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 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)
Well, there goes their chance of finding a lasting, loving relationship.
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 =)
Well, I'm sure many slashdotters are quite familiar with doing certain things by hand and probably would agree that it can be kinda fun, but doing /. itself by hand, no, doesn't sound to great imho.
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
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.
Seriously, mainframes are so cool. And they offer patent protection, too.
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.
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
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]
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/
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?
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.
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.
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
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:
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."
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.
All of you guys owe me money. Oh, wait. This is slashdot. Never mind...
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.
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
Fucking "Ajax". IT'S A CLEANING PRODUCT!
Nothing makes me angrier than some idiot jumping on the nearest bandwagon and suddenly deciding that their newest favorite toy is applicable to EEEEVERYTHING, Ignoring the fact that the web is supposed to be entire documents, not little tiny chunks of session-dependant XML, the bar to entry for displaying an 'Ajax' based page is much higher than that of a normal web page. And lightweight browsers are coming waaay back into fashion (who has a browser on their cellphone? does it handle javascript? how about non-standard extensions, such as xmlhttp?).
It's a stupidly named buzzword, based on a function Microsoft implemented first (which is also stupidly named)
AJAX, supposedly, stands for "Asyncrous Javascript And Xml". Well,
a) It doesn't have to be asyncrous. There's a flag on the xmlhttp function to tell it whether to run syncrously or asyncrously. In many situations it's often better to run it syncrously, if the user has to wait for whatever-it-is-you're-doing, rather than just silently sending a request and suddenly popping up with a result unannounced.
b) It doesn't have to be Javascript. You can implement it clientside in whatever scripting language your target browser supports. Not that that's a good idea. (and don't get me started on the name 'Javascript')
c) It doesn't have to be XML. In fact XML is quite a heavyweight format for a lot of things. Yes you can compress it as part of the http connection, yes it's a very flexible format, but if you're dumping, say, coordinate data, xml is 1) very bulky and 2) harder to parse than something a bit simpler
So the only part of that acronym that isn't bullshit, is the word "And".
Idiots.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
The patent specifically limits itself to sites that dynamically generate HTML.
Simple solution, use XHTML.
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
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/