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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
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.
Because most people arent stupid patent trolls?
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
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?
I have prior art. It is called a "phone book".
You shouldn't be able to patent something that already exists just by putting it on the internet. There is no innovation there. As long as the patent system continues on its current money-grubbing descent into the realm of anti-innovation lawsuits, I can't help but think that the current state of the economy is a mirage. We, as a nation, don't produce anything and just sue each other. When the bottom drops out, a whole bunch of people are going to be up against the wall. I hope that list includes patent trolls like this yutz.
I want to see some very simple patent reforms.
1) You can't patent something unless it actually advances the current state of the field. Re-expressing existing data, like a phone book, in a new medium doesn't even come close.
2) You must make a good faith effort to develop the technology. I understand there could be funding issues for the little guy, yada, yada. We've all heard those arguments before. I'm talking about talking about IP firms that just buy and hold -- no benefit to society whatsoever.
3) You must defend your patents in a timely manner. Someone else in this thread was suggesting 90 days. That might be a bit short, but only just a bit. You sit on a patent waiting to see who you should sue, you should lose the patent.
4) I've seen Marshall, TX, crop up one too many times. Is one local judge with an agenda determining patent policy for the whole nation? No checks or balances there...
-V-
Who can decide a priori? Nobody.
-Sartre
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'.
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.
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.