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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.
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?
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.
I suppose Rambus.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
You can't take the sky from me...
*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."
Because most people arent stupid patent trolls?
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
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.
um, the Yellow Pages ?
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)
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.
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'.
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.
Really obvious. Blindingly, mind-numbingly, stupefactifyingly obvious.
I was writing geographically-based search functions (in a non-web context) in 1998. They were just another feature of the search applications we wrote. The products I was supporting had been in use since 1994.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
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.
My phone book has been used for location based searches since the 1900's.
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.
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.
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?"