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Google and Others Sued For Automating Email

Posted by kdawson on from the promoting-the-progress-of-science-and-the-useful-arts dept.

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.

4 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. Procmail v1.0 released in 1991 by ebunga · · Score: 5, Informative

    Subject says it all. Procmail v1.0 was released in 1991. That's a little earlier than 1997...

    1. Re:Procmail v1.0 released in 1991 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      >> it also covers emailing the sender a canned response (from a repository) based on the content of the message

      This sounds an *awful* lot like what pretty much *every* mailing list manager has been doing for at least 15 years. This includes Procmail's SmartList, MajorDomo, and the
      venerable BITNET LISTSERV which I was using in the mid-to-late 1980's. Anything
      hooked up to -owner filtered the mail for administrivia and often sent mail
      back in response to an admin request.

  2. Others precede it by Rinisari · · Score: 5, Informative
    IIRC, Majordomo and GNU Mailman predate this patent by at least six years. In fact, the current mailman-users mailing list's earliest archive is May 1998, so work would probably had to begun far before that. A little research proved that LISTSERV predates all of them, actually. From Wikipedia:

    LISTSERV is the first electronic mailing list software application, originally developed in 1984 by Ira Fuchs, Daniel Oberst, and Ricky Hernandez for the BITNET computer network.
    --
    Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
  3. vacation(1) released in 1983 by jqpublic · · Score: 5, Informative

    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)