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Northeastern University Sues Google Over Patent
kihbord writes to mention that Boston's Northeastern University and Waltham, Mass. based company Jarg have brought suit against Google for apparently infringing on a distributed database system developed by Kenneth Baclawski. "The patent describes a distributed database system that breaks search queries into fragments and distributes them to multiple computers in a network to get faster results. The patent was assigned to Northeastern University, which licensed it exclusively to Jarg, according to the lawsuit, filed last Tuesday with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas."
Too bad we can't apply the Stupid Filter to the patent system.
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I've got it! Someone needs to patent 'Patent Trolling' so we can end this sort of madness once and for all! Seriously...this sort of thing has gotten so far out of hand, I'm not sure it *can* be fixed!
It looks like Bayh-Dole strikes again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh-Dole_Act .
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
Pretty soon paralegal work is going to have patent trolling as a prerequisite. I'm sure as heavy-handed as software patents are it's possible for anybody to become rich of playing the patent game. Of course Northeast plays the classic "Hey we just want to get paid," like they are some poor backwater college. They've been sitting on this for two and a half years until a legal team finally decided the chance at payoff would be big enough. There's no substance to their argument, they just "want to get paid."
I got a catholic block.
Guess what they say about lawyers being greedy bastages ain't far off the mark...
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
FTA, the patent was filed on Dec 2, 1997. From Google's Corporate History page, they describe setting up their first data centre in 1998.
Still absolutely ridiculous that this idea was patentable, and that the patent infringement case could happen this late.
If Microsoft is the defendant, then the plaintiff is standing up to defend against "embrace and extend," but if it's Google, they're patent trolls!
Somebody please fill me in here. How on earth can a university have a patent portfolio and use it against other companies? Isn't it the students that are paying for the research, and often times DOING the research which allows for these discoveries to begin with? I am failing to see a case where a University-funded discovery shouldn't be in the public domain, or at least any patents that come of them should be freely available for all to use.
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Come on, people. It's a fairly strange, unique idea that they came up with that I don't think anyone had done before and they were actually using the patent by leasing it out to someone or whatever you want to call it. That's not really patent trolling. Trolling is coming up with some ridiculous idea and sitting on it so you can sue someone when they try to do it
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
I congratulated him on the several patents he just acquired. Although I can't say I was very happy about his recent moves.
My work here is dung.
Breaking a query into pieces and evaluating them at nodes containing a subset of the database has been written about since the 1970s. I read about it in grad school back then. Whether that's actually the thing actually patented by jarg is an entirely separate question. If it is, the PTO has screwed up once again. If it isn't, then perhaps there is a deeper similarity that TFA isn't describing.
"Filing date: Oct 5, 1994"
Also, it seems that they've known about it since some years now but didn't have the ressources (money) to go after Google. That's why this all came so late.
I know the initial urge of a small company suing a larger one (especially a darling of slashdot such as Google) will have a lot of people yelling patent troll, but this may not be the case. The fact that this is a company from a university professor means that the company very likely has a working product that has been derived from several years worth of research. To those who are not used to the American system of research at the university level (for Professors and PhDs), any researcher can apply for a patent on the research they have been doing in the lab. The patent is usually issued in the name of the university or jointly in the name of the researcher and the university. There is usually an exclusive licencee for the patent. This forces the university to allow the researcher to have first dibs on licensing the technology he worked on exclusively to some company he decides. This is done as university's usually take anywhere from 50-75% of all royalties generated by the patent as research was done on university property. Thus many profs usually spin off companies and sit on the board of directors for the company and earn a supplementary income this way.
So , heres how it works :
1. Do research on some area.
2. Get funding from $Federal Agency of choice
3. Make a few students get PhD's doing research on this topic
4. Go to the office of tech licensing on campus and draw up patent
4.a Make sure the exclusive license clause is in the patent
5. ??? -> Form company and sit on board of directors
6. Profit.
Legally obligatory sig : My opinions are my own... etc etc
Does his patent pre-date Z39.50 (1995) http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/markup/01.html/ or even earlier?
Google obviously advertises and describes their approach to search and their data centers more than other search giants do, but I would imagine most to all search engines and very large databases have to do this as well. If they win are they going after Microsoft, Yahoo, and all the others while they're at it? The history of science is full of examples of people discovering or inventing the same thing right about the same time. . .it's kinda cool really. But ideas like this are in a way so obvious that patents should really go to people who got it working in the first place. But something like this is so fundamental one wonders if it should have even been granted a patent. Isn't this rather similar to distributed computing, paralleization, etc.? Maybe early parallel supercomputer inventors should sue him for infringing on their ideas.
Ok, we have this, um, network, we'll call it a network. ARPANET? Sure. And we'll take a job an run it on multiple machines to get a faster answer? Yeah, that will be great. Now, what do we do with it? IBM says play chess...
Seriously, isn't this pretty much the definition of a distributed computing job? What the hell do they teach at this school? Punch cards? It's not just patent trolling, it's embarrassingly ignorant.
If the courts of Marshall Texas are so popular for patent trolls, and the way you justify jurisdiction is to claim that "services are available there", blacklist every Marshall Texas ISP's IP range in that area.
If one of those IP addresses tries to access your service, put up a nice, static HTML page declaring that it due to the local court's ignorance of patent issues and the resulting popularity of those courts for patent litigation, it isn't a good business decision to provide services to that area.
Have a nice day.
Generally speaking no, students do not pay for much/most research, at least not directly. There are of course lots of exceptions but research is typically paid for by grants (government and/or corporate) or various wealthy benefactors. A surprisingly large part of being a successful university researcher is being able to bring in the money to conduct your research. Certainly some tuition money ends up going towards research but it is a surprisingly small percentage, often nothing at all. My alma matter gets literally billions a year from the NIH and other sources other than students tuition. Some of the professors barely see the inside of a classroom. That said, without the students the universities would not exist and universities have a tendency to forget this fact when it comes time get out of the lab and to teach said students. It's not right but unlikely to change either.
As for whether research at public universities should be public domain, ethically you can make a strong case for putting it out there for everyone but legally it does not work that way right now. (see Bayh-Dole act) Universities now have very large patent portfolios and regularly spin off companies, technologies and licensing. Often creates some significant conflict of interest issues.
Let me get this straight.
Litigants... CA company defendant, Mass entities the plaintiffs.
Lawsuit filed in East Texas.
They are making sure they get a judge who has never heard of a computer before.
The Supreme Court in the states has ruled that patents that are combinations of existing inventions or would have come about anyway are not valid. Geez! Didn't Sun Tzu demonstrate the 'divide and conquer' method like millenia ago? Just because you combine it with a computer network does not make it new or novel.
Shh.
so how is this different from an oracle database system that utilizes multiple database nodes?
That they got a patent for something so obvious is absurd. One could call upon the millions of beowulf clusters out there that split up a computing job among (tens/hundreds/thousands) of computers to speed the work, or alternatively, any load balancing application (be it hardware or software) for quicker response to web queries. Even Slashdot could be prior art! The US patent office needs to be pulled over and given a sobriety test!
And then there's always the specter of Prior Art raising its unwanted head.
Have these guys ever built such a database system themselves for sale?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This is interesting for me because I got my degree from NU and had that professor for a couple of classes. He's a smart guy but can't teach his way out of a wet paper bag. At the start of a semester, students quickly realize he doesn't actually teach anything and they stop showing up so there's hardly anyone in his classes. As long as you got your project done (no exams), you'd get a good grade. Anyway, I can't speak for the validity of this suit or not. The professor always had integrity as far as I could tell, so it may very well be legit.
We had a system in our office in 1985 that distributed records for each table to N processors via a hash function, where N could be a large as you liked. Queries were sent to all nodes and run in parallel, and the results combined (since SQL is set based, this works perfectly). Queries on any size database could be made arbitrarily fast by adding more nodes. The only bottle neck was the band width to the control processor and any order by clauses, which was proportional to the result set size, not the database size.
I cant even find any logic to explain why this can not be patented, and many people did similar things a prior. Not due to complexity, but due to simplicity of the issue.
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One of the interesting things I've noticed over the past 10+ years of working in IT is that more and more companies are asking questions like "How many patents do you have?" on job applications.
Combine with the graduate degree requirement that's slowly coming into practice and a BS/BA doesn't seem to be worth much nowadays.
In my postgrad years in the early 80's I worked for a now defunct computer company that often supplied minicomputers for Government departments. The patent is an exact copy of how we did information searches across a network.Honestly there is no other way of doing this type of search efficiently back then and I dare say the same method pre dates my early years within th computer industry. Think about it, user enters search criteria into stand alone PC/Terminal then it is passed onto a primary node minicomputer, if the information is not available on hand (cached common searches) the search engine software then quires all the other minicomputers computers attached, it's a no brainier. What Google has done is refine the search algorithms and used more generic hardware but the concept hasnt changed.
The /. posts labeling Northeastern University as a patent troll or claiming that the patent should not have issued have been posted too quickly to be credible assessments of the morality of this suit and the worthiness of the patent. The current Wikipedia definition is that a patent troll is "a person or company that enforces its patents against one or more alleged infringers in a manner considered unduly aggressive or opportunistic." If the patent was obtained through lawful and ethical means, is valid, and is infringed on by Google, then how is it "unduly aggressive or opportunistic" for Northeastern University to enforce the patent?
Some argue that a patent troll is merely a person or company that seeks to enforce a patent but does not practice the patent. Maybe Northeastern University is not practicing the patent. Then again, the mission of most universities seems to be conducting research, not applying and commercializing research. Licensing research to companies that can and will apply and commercialize that research is one way that universities fund additional research. Maybe universities should have to give all of their research away for free. But currently they do not. And it seems unfair to fault Northeastern for exercising its rights while not pushing the scope of its mission.
Given how quickly Northeastern was accused of being a patent troll, and given that there was no discussion about the proper role of universities or any real analysis of the worthiness of the patent (which was filed in 1994...almost 4 years before Google was founded), it seems likely that some people consider a patent troll to be any person who tries to enforce any patent rights.
Maybe Northeastern is acting like a patent troll. And maybe their patent is worthless. But it takes more than a quick glance at the 20-page issued patent or the 6-page complaint against Google to come up with a reasonable assessment of these issues.
Some analysis of the complaint would at least show that it doesn't look like Northeastern really knows the details of Google's search infrastructure:
Then again, Google's code is not open to the world. If it was, more detailed analysis would be possible. How can Northeastern try to get access to the code? By suing and demanding it as part of discovery. Does this make Northeastern a patent troll? Maybe. But the alternative (aside from discarding the patent system altogether, at least for software innovations) is a system that rewards patent infringers who keep their source code inaccessible to patent holders.
Let me get this straight... Public university means my tax dollars go to pay the guy who got this patent which means I should get money when he wins. Sue on. I kid but seriously you know it's a problem when a university is getting into the trolling game whatever happened to for the public good.
The fact that a university is behind this patent lawsuit is the most disturbing part to me. I probably have no real basis for this opinion, since I only spent three semesters at the school (I transferred to another school), but I had the overwhelming feeling that Northeastern U's primary concern was: bring in the money. That's why I transferred to UMass Amherst. In my experience, Northeastern was overpriced, and filled with students and teachers who just couldn't give a damn about academics. UM Amherst's admission standards were certainly lower than NEU's, but I found that the students who wanted to be there were really motivated, and that the teaching, in general, was outstanding.
That's not to say that NEU didn't/doesn't have some strong departments, nor do I mean to disparage anyone who is presently working their ass off there. I just didn't see it. This article strengthens my opinion of NEU as essentially "for profit" and not "for education".
Perhaps whatever protection offered by the law for software should be more similar to a copyright. Many smart people can solve a particular difficult problem, and some will come up with roughly similar approaches. The granting of patents for pedestrian solutions inhibits innovation and makes creation fraught with economic risks. A successful suit for patent infringement should be required to prove by preponderance of evidence that the defendant knew about the plaintiff's patent and relied on the disclosures therein to develop the infringing product.
Cool. Spread that meme. If more people start thinking that then the patent system will finally get fixed. When you can blame something on an icon of the left wing world (elite, ivory tower professors, for instance) then something gets done about it. Nothing motivates right wingers more, and left wingers are always happy to doubt themselves or eat their own.
Cheap Massively Parallel Sequential Search:
http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?CheapMassivelyParallelSequentialSearch
Table-ized A.I.
The fact is that the patent system has long been designed so that you need money to enjoy its protection, people who are unemployed very rarely have enough money to file a patent and most contracts of employment sign any patent rights over to your employer.
I dont read
Well, there were products on the market in the 1980s that did break down the queries to several CPUs.
...
One such example is Teradata, which had the database tables partitioned among many CPUs (done automatically on insert), each with its storage.
A query would be split automatically to all the CPUs, and each would fetch and return the rows matching the criteria in its part of the table.
The results are then combined from all CPUs and returned back to the application.
Later the CPUs were just emulated in software, as hardware became more powerful.
Prior art then
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NCR Teradata does data retrieval based off chopping indexes into discrete pieces then storing those indexes in separate nodes. WalMart and others have used this. NCR started selling these around that time 2000 so design had to occur much earlier. Seems to me to be what's covered by the patent. Network could be IP or simply the data bus.
So its likely this professor saw, heard, or smelled the process at some conference. Or from one of his grad students. Then painted proceeded to paint a Matisse abstract patent about it.
Research would be better served by professors like this chewing away on the truly difficult problems. Not rediscovering the wheel. Not tiny incremental baby steps. Go for research. Go for discovery. Go for the satisfaction of discovery. You might not reach your goal but will have had the satisfaction of the journey.
Thanks,
Jim
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
"The patent describes a distributed database system that breaks search queries into fragments and distributes them to multiple computers in a network to get faster results."
Doesn't this describe most every distributed computing system?
"The patent describes a distributed Computing system that breaks Computation into fragments and distributes them to multiple computers in a network to get faster results."
Can I replace Computing with some of these and patent it:
Database
Medical Imaging
Compiling
SETI
Folding
Weather simulation
Animation
Earthquake prediction
Web serving
Mathematics solving
If your/my country lets these things be patented, then the system is quite broken. We are going towards the new dark age where innovation halts (Currently innovation often is delayed for 20 years for free expansion of an idea. Of course Copyright used to be 28 years. Monopolies have interest in term expansion/elimination).
Imagine if the discoveries and formulas in you Physics and Calc books were all patented for 20 or more years. What effect would that have?
i'm not sure why you're focused on the "professor" aspect. the problem is that software is patentable - not that a professor did what anybody else can do.
That's what all the admissions tutors are saying now, "A BS/BA is the high-school diploma of the 21st Century" (podcast interview, about 17:24 into the interview).
Then you see three page mathematics papers being published which mention that the technique discussed is being patented, even if it just involves a couple of matrix-vector equations. And the paper will have around six or eight names as the listed authors.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
From what I have read, this is prior art in TerraData and other systems. Just because you specifically relegate this do a search, does not change the nature of a prior art.
Quick, someone Google patent infringement to see what will happen!
Well, almost every commercial database has clustering. They are all in violation then.
BTW--Is there a magenta object disposal place? I have some patented magenta things still I need to get rid of or I guess patents are recursive so I don't have to worry?
to block all Northeastern University and Jarg IP addresses from using Google. Their students and faculty will revolt.
Your George Mason University Professor was probably earning $85,000 or more a year in 2005 (see PDF). I agree that the guy may not be a millionaire yet, but he's certainly not part of the working poor, there are many benefits that come with being a Professor, healthcare, reputation, pension, subsidized housing, and being a Professor doesn't preclude him from getting some sweet consulting gigs on the side, or leaving his cushy tenure and go work in the industry whenever he wants.
Once again, I'm certainly not condemning him for taking advantage of the system -- or for making the choices he's made, but this guy has had choices placed in front of him -- and he's certainly not a victim of circumstances as you make him out to be.
Well, in the early 1980's, this was state of the art and obvious. But with the influx of PHP-writing barristas and C programming college drop-outs into the computer industry, standards have clearly gone down to the point that it now meets standards for patentability.
I work in patent law.
/. crowd needs to bear in mind when comparing patents is that in a patent infringement suit, what really matters are the claims. The abstract/description may help you to understand what the patent is for, and they help you interpret the claims, but for patent litigators, the claims are everything.
One point the
Patent protection for software is as inherently inappropriate as patent protection for genes. Patent protection for software only happened AFTER software became suddenly a big deal, the software industry has grown in spite of patent encumbrance, and I have yet to see a case where patent protection for software has "advanced the arts and sciences".
Once you realize this, then it becomes clear why NEU is being demonized. It's because they are acting like a demon.
Any lawyer would tell you that if you can file in a favorable venue, you should. Filing in Massachusetts or California just wasn't to the advantage of Northeastern; lawyers are ethically obligated (yes, ethically) to aggressively pursue their client's best interests, even if it means abandoning the lovely coast for the blighted interior.
This doesn't mean that the patent system shouldn't be reformed, mind you, or that Northeastern necessarily has a leg to stand on- this could still be a junk patent. But as long as a favorable venue exists for infringement suits, any good lawyer will want his or her case to be tried there.
Funny how such an early post can be modded 'redundant'. Get a clue, modkiddies!
HAHA... where's my haha tag you fat little liberals?
This is the site for morons...