Slashdot Mirror
Location-Based Search Was Patented In 1999
greenbird writes "Another patent fiasco has begun. Wired reports that a patent on location-based Internet searches was filed in 1996 and granted in 1999 (patent is here). A patent troll company name Geomas acquired the patent and has filed suit against Verizon in none other than Marshall, Texas. They claim this is the first in what will be a long line of lawsuits. Geomas has amassed a $20M war chest in venture capital to use for getting rich off of a clearly obvious idea."
You can't take the sky from me...
According to the rules, the patent application should contain enough information for someone skilled in the art to build the device or whatever it is that is patented.
One of the nice things of the patent system is that an inventor can freely talk to investors in order to build the prototype without risking that the idea is stolen and commercially exploited by someone else.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
And just to put this in historical context, this patent was filed (never mind prep time) a scant 45 days after Alta Vista went live. It would be a couple years before Google would enter the scene. The big search engine of the day was AOL's WebCrawler. Compared to WebCrawler, this certainly is not an obvious idea.
I seem to recall learning about geocoding (locating a point on the ground by looking up an address) and site location based on spatial criteria when I was in my Geography classes (Geospatial Information systems) at Penn State back in the 1990. The idea of getting a point from an address and selecting other features based on a buffer (spatial shape around the point) isn't all that original. We did exercises to find suitable locations around a point using ESRI's ArcInfo (think it was version 5.x) software. One of the exercises had us locating a site to build a business and we needed to have access to various utilities while avoiding residential areas and schools. I'm sure early GIS textbooks define enough cases of implementing this, just not in a web based input form. I don't think though that web enabling this functionality though qualifies as something patentable.
Google, AltaVista and WebCrawler are all essentially just fluffy frontends to databases that have existed pretty much in their current form quite likely since before you were born. Acquire the right sort of data and set algebra from a 30 year old ACM article will easily do this sort of thing (geocoded searches).
You are confusing the isssue of whether or not it was done in plain view of "consumer" with whether or not it's been done.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Well, from 5 minutes in google, here's a paper that touches on several similar topics, published in 1996. Here's another one by Larson, published in 1995 (look up the title: "Geographic Information Retrieval and Spatial Browsing" and you'll find citations to it that indicate a publication date of 1995). The relevant process even has a term: Geographical Information Retrieval (GIR). Larson's paper also makes mention of a system called "Virtual Tourist" for finding and browsing web sites by their geographic location.
About the only aspect of the claims that is superficially novel is putting together a geographic location from IP address algorithm with a search engine, but that falls into the "Duh, obvious!" category.
Something tells me that searching for more than 5 minutes might yield *alot* more.
The patent was filed in 1998 and in almost a decade, they have yet to implement a useful location based search engine. Yet by the time the idea has become obvious and more than one party has applications using that idea, the original patent filers still don't have a product. Isn't this example the very reason that software patents outrages intelligent people? It did not contribute to innovation back in 1998. It holds back innovation in 2007.
The yellow pages does apply here. Back in 1993,94,95,96 all the rage was the white pages and yellow pages on CD. I had a CD set for the entire country that let be do location based searches on people and businesses. This IS prior art. When did the first online version of the phone book start? I remember using them back in 1996 or 1997 on the internet.
This is the problem with our patent system. You are not required to show your idea is unique. You are not required to show you are the inventor. You apply and wait for approval. Then you can be challenged. The process is backwards. You should have to prove upfront your the creator/inventor and that this hasn't already been done. Then the patent should have a probationary period where it can be revoked easily if prior art can be shown.
A) A phone book did not have on-line information in 1996
B) A phone book is not connected to a computer network.
C) A phone book does not duplicate items into different regions.
D) This is definately not a software patent. Claim 1 clearly states that they are patenting a sytem comprising a network and a organizer (server).
You can get a patent on a system running software, just not on the software itself. A CD or hard disk with the code is also patentable.
I'm not saying this was novel at the time, but it most certaintly was not anticipated by a phone book. Just remember, to reject a claim, you need a document published before the filing of the application which teaches every limitation, or, multiple documents which when combined, teach the limitations and explicit motivation (known at the time of filing) for doing so.
This patent is completely obvious. GIS existed well before 1999. I graduated High School in '99 and we were doing GIS in the school for 2 years already. GIS databases were already searchable and at least a capable as what we see in google mashups now. And if I remember right several GIS companies were already doing webapps for local communities that had GIS departments.
My city had an online map of the city with searching by addresses, districts, and zones. The Center for Advanced Spacial Technologies at the University of Arkansas already had web interfaces to search and view their geo data.
This is a classic example of a patent where they take something that is already being done widely in industry and say, "that, but with the internet."