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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."
As a Vonage subscriber and hating what Verizon is doing to them, I'm all for someone doing a goatse on Verizon.
At least that's what could result if this patent sticks.
In your butt.
I don't know. Profit by patent lawsuit didn't work for the Wright Brothers or the inventor of the modern bullet cartridge (who partnered with S&W and was left spending all the money he made in patent court defending the invention). Can anyone site a successful patent-suing model as a sole means to wealth?
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
15. The system of claim 1, wherein said geographical search area is
Laugh now, but thousands of years from now when you're looking for an all night Denny's around Omicron Percei 8, the system that you use will end up paying me patent royalties!
My work here is dung.
Lots of things are obvious after they have been done for the first time.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Obvious now, but was it obvious in 1996 when they filed for it? The problem is that this sector advances so damn fast that it's hard to even tell sometimes.
Of course, holding the patent in their back pocket then arising like a submarine is a despicable action, one which I think should invalidate a patent. I think if you patent something you should be required to at least attempt to make a business off it instead of suing the shit out of people who have more balls than you.
if the patent isn't defended within (name your short time frame - I say 90 days*) from the first commercial, non-licensed implementation, the patent automatically expires and falls into the public domain.
Show of hands on the proposal?
*For those who say 90 days is too short, let me preemptively reply that if you are so involved in a particular industry that you can patent something in that field, you damned well ought to notice when someone announces or commercially uses that idea _in your field_ within three months. Otherwise, you really are just a troll.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
How obvious was this in 1999 when the patent was granted?
SCO may be going down the drain, but he seems to be raking in quite a healthy sum while they continue to circle the drain. Maybe not profit for the investors, but certainly profit for the board.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
To invalidate it as obvious, you have to find one or more documents/patents or example of a system that contain all of the elements of the claim (or enough sources that show that it was obvious to combine).
Remember, you have to be able to find documents that existed on or before the date of filing Jan 31, 1996.
Frankly, it would probably be easier to show that the disclosure was not enabling. But, let's have at it.
...for getting rich off of a clearly obvious idea.
Yeah, that's NEVER been done before.
If it was so 'clearly obvious', why did it take until 1996 before anyone thought of it? Why didn't YOU patent it first, if it was so damn obvious to you?
http://xkcd.com/386/
Graphon Inc. has a patent suite that covers, just for starters, two-factor authentication, use of firewalls (hardware or software), VPN, software licensing over networks, and on and on. Original patents issued in the 1995 - 1996 time frame, lots of recent divisionals & CIPs. Couple of 'em: 5790664, 5898830. First test case in play in 5th Circuit. Maybe a whole lotta snakes waiting in the weeds for big sectors of net-based industry.
I believe that the prior art has to predate the filing by more than one year, so we need something before January 1995.
You can't take the sky from me...
And you aren't going to see me crying for the company that beat Vonage down with it's patent bat.
Go go geomas!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
*somewhere in the neutral sector of the galaxy*
eldavojohn: "Now, your honor, I know my colleague, Red Flayer, here is trying to mystify you with his scientician speak of geo this and graphical that but I am a but a mere country chicken lawyer here to prove that my patent does hold up."
The Judge: "I'm going to allow this."
eldavojohn: "... I presume that, like most judges, you are familiar with the Ballmer/RIAA/Lucifer defense, your honor?"
The Judge: "You mean whereby I award you the patent and there is a large comically sized bag in the backseat of a BMW waiting for me in the parking lot with an equally large and comical green dollar sign on the front of it?"
eldavojohn: "It's a Viper not a BMW..."
Red Flayer: "OBJECTION!"
The Judge: "Overruled, Red Flayer. This is a court room--not some fantasy land where prior art and common sense rule. I rule in favor of eldavojohn Inc."
It seems like every few days, somebody post another patent story to prove the the system in the US is broken.
Then we get the same arguments repeated
Can't we just wait until we get a patent story where there is something unusual about it and then start a discussion?
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
Easy way around it would be to use a database that does not use that method.
a database of information organized into a hierarchy of geographical areas wherein entries corresponding to each one of said hierarchy of geographical areas is further organized into topics;
EX: every point is a specific lat and longitude.
DB has 2 indexes latitude and longitude.
Select * from loc where (lat loc_lat - 10) and (lon loc_long - 10)
EX2: Database of information organized into topics that are further organized into a hierarch of geographical areas.
Patents need to be specific enough not to be obvious and generic enough not to be easily circumvented.
Way back when, you used to be able to pick up the phone and ask for the phone number and the address of a particular place. The nice lady at the other end of the phone would access the proper directory and give you the address. (I know, I am old.)
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Just because something is going after something you dislike doesn't mean it's not going to come after you even worse.
.. the Cobra may kill the tiger (or vice versa), but don't expect that the winner will put on lipstick and entertain you afterwards.
The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend. Would you get in a cage with a tiger and a raccoon? Sure
My problem is not with it's obviousness. I think in 1996 it was a very novel idea. But I have two problems with the lawsuit.
1) The Idea had previously been novel, but at this point, 11 years after filing, the idea has become extremely obvious with a large number of public and private investments and markets already coming to play with absolutely no opposition from the patent holder. Personally, I don't think patents should cover anything for more than 5 years. I also think that any organization that doesn't make any effort to defend their patents should lose them (that is not to say that an organization must attack any and all offenders, just that the must make a minimal consorted effort to show that the offenders were aware of the infringment).
2) It is an IDEA. Sure, they stuck the word "system" in there, but they have no device, no code, no product. I'm all for people patenting things. Tangible things. Or exacting specifications and directions on how to build things (source code, blue prints, schematics, etc...) But an idea??? Come on. This isn't even psuedo code. I wouldn't even call it a passable design spec. This is more like an excessively wordy RFP, and a RFP is a looooong freaking way from anything patentable.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
{sarcasm}
I'm just going to patent the process for turning a cow into meat.
I'm going to first sue the people that process cows into yummy meat.
Then I'm going to sue anyone that sells or eats meat.
Then I'm going to sue California for having too many hippies that don't eat meat!
I'll make BILLIONS!
{/sarcasm}
It's no longer necessary to have such specificity. All the elements in one document means the invention is anticipated (already invented). All the elements in a set of documents can lead to obvious. Under the KSR ruling though, if it could have been obvious to try.
Here, what is weird is the "hierarchy of geological areas" as an organizational scheme. As such, searches based on distance or metropolitan area could be non-infringing. So, an alternatively organized geographical search system would be pretty decent prior art. Also, under the obvious to try attack, a printed reference might serve as prior art because in 1996 it would have been pretty obvious to put it on line.
There was a slew of patents filed/granted in the late '90s because computer networks weren't mentioned in the prior art and thereby got past the old obviousness test. Expect those to be widely challenged now that the obviousness test has changed.
As for saying the specification wasn't enabling - not a good argument. It is hard for something to be this blazingly obvious yet not enabled. The bar for that is "someone practiced in the art" could go from specification to recreating the invention. I know lots of people who, back in 1996, could have gone from just the claims to the invention.
I am a lawyer, but not yours. Anything I tell you might be a total lie intended to benefit my clients at your expense.
You hereby grant power of attorney, under the statutes of the United Gulags Of America, for all of your assets to
President George W. Bush for the duration of your life.
Patriotically,
President-VICE Richard B. Cheney
um, the Yellow Pages ?
The GIS textbook I used in 1998 was (C) 1995.
I'm pretty sure the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy would qualify as prior art. That it is fictional in no way keeps it from embodying those ideas.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Say it again: "No software patents".
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
If you filed a patent on a process that the patent office would need to use in the future to protect the process of filing patents, what would happen ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Was this obvious back in 1996 or 1999? probably so, probably not. But does that matter? Let's look at this in the broader sense. In the field of databases, "location" is just that, a field - a criteria. it could be hair color, height, race, planet. Replace location with those other criteria. In this case, should we allow a patent for each of those criteria? A race-based search. A hair-color based search? Should we have to define every single criteria so we can decide if they are patentable or not? NO!
:P
This was totally obvious. it's what a database search is. a criteria based search. be it location-based or whatever
Oh yeah, it's ON THE INTERNET!!
I'm pretty sure that the world cup, in some form or another has used a system just like this.
During qualifications, the hierarchy of geographical areas would be South America, Europe, North America, Carribean, Austalasia, Africa. Topics would be matches played, matches scheduled, standings, statistics, leading scorers. During the actual Cup, the hierarchy would be the entire planet.
I'm pretty sure they put this on a computer some where. If not the world cup, then how about the Olympics. I would be surprised if there wasn't something on AOL or Prodigy prior to 1995 for events like these.
Well, since I'm not going to be appearing in court I'm not going to drum up all the documentation... But the only thing that would be remotely hard to find evidence of predating 1996 would be the part about "at least one of said entries associated with a border geographical area is dynamically replicated into at least one narrower geographical area".
The first two bullets are simply describing the client-server model of networking which was old hat in the 60s.
The third bullet just describes a database with geographic location as the primary index. Aside from what are certainly many examples used within businesses, any electronic phone directory is an example of prior art. I recall using one as early as 1994.
The fourth bullet, aside from the part I mentioned, is nothing more than a search with geography as the primary search term, which is an obvious thing to do once you have a database organized by geography. Citysearch.com, yellowpages.com, I'm certain an example of this predating 1996 can be found. They may even include the technical detail of duplicating information into multiple geographies.
By the way, "obvious" is not supposed to require prior art -- prior art is by itself proof that the patent isn't novel, but isn't always necessary. It's just a sad fact of the USPTO that the non-obvious requirement is not enforced much at all.
The enemies of Democracy are
All you need is the database.
All the database has to do is be able to form queries suitable for returning the sort of search you are looking for. The whole thing is probably in some 50 year old math textbook somewhere.
Oddly enough, the library database at OCLC probably qualifies.
This ties into my earlier rant about how libraries are actually organized and locations are coded based on what the local organizational algorithm is.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Firstly, SCO is suing on copyright and trademark, not patent, infringement.
Qualcom is a good example. At first they just held a lot of CDMA IP. As they pushed in court they ended up also building a technology company.
There is at least one fat and juicy patent case a month that makes the patent holder some nice cash. Scan a patent law journal for details.
There are a huge number of cases that end in favor of the patenter after the first nastygram or two. Perhaps a little arbitration. If the license fee is reasonable, folks tend to pay.
Finally, it does pay the lawyers
I am a lawyer, but not yours. Anything I tell you might be a total lie intended to benefit my clients at your expense.
Two words: Oracle Spatial
Root for Verizon or root for software patents? My head's exploding.
I need to see this positively. It's a Win-Win situation. Whatever the outcome, the bad guy loses.
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.
a couple things Firstly, the examiners are experts at one thing - the process of filing patents. They could dredge up so much prior art that you'd likely never get the patent.
Unless you are brilliant and really forsee a future need.
Then, because of a national need, they can seize a license to your patent. Eminent domain. It applies to more than real estate.
I am a lawyer, but not yours. Anything I tell you might be a total lie intended to benefit my clients at your expense.
You do not get a patent on a problem or an idea. You get a patent on a solution to a problem, an implementation of an idea.
"Location-based search" is an idea. "A machine that can trap/kill mice" is an idea. "A sturdy container made from cardboard" is an idea. "Heating water to create steam to power the motion of a vehicle" is an idea shading towards an implementation. The intention of patents was not to patent the idea. Yes, ideas are often clever, creative, novel, or "innovative": "nobody ever thought of doing that before". But that means very little; somebody has to think of it the first time. In the grand scheme of thing, ideas are cheap, and not what patents are supposed to protect (in the interests of encouraging).
You are supposed to patent an implementation of an idea: a detailed, specific approach to solving the problem. The solution is not supposed to be "obvious to a skilled practitioner", but there is no enforcement of this in the patent system, which is where many valid grumbles about patents arise.
I don't know anything about cardboard box patents, but there are some obvious constraints on the problem. You'd probably like to be able to tile the plane with the unfolded shape, so you can cut them out of a larger run of the material. You'd like to be able to fold the thing up into something along the lines of a box (a rectangular parallelpiped)--boxes pack well for shipping. You need overlapping flaps to allow sealing it.
Given those constraints, there are probably only a few basic plausible methods for a design for making a cardboard box that's efficient and effective. Given so few plausible designs, somebody who invents one and patents it is not significantly helping or advancing science (because the constrained solution space is so small, any skilled practioner could invent one of the few possible solutions). Actual advances are what patents are intended to encourage, but (at least as I've characterized the problem) I doubt anything like that happened in the basic design of cardboard boxes. (I also know nothing about what, if anything, got patented. This is just trying to offer an analogy.)
This happens constantly in software; most of the time the idea is the only novelty, and the patent is either interpreted as covering all possible solutions to the idea (making alternative implementations irrelevant), or it patents the obviously best solution (if you're going to draw a cursor in a manner that's reversible, XOR is the most effective algorithm; there were apple ][ / Atari 800 games that drew sprites the same way--but the patent only covered uses of the algorithm for drawing cursors on windowed workstations). Someone long ago patented the idea of a networked game with sound and was semi-recently extorting game companies with it; the patent was old enough that the most viable candidate for prior art fell through, because although people used a port on the old Commodore Pet computer to create a networked game, and used the same port to drive a simple sound output, nobody ever did both at the same time (I guess it only had the one port); and without prior art, nobody involved in the patent system accepts that the idea that combining the two is obvious, or at least that the two or three obvious ways of implementing game-sound-in-networked-game are, indeed, obvious. Or (more accurately, I expect) they've abandoned all pretense of 'obviousness' as meaning anything other than 'prior art'.
Guess they don't check for typos.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
the companies that do this? And their relatives and their friends? If enough of the trolls were destroyed big time, including their investors and their families and their friends, wouldnt it stop happening? I mean nothing illegal of course, just equitable legal quick-sand. I'm not suggesting child custody battles, or property confiscation, am I? Private investigators and church groups could help.
GIS (geographic information system) is all about collecting geographic-based data and making it accessible. Click here for a history of GIS. Even back in 1999 it was possible to buy CDs with various GIS data collected from the census bureau (such as income levels, age groups, etc. for each zip code). It was just a matter of time before the same data would be accessible via the web.
Have been doing this as long as there has been networking... and there are quite a few that have "really deep pockets" and tons of "prior art" to squish this - perhaps the legal folks at Ma Bell will go on a rampage.
Mix a few words around and you have locating a computer in a building based on its network address, corporate yellow pages, and a floor map...
Which is what we did in colledge 30 years ago to see what cute chick was sitting at that terminal.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Seems like every company that wants a website has to do the following anymore:
a) create a subsidiary for the website
b) incorporate subsidiary in non-software patent country
c) host website and everything related to it in said country
These are just the patents I know about, but they pretty much preclude anyone from making an ecommerce website:
a) 1 click patent
b) CC payment over the internet is patented
c) "find nearest location" is patented
So if you want to accept money, allow customers to find your physical locations, or conveniently store customer information for repeat purchases (all normal, rather obvious things) then you have to pay licensing fees for each of these features (if licensing fees are available). The owner of these patents could just as easily say "No you can't license it, you have to pay me $100,000 to develop your website with this feature". Or, "No I'm the only one that can have a website with these features".
Basically, if software patents aren't done away with soon, all progress in the US will halt. The writing is on the wall.
For those of you stating that this is "non-obvious" in 1996, have you ever heard of the yellow pages?! This is a patent on online yellow pages. I'm 100% certain that the yellow pages companies have been storing their directories in DATABASES and accessing them across a NETWORK for decades. I'm also sure that whatever function they use internally to convert the digital yellow pages into a physical printed yellow pages book would violate this patent, running an SQL query on a database across a network would constitute a search engine on a database based on location and topic.
Creating an online web based interface to an existing database of listings which can be searched by location and topic is not novel, its not even an idea. It's been done for decades, just because its online doesn't make it any different.
I used a web application called infospace.com prior to 1995. It clearly had location-based searches, all the way down to the street level. Infospace.com is still online, too.
Here's prior art:
s /browse_thread/thread/f1ced676166674c8/a6ff632976a 53b37?lnk=st&q=%22search+engine%22+%22zip+code%22& rnum=6&hl=en#
http://groups.google.ca/group/rec.food.restaurant
I'm pretty sure any typical Fidonet BBS system did this sort of thing back in the 1980s. They used a Nodelist which categorized other Fideonet nodes geographically and including a topical index of store-and-forward discussion areas called Echoes. There was definitely "a plurality of computers" on Fidonet. The echo tossers and netmail handlers could be considered as agents handling "search requests" from other systems. The nodelist was divided into zones which represented major geographical areas and some file and message transfer functions limited searches to a single zone ("elect one of said hierarchy of geographical areas") before providing results. It's been years since I used Fidonet but I think you could argue that it embodied many of the principles described in this patent. You might find similar functionality in Usenet systems back in UUCP days too.
Prior art DOES go to the idea of obviousness, unless you're going to disagree with the Supreme Court. SCOTUS, in the Graham case stated the following factors as relevant for obviousness:
1. Scope and content of the prior art
2. Level of ordinary skill in the prior art
3. Differences between the claimed invention and the prior art and
4. Any other objective evidence of nonobviousness.
And, just as a refresher, it is NOT enough to point to disparate sources to hit each element of a claim. You need something more than that: it used to be a "teaching, suggestion or motivation" to combine the art. Even under KSR, vague assertions are not going to be enough.
I've just got a patent covering the 'scientific method', prepare for the pain as I sue all and sundry!
The problem with the whole "obvious" thing is this: lots of things become obvious to many people at once. It is the progressing state of the industry that makes it obvious at a specific time.
It *was* obvious at the time. I remember a website at a university early on that did something similar, for their area. This was like, 1994-95. It was like the coffee-cam (one of the first webcams), interesting but essentially useless; however, it embodied the basics of what this patent covers.
It was obvious because the internet made it obvious. Many things became obvious once the internet took off. Just because someone applied for a patent in 1996 doesn't mean it wasn't obvious, even at the time.
The patent system is broken, fucked up, and pretty much a hinderance to progress. The sooner the patent system is dismantled, the better off we'll *all* be.
Unfortunately, we probably can't dismantle the USPTO without dismantling the government first.
Maybe that isn't so unfortunate.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
And that's why things like this shouldn't be patentable.
The purpose of patents is to encourage people to openly document their techniques. We give them a temporary protection on the idea in exchange for a concise explanation of how to implement it. The trouble with a patent like this is that it really is obvious. What would they need to explain here? All we're talking about is a relational database with another indexed value, namely, the physical location of something.
The problem is that the value equation is radically skewed here. You're taking a concept that's easy to implement and pretty damn obvious and locking it up for years to what end? So that 17 years down the line we'll have this wonderfully written explanation of a concept that was stunningly obvious in the first place? Society is giving up an awful lot and getting no value from it in the end.
There are things that legitimately should get protection. Complex non-obvious algorithms. Encryption. Data compression. Things that actually aren't obvious, that actually require some explanation.
Our current system only accomplishes two things:
1) Creates a money making process for patent trolls that provide no productive economic output
2) Provides patent arsenals for large corporations to defend their turf against newcomers
The time when patents were the realm of the individual creative inventor are long long gone.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
A phone book. Is adding the computer to the equation worthy of a patent?
Do I really need to say more?
Well for those that don't get it.. on-line is a really broad term. Usually it means on a computer. Thier first claim, basically consists of a computer on a network, that is looking at goegraphical information via a search engine. Who patented this, mapquest?
Claim 1 is so broad, that Google and just about anyone doing mapping (GPS included) could fall under this defination. Now considering that I was using a GPS when I was in the army back in 1991, and that a GPS is a specialized computer, this claim can be invalidated under that.
But back to star trek.. they tracked people on that show and scouted planet surfaces using computers and GPS stuff. This was all talked about years before these people patented this stuff.
Who do I talk to about working to invalidate this patent? Seriously!
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
... and that's why software patents fail. These guys had no "product" so they didn't actually reveal their invention to the industry ...
... are now at fault for doing something that came thru the natural order of things... evolution if you will
The patent system did not fail, you merely misunderstand it. They don't need a product to reveal their invention, the patent is the revelation. Anyone interested in using the "invention" was free to go to the owner and license it. Requiring a working product, rather than a detailed description, would just shut out the little guy who might have the breakthrough idea but not be able to afford to build the product.
That is a somewhat bogus claim. Through increasing knowledge of materials and electricity the light bulb becomes obvious too. You grossly undervalue the usefulness of the first person to find the answer and the necessity of having a reward for being the first. Software confuses this issue because software advances at a faster rate than previous technologies.
The assignee, ZLand, was supposedly an ASP. They had a novel business model: franchising. It didn't work out for them, and some googling around (using the assignee's and inventors' names) reveals the company may have been just the slightest bit sketchy. So the patent's origins may turn out to be troubled.
Also, both the abstract and the claims don't describe a modern location-based services system or the main functions of an LBS system. It looks like they patented a hierarchical Web directory (like Yahoo!, circa 1996, the year this patent was filed) that uses geography for categories. Gee! I wonder if Yahoo! had geographic categories back then?
I wrote parts of this stuff
Um, yeah, exactly like I said, prior art is relevent to showing obviousness, but is not the same thing, as evidenced by facter #4.
The enemies of Democracy are
My phone book has been used for location based searches since the 1900's.
IBM, are you kidding me? IBM is one of the biggest patent trolls there is. See this article for a good description of IBM's shakedown process:
http://members.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html
Good point, see also: Robert Heinlein and the waterbed.
I wonder if you could forge evidence that L. Ron Hubbard denounced software patents as being a thorn in the eye of Xenu.
There. Problem solved. Just sit back and watch the carnage.
Used something like this (and the fact that you can get an approximation of distance between two coordinates from the difference in decimal degrees because 0.00166667 degrees = 1 minute of arc = 1 nautical mile = 1.15077945 statue miles ) for a dispatching system (long since defunct I'm sure) in 1995.
I would hope such a calculation would be patent proof since the equivalence between minutes of arc and nautical miles has been exploited for navigation purposes for centuries.
Watching the American system implode is about as entertaining to me as watching the system in my own country ... Canada ... do the same.
Best of luck to the folks who are doing the suing. I look forward to the changes that will need to come about due to your careful use of a clearly defined, if not poorly designed, system.
In B.C., our fascism is green.
How about Jerome Lemelson who made 1.5 billion (Yup that's a B) through Submarine Patents.
Fortune had a pretty extensive article on him in the May 14th, 2001 issue. Here is a link to the article detailing his exploits...
Doesn't DNS qualify?
If you look up "ibm.ca" or "ibm.fr" say,
the "ibm" is the search term, and the
country code says which geographical
database you are looking in...
- a computer network wherein a plurality of computers have access to said computer network; and
- an organizer executing in said computer network, wherein said organizer is configured to receive search requests from any one of said plurality of computers, said organizer comprising:
- a database of information organized into a hierarchy of geographical areas wherein entries corresponding to each one of said hierarchy of geographical areas is further organized into topics; and
- a search engine in communication with said database, said search engine configured to search geographically and topically, said search engine further configured to elect one of said hierarchy of geographical areas prior to selection of a topic so as to provide a geographical search area wherein within said hierarchy of geographical areas at least one of said entries associated with a border geographical area is dynamically replicated into at least one narrower geographical area, said search engine further configure to search said topics within said selected geographical search area.
Oh, um, you mean, kind of like the way Yahoo was searchable but also had everything indexed geographically? Back in, say, 1994-1995? Or is this somehow different?Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Fraud against the consumer...
... "d" and then in this recursive human act I location search the definition for the relevant meaning...
When I look up a word in a dictionary I don't start at the beginning of the dictionary, I do a location based search, starting in the section that starts with "F" and then jumping to the pages that the "f" is followed by an "r" and then "a"... "u"
Now maybe the patent office applies some other technique to deal with their search needs rather than using location searching, but I use location searching along with many many more people.
Just because its done through computers doesn't mean anything new.....For what are computer softwares modeled after, if not human thought...
is to enforce it, or so the old saying goes. Seriously, why don't we form an alliance to generate tons of pattens, place them in a troll company, and license them under terms that say they are exclusively for use in GPL'ed software. Proceeds after legal fees to go to further R&D of GPL'ed software.
I did a quick whois lookup to see when yellowpages.com and citysearch.com were registered.
I think citysearch.com will qualify as prior art... as the whole concept was to provide geographically specific searches.
Domain Name: citysearch.com
Created on..............: Wed, Nov 22, 1995
Expires on..............: Wed, Nov 20, 2013
Record last updated on..: Fri, Jun 02, 2006
Yellowpages.com's whois says:
Record expires on 10-Oct-2016.
Record created on 05-Apr-1996.
Database last updated on 12-Jun-2007 20:39:45 EDT.
A little later but they were on the web at that point too.. and did area code based lookups and zip code based lookups if memory serves. I wonder what the WayBack machine would have to say about each site...
A /. reader and a businessman go to a garage sale, where they discover a copy of Action Comics #1 priced for 35 cents.
The slashdot reader launches into a diatrabe about how it's wrong that he can't photocopy and sell the copy because, man, information wants to be free. He then launches into arguments railing against how capitalism has assigned a value to the comic other than its value for recycled paper, and for good measure complains about his city's recycling program and how few people take advantage of it.
While he's busy making cracks about how "In Soviet Russia, comics read you!" to the poor housewife, who is fearing for her life and is trying to hide under the table, he completely misses the fact that the comic is no longer there; the businessman bought it, resold it, and is driving by in his new Ferrari.
Verizon didn't search for the patent. Someone else found it and discovered they could make money by buying it cheap. It's the market in action; what's the problem here?
And why exactly is this filed under "your rights online?"
Everyone jumps up and says this is so obvious, and then proceeds to give an example of something that ISN'T a location based search. The biggest example everyone provides is the YellowBook. Generally the only location you could search was the area the entire book covered. Sometimes the book would cover a few different areas. But what if I wanted to find the pizza places within 5 miles of my house? I could do that only by looking at every pizza place in the YellowBook, then looking up the address on a map and figuring out if it was within 5 miles. While it may be an obvious thing to want to do, it isn't quite so obvious how one goes about doing it. On the other hand, I would be surprised if Quantum or Compuserve or AOL or even some BBS's didn't have some sort of location based search prior to 1996.
This should be a pretty easy patent to invalidate. There are individuals who had developed web-based geographic interfaces prior to 1995 (including myself--basing my work on pioneering work done by Dr. Susan Huse in San Jose, CA). The GIS known as Grass was particularly well suited to the early web due to it being UNIX based and open source. GeoNorth in Anchorage AK did some early work in this area as well using ESRI based tools and some in-house-developed software. And that's only what I have personal knowledge of!
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
I submit that merely automating an existing clerical process is inherently too obvious to pass the bar as a patentable invention.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
... because each generation is getting 30% smarter. There's almost a whole 12 years since 1996: we've got a lot smarter since then.. maybe 10% even. Just think about all the really stimulating shows for our current lowest common denominator like Big Brother and ${country.name} Idol.
And what should the cost be to violating a patent be? Okay, sure someone might infringe upon this patent, but if it takes someone a few pretty easy intuitive hours to come up with this original idea, what's that, like a few hundred bucks of expense. The current patent system is more like bingo then reward attributed effort, which it should be. And the effort rewarded should be the least possible effort: work smarter not harder.
I agree with the idea of patents in principal. Like that guy who invented the bagless vacuum cleaner: fantastic. That would have taken a hell of a long time to work out all the different air vortexes and stuff. This supposed patent is nothing even close: an idea should not be possible to patent if all it is only the bare "use case" itself, it has to have complete details of the implementation. And even the bagless vacuum cleaner idea should have limits: bagless vacuum cleaners themselves should not be patentable, as it is a feature, but the mechanism to do so should be - and again this should be challenged against how hard it really was to work out exactly where to put the input/output pipes.
Is anyone else thinking, Calamari?
Hmm... How about http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.superpages .com . Lets see, there's an entry for Dec 26th, 1996. Follow that and you get to http://web.archive.org/web/19961230224759/yp.gte.n et/ which shows that superpages.com had a way to search by zip code way back in 1996, before the filing date of the patent. Weird its almost as if someone saw that functionality online and then tried to patent it after the fact.
"And the ads. That was what really did it. He could have stood everything else -- but the ads, the whole long way from Ganymede to Earth... He was getting near Terra; the barrage was increasing... [time passes] Thank God, he was past it. The ad dimmed and receded behind, as his fast-moving ship hurtled forward." -- from Sales Pitch by Philip K. Dick, first published 1954
Then Verizon shouldn't have any problem getting the patent invalidated, in light of KSR v. Teleflex. Or is the poster suffering from hindsight bias?
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
"Requiring a working product, rather than a detailed description, would just shut out the little guy who might have the breakthrough idea but not be able to afford to build the product."
... As an alternative, the "little guy" is always free to sell his services or ideas to someone or some entity who IS willing to invest the time and money in the invention.
Maybe that "little guy" doesn't deserve the patent if he's not going to put that idea into action then - have you thought about that?
Uh, "alternative"? I thought it was obvious that a little guy would patent something he couldn't afford to build so that he could license it to others. I think your tinfoil hat is wound a little too tight if you are thinking the primary reason little guys patent things are for patent ambushes. If you bother to study the topic a little you will find that little guys generally are in a pretty big hurry, they hear that clock ticking. Your "17 years" focus is a bit naive. The value of a patent is not constant, it diminishes as each year ticks by. When you consider the time to find a buyer, negotiate, close, develop, produce, develop the market, recoup the investment, that "17 years" does not seem as long as it once did.
Moviefone / 777Film /etc.
Actually It's as fictional as Geomas' work.
In the late 80's I wrote software to allow our client to search their customer database (30million rows) with the following methods:
Zip
City
State/City
Address Line 1
Name
Phone
etc. etc. etc. etc.
I'm also absolutely certain there is a mainframe app that did the same thing back in the 60's, and probably a bunch more on every environment imaginable over the last few decades.
What makes the patent unique? Because the database is accessed over TCP/IP instead of SNA? Is it because the database contains businesses instead of the businesses and consumers that were in the db I worked on?
...I read '1899'. Seriously though, location based search and geo-encoding must be older than 1996.
The basic idea was to assemble a customizable newspaper, similar to Google News. The user interface was HTML served from a (single) web server to clients on the Internet using web browsers. The user could set persistent preferences for news articles to be searched for, including general news topics as well as geographical area. I'm fairly certain that the 'border area' feature is also met, in that (e.g.) articles about St. Louis would be provided if you selected Illinois or Missouri.
To find other example of prior art, I'd want to look into what features SABRE and Lexis-Nexis had in the early 1990s. In particular, I'm expected some kind of a 'nearby airports' search, or a search restricted to news sources in a particular region. Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL, GEnie, etc. would also be good bets, though probably less well documented.
Before the Internet and the Web got all commercialized, big business was already providing these databases to customers or using them themselves. This patent looks to be inspired by web hype. The features of the first claim are useful, but they're also quite obvious.
Also, if you have copied it correctly, it has various grammatical errors.
This is a subordinate clause. "Entries" is the subject. "Is" is the verb.
Plural Subject + Singular Verb = Grammatical Badness.
How is this patent different from the 411 operator asking you "city please?" before looking up your search for let's say, Luigi's Pizza, in the city you state rather than wasting her time looking up numbers for Luigi's Pizza in all of the US? Wasn't that a geo-coded search of a networked computer database?
In 1985 or so, the company I worked for built a reservation system for tour operators. This system included the ability to search for hotels in specific hierarchical geographic areas (called 'countries' and 'resorts'). Very much the same idea. Obvious. Widely implemented.
More fundamentally, this 'invention' is wholly self-disclosing, and benefits society not an iota by being patented. A patent system that grants patents that do not benefit society is corrupt, and self-destructive.
Patents should only be granted where there are real secrets that must be documented or they are lost to society. It is not about rewarding inventors, no matter how much people wish it were; it is about collecting documentation of prior art, and allowing inventors to divulge secrets without loss, in the same way copyright lets creators divulge content without loss.
My blog
If you google for Univac and Census you will find that the Univac was used to pull geograhical and location information way back in 1952.
yell.com launched in 1996, and seems to cover those claims. There's no exact date on that site, but maybe there's a reference somewhere previously from Yellow Pages saying "We're going to do this" ..?
We need patent reform. To get a patent it really must be not obvious. It must be novel - something that would not be thought up by others. No more games. No more Amazon one click patents either.
Ok, if your Vonage here's what you do:
1. Get some more venture capital
2. Purchase Geomas
3. Back in business!
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Ron Katz has managed to shake down pretty much every big company in the United States for royalties on his interactive voice recognition technology. ATT, for example: http://www.thedigest.com/more/122/122-51.html
He did, however, arguably actually invent something.
I wrote a product back around 1992 called SelectPhone/DirectPhone (won the BSA award for business product of the year back then) that put a national phone-directory on CD-ROM. It had location based searching as part of it, would let you search for business by SIC category and sort them by distance, etc, etc.
Most U.S. patents don't make it beyond their borders. Why? No other country allows patenting of ideas, methods, procedures, animals, etc.. It also appears that International patents are far more difficult to obtain because of more research done and stricter parameters... And from what several readers have posted so far, this one won't make it out of hanger! This patent will be revoked.
Uh, yeah - remember things like contracts?
I don't see how that advances science and useful arts. If anything, it acts as a deterrent for "others" to invest. And I don't see how any reason you are giving contradicts the argument that a grant on a 17-year (yes 17, however short you can sugar-code that time period to be) government-backed monopoly shouldn't require some kind of commitment to demonstrating an investment of time and money into what is being patented.