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Oracle Fights EpicRealm Patents
An anonymous reader writes "Oracle is now fighting EpicRealm's web patents after Safelite settled with EpicRealm, then asked Oracle to pay, as per their software license agreement. EpicRealm's patents are vague and 'describe a technique where a web site updates only part of a website instead of having to rebuild the entire page. That may look a lot like DHTML, but apparently it isn't the same.'"
But I patented a technique whereby companies with names starting with 'O' sue companies whose names start with 'E' over patents that are bullshit.
Send me 10,000 moneys now!
Beh, even the new DHTML Slashdot's interface does the same, whenever you expand any comments that are below your threshold.
Not to mention a crapload of other pages.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
If something is to be patented that has been around a long time and it STILL gets patented, it usually means the patent clerk has no idea what he's doing. That doesn't surprise, even though they tend to be experts in their field, it is impossible to keep up with the development in the field of computer science.
Now, of course he knows all relevant patents (or, rather, he is able to look them up). But not everything in this field is patented, and "prior art" is usually not decades old and well known, more often than not you have prior art that's only a few years or months old, hardly known and far from penetrating the market, before someone comes up with the bright idea to file a patent for something that does roughly the same (without, of course, mentioning the general name of the non patented prior art). And there you go. A patent for something you didn't do anything for.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I guess it's good that the big boys are fighting it out, maybe the patent trolls will lose this time. However this doesn't fix the real problem with the patent system. And no the real problem is not that you can get a patent for anything. The real problem is that it is too costly to defend against an illegitimate claim. If you could defend yourself cheaply against these stupid patents then it wouldn't matter if they were granted, you could just swat them away without blinking.
Philosophy.
This show why indemnification clauses is bad for open source projects. So including something like Postfix into a Linux distro or a *BSD may very well open you up for litigation in the future under certain conditions.
The Commission seems to have made its favorite dead cat return from the grave (where Parliament overwhelmingly sent it just months ago) this week:
See recent links to key articles on Slashdot, as well as the latest attempts to spin the issue uncovered (alleging double jeu - albeit in "Austrian" only, so far).
The idea behind a patent is to be as vague as it can be but at the same time very specific! Sounds impossible? Well that's why a good patent costs a lot of money. The lawyers who write patents mission is to write something that will cover as much ground but on a specific quality of the product.
Omgili - Find out what people are saying.
By "Pet Sematary" did you mean "Pet Seminary", because that is what I read it as?
Philosophy.
Dear Oracle,
All your patents are belong to us. Please pay us money.
Greetings,
EpicRealms
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
EpicRealm's patents are vague and 'describe a technique where a web site updates only part of a website instead of having to rebuild the entire page. That may look a lot like DHTML, but apparently it isn't the same.
/. attack-worthy server using a two-month late unpaid geoshitties account, for fuck's sake, just by using the technique they describe - yet they don't seem to bother to employ it very well in their website, from what I can get cached from other mirror sites. :( They're full of crap, as far as I'm concerned.
I was able to do this before DHTML or PHP. It was called a dynamic CGI database script, and it was used for "realtime" CGI/HTML-based chatrooms (I typed something, unless you hit refresh after I typed it you'd have to hit refresh again to get your information that I sent...) The only thing that refreshed was a frame unless some interaction (this was all for a web RPG,) caused a change in other frames of the page. This sounds exactly like what I'm doing, without frames, and hell, you can onyl tell I'm using frames because I alow you to resize the damned windows for your resolution, so you've gotta be able to somewhat see the bars. Had I made this a fixed resolution and frame size, well, more people would play with the page in the upper-left corner of their web browser, but it'd still refresh the particular needed areas without "reloading" the page (since only one/two frame(s) is(are) changing, kinda just like how PHP can make this happen...)
So I've had prior art to begin with, since.. 1997? (That is if I can pull up my old documentation from my old ISP/Provider and get a reliable backlog of files I made/uploaded to what I have backups of on my computer.) It's past 7 years so I guess I'm a couple years late, unless there's some potential extenuating circumstance I can talk about.. oh, wait! Almost any website TO-FUCKING-DAY can do things like that in PHP, Perl, RPG script, or even CGI script. Why are these idiots suing to begin with?!?!? Hello? Is anyone home in the CEO/Shareholder department? Do I need to smack you upside your head to get some rational and logical thought out of you? No - I take that back... we've probably already given potential proof that you and your entire IT department is semi-useless because we've already put your server traffic to a crawl only by looking at your whole site.
Sorry for the rant, guys, but lots of this just screams BULLSHIT to me. I've done this - these guys obviously haven't figured out a way of implementing it - I could make a
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Fear not, English teachers: IMDb says there's even an orthographically correct movie release (presumably still not quite suitable for classroom viewing though).
Just try selling software to a large company without an indemnification clause. You can leave the idemnification clause out, but sorry, nobody will be stopping at your lemonade stand.
You are missing the point. A Linux distro or a *BSD can not, in general, afford litigation.
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Though in truth they are pretty vague.
I found the patent that EpicRealm holds. It was filed in 1999.
EpicRealm patent
Basically, the patent is about the web server receiving a request, and handing the request off to a page server. The page server finishes the request and responds to the client while the web server continues to handle other requests.
This sounds very similar to many web applications in use today (J2EE, ASP.net, etc.). There are usually a few processes running with J2EE (the one I'm most familiar with). One handles the HTTP requests and then hands it off to another process to dynamically create the web page. The second processes send the generated page back to the HTTP processes, which sends it to the client. In the meantime, the HTTP process could have been handling other HTTP requests.
This describes SSI. I believe I've been building sites for over 10 years with this. Does anyone know when it was first introduced. I have a reference back to 1995
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
Can't we just get this whole patent thing over with already? Just give M$ the patent on, "doing anything useful with a computer," label us all criminals, file lawsuits against us by the thousands each month, and create cartoons to remind us that everything we create you thought of first with your vague wording.
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If some company owns "Intellectual Property" worth billions, WHERE ARE THE TAXES?
If the co. owns an old chevy pickup or a building, they have to pay property tax on it.
TAX THE IP OWNERS based on what THEY CLAIM IT IS WORTH.
The rest of us will get a free ride next April 15.
I don't think I'm missing the point. Your point was, "indemnification clauses is [sic] bad for open source projects." My point was, "then try selling your software to a large company without one."
As far as affording litigation, who can afford litigation? If you're sued, you're screwed. So if you want the business, you write the indemnity clause and cross your fingers that nobody sues you.
In the bigger picture, everyone who writes software will ultimately be screwed by software patents and the vultures who collect them. Apparently very few people outside our industry comprehend this train-wreck-about-to-happen. Even in this forum, well-meaning people believe, incorrectly, that the patent system is "protecting the little guy."
So the way I look at it, a train wreck has to be allowed to happen. Indemnity clauses or no indemnity clauses, it doesn't really matter much from a legal standpoint. Eventually there will be a disaster. Before change can occur, we'll have to wait for the trolls to shut down something really important and vital. It's really too bad, for example, that RIM wasn't shut down. That would have sent a strong message to everyone in power that the laws must change.
Doesn't this sound like AJAX too? Maybe their next target is Google. Then again if their patent is so vague as that someone can't try to follow it (patents are usually unreadable at best) to make a working solution, could that invalidate the patent. Think 'process for getting to work', as opposed to 'process for getting to work, by placing one leg in front of the other'.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
"Instead we have gas guzzling cars that will end society, microwaves using decades old technology, TV incompatibilities up the wazoo and fake sugar pills sold on SpikeTV at 2am."
Fake sugar pills? What are they putting in them that is cheaper than sugar?
It's ironic that a 'commercial' software house is being patent trolled especially after recent statements from Oracle regarding taking other peoples intellectual property.
"We can just take Red Hat's intellectual property and make it ours, they just don't have it."
Larry Ellison
davecb5620@gmail.com