ties with Western European monarchies. Up until the late 1800s, Russia was just as European as any European country - sure, they might have fallen behind on democracy, but so has Belarus; would you consider that "not European"? Does the past century of non-democracy erase millennia of cultural ties? Ever hear of a little war called World War I, where Russia duked it out with the most European of Europeans? And what about Russia as the center of Slavic culture? Or the largest Eastern Orthodox church in the world?
Why don't you ask a Pole or a Ukrainian how un-European Russia is.
As for Turkey, your historical ignorance is also duly noted. If Turkey is good enough to be considered European by the EU, then shouldn't it be good enough for you? What about the Ottoman empire's hegemony over the Balkans for much of the last thousand years? Or Atatürk's aggressive westernization of the country? Or the distinctly western brand of secularism that Turkey, the Muslim world's largest democracy and most stable regime, practices? To say that simply because a country is Muslim therefore it is not European verges on bigotry. For much of its history, Spain was a Muslim country. Islam is Europe's fastest-growing religion, and it has a very important ties to the Balkans and the Iberian peninsula. Islam is the plurality religion of Bosnia & Herzegovina and was, pre-WWII, the largest religion in Albania and Macedonia.
You seem to have a very skewed vision of Europe - there's more to it than just the Louvre and the Renaissance, you know!