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Google and Others Sued For Automating Email
Dotnaught sends us to InformationWeek for news of the latest lawsuit by Polaris IP, which holds a patent on the idea of responding automatically to emails. The company has no products. It brought suit in the Eastern District in Texas, as many patent trolls do — though the article informs us that that venue has been getting less friendly of late to IP interests, and has actually invalidated some patents. The six companies being sued are AOL, Amazon, Borders, Google, IAC, and Yahoo. All previous suits based on this patent have been settled.
I hope the patent is explained better in the filing than in the article, because it's ridiculous. It'll get thrown out easily if the big guys decide to defend themselves rather than settle
Subject says it all. Procmail v1.0 was released in 1991. That's a little earlier than 1997...
As opposed have PEOPLE sort ELECTRONIC data?
Seriously, I'm glad to see someone hop on this in such a timely manner, because if Polaris IP doesn't nip this in the bud now, automated email response could become widespread in no time!!
"Thank you for using Stop-n-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008"
message received.
sendmail looks up in it's address base and either a) forwards to appropriate mailbox or b) replies with undeliverable.
further details within the rule base may determine whether additional copies need to be forwarded to other mailboxes, or further responses are necessary.
integration with things like spamlists, virus scanners all add to the *automated* handling of e-mail based on rules.
just because they are adding additional automation to the last leg in the e-mail journey doesn't mean that the mail was already processed, scanned, had rules applied and copies made/forwarded by the server before the client ever saw the message.
Obvious patent - apply server rule processing to email client.... BFD.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
http://www.procmail.org/procmail.HISTORY.html
This file contains a summary of changes made in various versions of procmail up to and including the current release. It is derived from the HISTORY file that is included in source distributions. For information on downloading the current release please see the Procmail homepage.
Only the last entry is complete, the others might have been condensed.
1990/12/07: v1.00
1990/12/12: v1.01
1991/02/04: v1.02
1991/02/13: v1.10
1991/02/21: v1.20
1991/02/22: v1.21
1991/03/01: v1.30
1991/03/15: v1.35
Hmm. Are you a Mac user?
Not for long, if Polaris has their way.
Grammar Nazi
Ftfp... >In order to overcome the disadvantages of the prior art, ...
So let me understand, the company makes no product ... Only behemoths like Microsoft and Google should be allowed to dedicate massive resources to _succesfully?_ develop products based on other peoples insight? God forbid someone actually make money by THINKING. /dives into flame resistant suit/
== Auto-reply:
I'm sorry, I'm on a vacation to Italy,
I might respond to your post during the week if I get a chance.
Otherwise I will respond over the weekend.
Good luck,
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
... but I did skim the first half or so of the claims, and this is one of the most-thoroughly-and-obviously-covered-by-prior-art patents I have ever seen.
I'm sure that *well* before procmail there were products and academic papers covering exactly this subject matter in detail. How a patent like this ever passes the laugh test, I don't know.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Majordomo did just what the patent says. It parsed a message, determined whether it could be automatically responded to (as in subscribe, unsubscribe, list members, help, list charter, etc) or needed to be forwarded to the list owner. Majordomo did much of the list management entirely automatically, hence it's name. They describe something entirely comprised of Majordomo's functionality. Our company was using Majordomo to manage email lists in 1995, well before this patent was filed.
Clearly their intent is an "Ask Jeeves" type service that is email based. You send a support query to an email address and the server tries to guess at what canned FAQ is most appropriate and sends it.
--Perry
Aren't bounce messages automated email responses? I might be stumbling in the dark but I think bounce messages are required by the RFCs covering email.
Normally, conventional practices and ethics dictate that when you make money by thinking, you use some kind of original thought.
In 1989 I wrote various shell scripts for automating the retrieval of back issues of an electronic magazine I edited. Ill-formed ones would come to me.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I used email for the first time in 1975. And I remember getting a demo then of an automatic reply mechanism. I think it was a bit of a nasty sendmail, or whatever was used at tht time, related extension or hack in unix. I can't remember the details, but perhaps someone else does. I'll see if I can track that down.
man vacation
[snip]
AUTHOR
vacation is Copyright (c) 1983 by Eric P. Allman, University of Berkeley, California, and Copyright (c) 1993 by Harald Milz
(hm@seneca.ix.de). Tiny patches 1998 by Mark Seuffert (moak@pirate.de).
Now maintained by Sean Rima (thecivvie@softhome.net)
1. work at the patent office.
2. award patents with the magic 8 ball procedure (pat. pend.)
3. nobody fires you for that!
4. profit!!!
5. ??? (these are coming from those being sued for infringement)
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Who'da thunk it... Betrayed by one of our own...
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Does this patent really presume to cover anything beyond "vacation"? Is it merely enough that (1) there's more than one response, and (2) they aren't just random? If so, I propose listserv as prior art. First version: 1984. Not sure when the ability of the software to automatically respond to email content (e.g. "subscribe") was added - but it was a long way back.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
EXACTLY! This is the first example I thought of... Although, it doesn't meet all of the criteria.
Must be a sumbarine patent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris_missile
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I had automatic reply setup on a Vax email system, and I forget the exact situation, but my auto-reply got into a duel with another auto-reply while I was at lunch. Anyhoo, 2 hours later I had some 1200 emails in my inbox, all auto-replies to another auto-reply, which was replying to my auto-reply, etc, etc, ad nauseum. Good times. (Da Da Ding-Ding Ding-Ding Ding-Ding Diiiing.)
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
I'm not living in the US, so I was curious about "venue picking".
Off-topic, I know, but interesting link anyway:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum-shopping/
Who the hell would settle something like this with such a well established history of "prior art"?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
The whole point of using and programming computers is to automate....
Software Patents are acts of fraud against the consumer and users.
http://threeseas.net/abstraction_physics.html
Extending it to patent trolls would, I feel, certainly act as a deterrent.
And this is Texas after all....
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
just tell the judge that you hired some dude in Baghdad to type each email by hand. Who the hell's gonna go to Baghdad to verify?
Table-ized A.I.
This is what is wrong with Slashdot.
How we know is more important than what we know.
.. there really should be a law against someone getting a patent and not using it, especially in software. The whole purpose of a patent is to give someone the opportunity to make money from selling their patent before it become public domain. The idea of getting a patent and then just using it to sue other people who implement that technology without them knowing of your patent, seems to me that it would invalidate your patent, but showing that it is 'obvious to one of ordinary skill, in the art...'. Thus the patent should be voided for being an obvious invention.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
No, he's clearly an MCSE. They specialize in shit eating.
msg = readNext(mail);
if contains(msg.text, "viagra") {
reply(msg.sender, "Go fuck yourself, spammer!");
}
Table-ized A.I.
Please respond with "unsubscribe" in the message body to be removed from this news aggregator.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
I had scripts and process that responded to email back in 82-83 time frame. Where is my money?
God damn it. Don't they see what happening? everytime you settle with a patent troll, you give birth to a new one. These guys will go away with the big boys would just make mince meat out of a few of them.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Wow, I break IP constantly on my project if this is true. I write lots of automated notifications that I send by email. Come and get me Polaris!!!
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
I for one welcome our patent troll overlords.
As long as we are all talking about this, I'd like to request that the storm botnet speak up and send a few automated emails their way, hopefully enough to blow these trolls off the face of the Internet.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
So why does it have to be like that with you? Can't he/she just be, for example, mistaken, ill-informed, wrong, drunk, confused, or brain-farting? Why does he/she have to be, in *your* mind, an idiot? Would it really kill you to be just a touch more civil in your discourse, fucktard?
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.misc/ browse_thread/thread/159da6d4aa9dc684/207e6850fdf0 4e37?lnk=st&q=embot+shar&rnum=1&hl=en&utoken=FtV-n jUAAAARsaj8gXb6nQ09pETiGKzRrTqI3n3c5mJ3yL-xMoSQuuG o43R0pCBak2D2RRdyA3sGwgqeGXy6UZx19ZLvIhFv
This program does it.
Assuming this goes to court and they lose - what is the penalty? Surely they at least have to pay the court costs of Google and the others?
Why doesn't this invoke some sort of statute of limitations? ProcMail was developed in 1991, as I've read it, and now they sue sixteen years later? And years after this kind of ability has existed in web mail? Did they not see it, or maybe forget they developed it way back when? Did someone walk down the hall and trip over an old computer that magically booted ProcMail to jog Mr. Ima Useless Dumbass' memory?
Yes, I know: patent troll, but still. Why would a judge even look at this case? You don't report a car stolen years later unless there was never a car to begin with or you yourself had performed illegal activities relating to that car. This has to fall under the same context and as such be immediately dropped. Whether or not the company has a valid case.
The downside of being killed is the upside of being dead.
Uh, majordomo. Anyone? Anyone?
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
IANAL but I'm a nerd who've occasionally picked up a law book to read for fun. In the one about patent laws, I remember reading about the court system being restructured and the creation for a Federal circuit for all patent suits precisely to prevent this "forum shopping" that patent trolls do.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
*sings in high Munchkin voice* We're all members of the Patent Troll Guild, the Patent Troll Guild! We're all members of the Patent Troll Guild, the Patent Troll Guild! And we just want the Cash!!! *sings in high Munchkin voice*
Can you be more specific on exactly where he is an "idiot"?
So far, so good.
Yes.
Yes. If recipient == X then do Y.
Not only "classifying" but also responding.
Seems like he was right and you were wrong.
I even use procmail scripts commercially. I guess I'm double screwed.
Most old mail servers already did the following:
;).
;) ).
;) ) then they could be rewarded.
"A method for automatically interpreting an electronic message, including the steps of (a) receiving the electronic message from a source; (b) interpreting the electronic message using a rule base and case base knowledge engine; and (c) classifying the electronic message as at least one of (i) being able to be responded to automatically; and (ii) requiring assistance from a human operator. The method for automatically interpreting an electronic message may also include the step of retrieving one or more predetermined responses corresponding to the interpretation of the electronic message from a repository for automatic delivery to the source."
a) definitely.
b) examples: sendmail.conf and aliases
c) Bounce with appropriate message or deliver to human operator...
So how innovative is that patent?
What's innovation is the stuff in Douglas Engelbart's Demo in 1968.
The thing about real innovation (where it is non-obvious to someone in the field) is that it can take > 20 years before people realize what it's useful for and that they want it
Smart people can think of innovative ideas all the time, the trouble is if you're too far ahead, nobody else "gets it", or the rest of the stuff hasn't been built yet. Think of a caveman coming up with a bicycle when roads weren't built yet. It'll just be a toy or mild curiosity in most places (the aztecs or whoever come to mind - the wheel's not so useful when it's just one more thing you have to carry up the mountain
So the trouble with patents is immediately useful inventions tend to be fairly obvious, because at least nowadays when the "world is ready", either you or hundreds of others will come up with the idea, because either it's obvious or required. All the experts in the field are "thinking in the same context".
If you're thinking out of the box and beyond all those experts, then the odds your stuff get built/implemented are very low.
I don't see the point of rewarding people for inventing something that's practically inevitable, maybe if they "_dragged_ everyone to something that was good" (which people just didn't realize was good), or in hindsight tried to (oh that was a good idea of yours after all, sorry bout ignoring you
Inventor(s)
t ion.html
Robert J. Hall
Assignee
AT&T Corp
Application
No. 208446 filed on 1998-12-10
US Patent Issued on February 15, 2000
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6026396-descrip
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
"In accordance with the principles of the present invention, an automatic moderator for electronic mail help lists is provided which builds and supervises a knowledge base of queries and responses. The automatic moderator is a list agent computer program (hereinafter, simply "list agent") which provides information for a list of people interested in a certain subject matter."
"To avoid loss of effectiveness of such help lists, it would be desirable to build a knowledge database of queries and responses and provide an automatic moderator to formulate responses to queries from, for example, new users. In this manner, old list members would not have to answer repetitive questions and would be encouraged to stay subscribed to the help list.
An early system for providing automated question answering was Eliza, described in Communications of the ACM, 9, 1966, at pages 36-45 by J. Weizenbaum, in his article "ELIZA-A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine." It is believed that Weizenbaum and others pioneered a shallow natural language understanding based on pattern matching against a user's input and then generating responses based on pattern-action rules. It successfully fooled some people into thinking a human was answering their questions."
This ain't rocket science. Get a statistician, show that the juries in EDoT have a demonstrable bias and move the case.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
That's the great thing about the new economy! We've shipped many of the good jobs overseas, leaving our refuse class: the lawyers. They producing nothing, but cost us all much.
I think that says it all. You can't patent an idea (although a lot of current patents seem to be based on that principle); you can patent a method or a device for implementing that idea. If everyone else uses different code to implement the idea, then the well-informed judges that hear patent cases will dismiss the suit.
Well-informed judges... Oh crap. They're screwed.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Isn't this exactly the kind of situation where they are so obviously a patent troll that they'd be required to pay the legal fees of the defendant? Can't you bring a ridiculous countersuit of your own, charging them for the "emotional trauma" of bringing you to court on such a BS charge?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I can't recall the exact year, but it was around 1984 (scary, eh?). The DECsystem-2060 system running TOPS-20 at The Ohio State University Computer Science Department was connected via a network I believe was CSNET. While using that system I learned of a facility to obtain RFC documents that described things like the format of email headers ... by sending email to a specific email address. It would them email the document back. I received over 20 some RFCs that way. They came back within a couple minutes, so I doubt they had someone just sitting there answering it. I suspect this was an early IETF or ARPA facility. Maybe they have some documentation that still remains about this. Maybe it's in an RFC itself. I'll have to Google for more of this.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
let us not forget the email-to-ftp gateways that BITNET used to have. Another example is the AutoDRM protocol used for seismic data, which dates to 1991.
Outlook does automated replies (Out of Office and canned replies from application mail boxes), is Uncle Billy paying his fair share???
no comments
Automated e-mail responses are really old stuff; this patent is about 20 years late.
Yes, but you STILL don't demonstrate where "vacation" would NOT meet those criteria. Read for yourself about the "one or more of the predetermined responses".
So having a SINGLE predetermined response WOULD meet the basics of that.
I'm going to predict that Google will take this patent apart in court. Despite what you two claim.
I'm sure the poster wasn't drunk, if he were drunk he would have been +5 Insightful.
Why would anyone pay anything to these guys, this technology has been around for at least 15-20 years.
unsubscribe
Perhaps an interesting poll would be "how many Slashdot readers, over the age of 30, don't personally have prior art that would invalidate this patent?" I know I do. What is truely scarey is that this patent ever got accepted.... it augurs badly for our friends in the Patent office.
I don't see the point in applying server rule processing to an email client. Why not add an email adapter to a business rules engine?... oh wait...
I don't therefore I'm not.
...aren't they going after Microsoft, the postfix folks, etc? They make software that can be used to send automated emails, too. For that matter, I'm sure Novel has a product that does as well. That doesn't even speak to all the "shareware" mail software that can do the same.
Why just pick AOL, Amazon, Borders, Google, IAC, and Yahoo?
bork bork bork!
Automatic responses to email, SMTP specifically, is discussed in RFC 822. This RFC was published on August 13, 1982 and is listed as an industry standard.
4.4.4. AUTOMATIC USE OF FROM / SENDER / REPLY-TO
For systems which automatically generate address lists for
replies to messages, the following recommendations are made:
o The "Sender" field mailbox should be sent notices of
any problems in transport or delivery of the original
messages. If there is no "Sender" field, then the
"From" field mailbox should be used.
o The "Sender" field mailbox should NEVER be used
automatically, in a recipient's reply message.
o If the "Reply-To" field exists, then the reply should
go to the addresses indicated in that field and not to
the address(es) indicated in the "From" field.
o If there is a "From" field, but no "Reply-To" field,
the reply should be sent to the address(es) indicated
in the "From" field.
Sometimes, a recipient may actually wish to communicate with
the person that initiated the message transfer. In such
cases, it is reasonable to use the "Sender" address.
This recommendation is intended only for automated use of
originator-fields and is not intended to suggest that replies
may not also be sent to other recipients of messages. It is
up to the respective mail-handling programs to decide what
additional facilities will be provided.
Examples are provided in Appendix A.
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
Actually, I wonder if this is the case that the Supreme Court's been apparently looking for to invalidate sofware patents entirely? I recall in the MS vs AT&T that one of the justices asked "This court has never actually ruled on the patentability of software, have we" (IIRC). They couldn't rule on SW patentability in that case because neither party brought the issue up.
Supremes have been tightening patentability left and right lately. It wouldn't be a stretch for them to whack SW patents completely. Google may well be the deep-pocket defendant to bring up the issue, and they can afford to litigate it all the way.
Simple: the patent office doesn't apply the laugh test. If they did, the patent lawyers would challenge them on it to the legislators. ("Either there is a good legal reason to deny the application or it should be accepted. This isn't the time or place for gut feelings.")
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
The way most people keep up to date on network news is through subscription to a number of mail reflectors (also known as mail exploders). Mail reflectors are special electronic mailboxes which, when they receive a message, resend it to a list of other mailboxes. This in effect creates a discussion group on a particular topic. Each subscriber sees all the mail forwarded by the reflector, and if one wants to put his "two cents" in sends a message with the comments to the reflector.
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Internet September 1989On the Debian bugs system page it says the first version was realeased in 94. I'm not sure how much was implemented, but in it's current form it's really very much alike the patent (what is said in the abstract anyways.
Listserv might also apply, if they had advanced mailinglist management in the beginning.
I'd expact that if "using different code" were to be considered an acceptable way to use a different method, the code would have to be published as part of disclosing the method.
I'm not going to say that's a bad thing.
Ok, plenty of examples of prior art relating to SMTP, but the patent seems to refer broadly to responses to an 'electronic message'. Wasn't the Gopher protocol essentially a mechanism for receiving an 'electronic message' containing a request for specific resources from a repository, which would then be posted back to the requester.
Gopher was implemented around 1991, I remember it was one of the first search facilities I used on the early internet.
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
sumbarine.
Two words to Polaris: procmail, formail.
Back in the 1980s I remember using at least two services that provided software in response to email, which would seem to be prior art. One was run by Bell Labs, the other by one of the national labs (Sandia? Los Alamos?). Bell Labs distributed some of their Unix utilities this way. Whatever lab it was distributed mathematical software - stuff for linear algebra, differential equations, statistics and so forth. In both cases, you sent a message along the lines of "get package foo" and you get back email containing the software.
Well, procmail/vacation has most of these:
-procmail provides the rules
-vacation retrieves a message from stdin
-vacation interprets it to see wheter to sent an automated response
-procmail stores the message for the human operator
I can't believe parent was modded up insightful. The parent didn't describe a damned thing.
Truth is, the patent, like so many, is probably BS, and I would be happy to see it quashed now that Brightware no longer exists (along with my ceremonial stock suitable for wall paper.)
But parent's post was just crap.
Thank you for your e-mail to claims@yahoo.com This auto-reply informs you that your claim is received and that it's automatically forwarded to our Legal department. Kind regards, Yahoo.com
I didn't invent the damned system, but I inherited it and managed it for awhile.
It was built with ART*Enterprise, a RETI, Rule Based System, half lisp, half rules, half c.
It also made use of Brightware's Case Base Reasoning system, as well as various modules using Bayesian analysis.
We certainly CLAIMED it was much smarter than procmail.
It would try to understand what a typical text based email was trying to ask about. If it was asking for account information, or information that the system was programmed to handle, it could autonomously respond with that information.
If it didn't understand the actual intent of the message, it would try to understand enough of it to forward it to the appropriate email queue.
Plus of course it had various statistics, tracking, and reporting abilities so you could figure out what your customers were looking for and beef up actual customer support in those areas.
Sjeez - how far back do you need to go? What about email reject messages - that would be prior art. Vacation messages? List control messages? I've seen this years ago on Bulletin Boards (i.e. pre-Internet) so there's a mountain of prior art.
Insert
I break wind daily, but you don't hear me bragging about it.
unscribe
Back in late 1994 I wrote a small application which generated Star Charts served via email.
Based on a simple set of commands describing where in the sky to centre the chart, the field of view, limiting magnitude, objects to include etc, and it would generate a Postscript file of the generated chart based on those commands.
It was built up using both bash and perl, and the commands fed to it directly from sendmail, so when you sent an email to it's own email address, you received a response with the required generated map or a set of errors if you made a mistake.
Java gaming nut - http://www.retep.org/ or for the rail http://uktra.in/
Can we please introduce "looser pays all costs" - (with costs not limited to just legal) even if this is just for patent related lawsuits.
this would fix soooo many problems
Against Google and Yahoo!
But if a similarily absurd patent is filed by Microsoft vs. a lone open source programmer, it will be won (or at least it can block the distribution of the software in mainstream linux distributions, like in the case of ffmpeg).
And this shows why software patents must be unacceptable, like the EU does. Even if "OIN is your friend".
"vacation" is just a tool used by sendmail in a .forward file context. Again, I haven't read the full article, but the abstract seems to be met by Sendmail (1983, assuming that feature was intact at the time).
Marques Johansson
It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:--
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
--Rudyard Kipling
People should probably search for old examples of email "servers," such as the ones that respond to commands like, "get myfile.zip." These go way back to even before people commonly had Internet connections, when they had dialup UUCP and Compuserve and such. There was even a system called "M0" , that had a grammar for interpreted email scripts.
Oh, and don't forget LISTSERV and Majordomo!
Using smarts to guess the information and context of a given message does definitely have ancestors in software that would scan USENET postings for useful stuff. Remember that originally USENET was more like email and predated the "news:" protocol.
No, a Senator.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Beyond prior art, there are other sound defenses. First, let's take laches. Laches says that a patent holder can't sit back and wait for a patent infringer to build up a business with the patent and then stomp him. As soon as the violation occurs and the patent holder is aware of the violation, he must act. Waiting a few weeks (or 5 years) can trigger a valid laches defense.
Second, prior art requires, er, prior art. Others have cited to scores of major tools (Listserv being one) that satisfy that. However, there is another defense: obviousness. IIRC, SCOTUS just lowered the standard for obviousness this past Term. The fact that there are so many tools from the time of the patent (1998 is when it was filed, and IIRC, its effective date) that are similar to the patent's claims indicates that a practitioner of the art from 1998 would know how to write an automated, multiple-response email responder. If so, then it's obvious.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
I just hope google releases their Nazgûl rather than settling. It would be nice to see a few more of these trolls get ground into the dust, patents invalidated, all their money spent on lawyer's fees and countersued for being a royal pain in everyone's collective ass.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Both in terms of taxpayer funding for legal spaghetti monsters and stifling innovation. The Patent System needs to be reformed or the US may just find itself wearing a legal straightjacket that doesn't even allow one to change direction, let alone innovate freely.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
The original smail does all that's in the summary with shell scripts. Such functionality was in smail, smail-2, and is still in smail-3, all prior art to the patent.
BTW, vacation(1) is trivial to implement with smail.
SO the tighter doesn't have to pay anything? Cool.
" ... which holds a patent on the idea of responding automatically to emails. "
no way. An 'idea' can not be patented. A patent is for an INVENTION, not a thought.
A patent requires a 'model' , it requires 'drawings and/or a working model of the DEVICE'...
baloney.
"There are 11 kinds of people: those who know binary, those who don't, and those who could not care less!"
Umm Well even AOHELL Hacker program did this in the early 90's, Send and email to the user account with certain commands, the commands would be interperetted, like "send list", it would send you a list of Warez the person had available. Meanwhile it ouwld delete this email from the user keeping the AOHELL acount mailbox clean for other requests. You could then send an email requesting a specific form of warez. If you screwed up it had the option of Automatically replying with a your a dumbas message or attaching a virus, or it could prompt the person running AOHELL and they could TOS your account manually or automatically or even punt you via IM's, Let Face it AOHELL And several other hack bot AOL software had these features way way way before 1997.
It only takes 1 valid claim to win a case. By stopping 46 short of the end, you may have missed the moneymaker. Remember, invalidating one claim does not invalidate the entire patent, it invalidates that claim. All the other claims remain valid until each individual claim is struck.
That's abstract the patent. If you think that vacation meets even that then you're an idiot. And we haven't even started looking at the claims yet.
He is actually right. .vacation, and unmentioned .forward file have been in there since I don't know when. Certainly long before 1997.
And example in a forward file:
\js, "|/usr/ucb/vacation js"
Lets go back further.
Now I remember doing this in the late 80's where I would have a cron job read mail of an account sent to a system. It would run a shell script where if the rules matched the headers and the message body it would execute commands and conditional responses with the results of those commands. The purpose was to reset the modem pool if someone left them in a hung state.
So I guess I broke a 1998 patent in ~1989? I should be chucked into jail -- or --
Lets hope the court dismisses this with prejudice and punitive damages against the patent troll. This is prior art plain and simple. Certainly nothing innovative.
The patent system is full of trivial concepts like these and should be routinely flushed.
The simple answer to all of this madness is to completely eliminate software patents. It seems to me that the arguements against software patents FAR outweigh the arguements for them.
My hope out of all this is that the judge's in these cases start to use the new obvious patent analysis introduced with the KSR case recently. Then prior art wouldn't be required if the patent were to be found obvious, and thus, invalid.
Patents are designed to A: protect intellectual property and B: bolster innovation. I can't for the life of me see how this patent troll is using patents for anything but making money, which should in and of itself be an invalid use of a patent. Perhaps a change to the patent system... say... you can't bring a suit against another company for infringing on your patent unless you derive more than 50% of your gross revenue from non-patent sources... you know... true innovation, actual products, sales, services.
That would stop patent trolls in their tracks, as it would make it impossible to develop a stockpile of software patents, and then just hand out dozens of lawsuits to make money.
Bring back true innovation, when a company could come up with truly unique ideas and build that into a foundation.
Or are we, as a human race, simply out of truly unique ideas?
Thomas A. Knight
Author of The Time Weaver
Morons. Yet another example of the USPO idiocy. Why they ever granted such a blatantly obvious patent is beyond me; perhaps its lawyer-generated obfuscation rolled their eyes back, eh?
We were doing this with Usenet mail decades ago. I personally wrote scripts (perl and Unix shell scripts, of course) to parse incoming uploader email at the major software archive site I was supporting. Trivial.
Man, I despise patent trolls. Shakespeare had it right: "First, we shoot all the lawyers."
... for a feature that's been part of most, if not all, email software packages since email existed? (Why am I not surprised?)
So, I guess the patent examiner wasn't aware of how ".vacation" files work. Or that autoresponders have been in use since the '80s. Magazines back then published articles on how to write your own.
While it's expensive to fight a bogus patent, one's still gotta wonder about the competence of the legal advice received by those companies that settled. Patent trolls will never go away if most companies merely follow the knee-jerk approach of writing a check and settling.
The U.S. ought to get a copy of the hiring guidelines of some of the European patent offices. They used to hire smart guys who came up with revolutionary ideas in physics in their spare time. We tend to hire guys who have no idea what technology has already been in widespread use for, oh, the past twenty years.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
you are one sick fuck
the significance of a signature is insignificant
Back in 1992 while working at Bell Labs in the Network Systems division I wrote a simulator for the 3M DARTS (Digital Access Remote Test System) product, called, appropriately enough, dartsim. I provided an email based interface for simulator control, status reporting, and documentation. It would parse the subject line and message body and respond appropriately. A general request for 'help' would send you back a text document on how to navigate the remaining email based services. The simulator supported many (many) simultaneous DARTS that were all addressable based on CLLI (don't ask...) and each CLLI instance was programmable to provide various test results as well as failure modes, based on statistical modeling, fixed failures, or random occurrences. The behavior could be set/retrieved through the email system. A user could request the current behavior set, edit the returned results and resubmit them to change the behavior for any specific DARTS instance, all through text based email to the server. In this day and age, I would have made it web based instead, but at that time and place, text based configuration made much more sense, and email was the 'universal' interface, accessible from any client. I think this application would have certainly met most of the claims in the listed abstract, including (ii) in that poorly formed requests were automatically forwarded to me so that I could respond to the user directly.
Hey John, if you happen to be reading this, I hope you are staying out of HARMs way! (Its a CAROT joke)
BUGNER
Indeed, here's a pertinent post (and thread) from 1989:
"Flag on the moon. How did it get there?"
It sounds like you're confusing patents and copyrights. Setting aside the issue of whether or not software patents make sense, this is a big part of the reason why someone would want a software patent as opposed to a copyright. You can copyright the code, but not the idea. But you can patent the idea (basically), as long as the idea has been implemented (as code, in this case). This is a ridiculous dichotomy, but one we're stuck with in the US for the moment.
A patent is supposed to be detailed enough to allow anyone skilled in the art to reproduce the invention. I didn't see anything in the claims that would allow you to do this, only vague descriptions that the program parses the email and makes decisions.
The situation it's supposed to be is that you patent the ALGORITHM.
But that's really been forgotten at this point
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Procmail and sendmail (and mh's slocal, for that matter) probably had this capability well before the filing. However, to serve as prior art, you would need documented evidence that someone had conceived of using them to automatically respond to the content of a mail message prior to 1997. It's prior art, not prior capability.
Having said that, back in the late 80's/early 90's, when there were still people with dial-up UUCP connections still, there were a number of services which responded by email. Archie is the biggest one I remember off the top of my head, and if you go to http://www.yudit.org/gaspar/archie.txt you see:
Archie Email Help (Version 3.0)
HELP for the archie email server, as of 10 April, 1993.
And it does exactly what the patent claims, and more. It sends canned responses for quite a few commands, plus it can send dynamic responses to requests for searches. The patent is obviously invalid, and now that they are picking on big companies with lots of lawyers, they are going to get buried.
I remember using primitive email systems even back in the 70's - and automated email reply bots came not too much later, in the very early 80's at the latest. I haven't read through the entire list of claims carefully, so it's possible that there is some little bit of innovation in there somewhere, though by 1998 when the patent was filed the basic concept was old, old technology (even Netscape had been out since 1994) and I doubt that there was much room left by that time for any innovation whose application was so broad that it could cover very many of the possible designs and uses for email bots.
However what interests me more is the statement that implies that there have been other lawsuits over this same issue and that they have already been "settled." This implies that the patent has already been tested in court, though the previous cases may have already been settled out of court. Since this new lawsuit is aimed at some of the "big names" in the industry it would appear that the point is to try to use these previous lawsuits as case law for the new lawsuit. This is a typical tactic of the patent troll - try to get some case law established against small fish who would rather settle than fight (because they don't have the resources or incentive for a massive court battle) and if that goes your way then go for the big score against the big fish. Does anyone know whether those cases were settled out of court or whether they actually went to judgement? If the latter then the legal situation is a bit stickier for the defendants. If the patent was upheld in previous cases it would also be interesting to know whether the whole patent was upheld or only parts of it, and on what basis.
That's abstract the patent. If you think that vacation meets even that then you're an idiot. And we haven't even started looking at the claims yet. This is what is wrong with Slashdot.
This idiotic post is no different than the Fark cliche ("I work for the US Treasury, so I'm really getting a kick out of these replies...") There is absolutely nothing insightful, or for that matter, correct, about anything that QuantumG wrote.
Clearly the entire abstract is covered by prior art. What claims in the patent were not implemented earlier?
Lessee. Procmail in 1991, even so far back as an alias with a shell script back in the days of RFC 822. I don't think we'll have any problems with prior works.
This sig no verb.
Auto-responders are the devil with a touch of hilarity. I once had a user send out an e-mail to someone with a vacation auto-response. At the same time, she had one set still from her vacation. So the servers just kept responding to each other and everything slowed to a crawl. I stopped allowing them shortly after.
Bullish Machine Tzar
these guys can sue google for any single claim in their patent. They don't need to start with claim one. They also don't need to sue google for as broad of use as people on this board are joking about. Auto responders would seem to distroy claims 1-3 but claim 7 starts to get really specific as it is a grouping of claims 1-4 and 6 and 7. The prior art you are referencing doesn't touch on that subject matter. If google is doing that then they would need to bring prior art shows a product that did all those steps or an article outlining all those steps. Just trying to bring the debate up a notch. Not a big fan of patents although I know some little companies that would not exist if they didn't have that type of protection.
Obviously there's prior art, but wouldn't it make more sense for the courts to just overturn the patent as an obvious idea? Patents are meant to protect the investment of people who spend a lot of money to figure out how to do something. It seems pretty obvious that there's no need to spend much time figuring out how to automatically reply to an e-mail. Maybe if they patented an AI algorithm that interpreted emails (something more complicated than a series of regular expressions) and replied appropriately, but their patent is much simpler than that, isn't it? And even if it wasn't, how would they know about the algorithms the defendants use to process e-mails?
A better implementation of an Autoresponder will only send one auto-response to each address from which it receives a message.
Incidentally these also happen to be the ones skillfully and convincingly taking software patents to bits (root and all).
heck! why both with a proper patent office and law suit defense when you can simply
read the slashdot responses to such a patent issue and get sooo many references
and URLs - its not even funny. those companies that paid out should not
only be ashamed but should no counter-sue to get their money back - as this was
an obvious extortion and con racket that they got done by
I have a patent on automatically filing lawsuits.
Unfortunately the "obvious idea" approach to invalidating a patent is often difficult - in general you won't be going before a judge or jury who actually knows about software development from the standpoint of a professional. Most of them won't know any more about professional software development than your grandmother, and you're at their mercy about whether they believe your expert witnesses or those of the plaintiffs.
In contrast, if you can exhibit prior art then it becomes much easier. It's hard to argue that the idea is truly novel when you have prior art staring you in the face.
when was vacation written? It auto responds basing its content on the received subject line.
The patent is complete crap -- even I wrote an auto-responder script for handing out internal licenses
from a pool back in 95 or 96, maybe as late as 97, but that would be pushing it.
My equipment - in the late 1980s - did hundreds - per day - of automatic responses to Netmail messages and I sent hundreds of automated Netmail messages to the Eastern Star which fed my "Hub" (1:109.300.0) = DC, NOVA SOMD.
It would be interesting to see AOL, Amazon, Borders, Google, IAC and Yahoo decide to counter-sue, go for punitive damages with frequent use of the phrase "orders of magnitude" and prove for exactly what the "I P" in "Polaris IP" stands.
And I wonder just how the folk in the Eastern District in Texas like being thought of as not very bright - plain stupid - by Polaris IP. Those big city boys just might change their minds about "putting another one over" them thar' ig-nor-ant Texicans".
And, if they're going to have a party, they ought to invite Apple and Microsoft to send fifteen or twenty lawyers (each). Just think: the computer corporations are the "Texas Rangers" and Polaris IP is the "Hole in the Head" gang.
And - come to think of it - the computer companies might want to have, in their team, 3 or 4 Sumo wrestlers. In 3-piece business suits, of course - we must maintain decorum. Each should be assigned to one individual of the "Instead of creators, we are destroyers and NONE OF US EVEN KNOW WHAT Karma IS" group!
It is totally unconfirmed that the "IP Group" (snicker) was responsible for luring Alberto Gonzales away from the WC43 administration as their lead lawyer because of their respect for the morality and ethics that they share.
Let 'em walk into the sunset with Dusty singing the Luther Dixon / Willie Denson tune in the background: "Mama said there'd be days like this".
So if that doesn't match the patent, then what does the vacation auto-responder in GMail and all the other services do what vacation(1) didn't?
In the mid 80's I ran an email based file server useing caned software from decwrl? with some changes I made. requests were sent to the file server email address which then process the email to find requests for help, requests for files, etc. I think the package was several years old at that time.