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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.