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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.

12 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 darnok · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Absolutely - Procmail covers so many bases in terms of "automated stuff that can be done with email" that it's hard to see how it wouldn't be prior art for just about any patent issues in this area.

      On a broader topic, I can see the day when law firms engaged to provide legal defences against software patent claims start to employ older geeks specifically to identify prior art solutions. It's gotta be cheaper to keep a bunch of us around on some sort of "professional retainer" basis than to engage paralegals to trawl through old patent documents (and I'd "Procmail" probably wouldn't come up in a patent document search anyway) - many of us who've been around for a while would've thought "Procmail" before we'd finished reading this summary.

    2. 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. WOW! by wamerocity · · Score: 5, Funny
    "Six major Internet companies have been sued for using computers to process their e-mail."

    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"
  3. Re:I for one... by Tribbin · · Score: 5, Funny

    == 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!
  4. Usually patents that seem stupid aren't quite ... by joe_n_bloe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... 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.

  5. 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
  6. 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)

  7. Wow by marcello_dl · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  8. Related Arcitles by BronsCon · · Score: 5, Funny

    Firehose:Google and Others Sued For Automating E-mail by Dotnaught (223657)
    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.
  9. I'm against the death penalty but.... by MosesJones · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  10. Re:vacation(1) released in 1983 by tsm_sf · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.