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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.
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.
Most major universities control massive patent/IP portfolios... see the CalTech or BU for major examples. Universities are corporations, nothing more or less. The research done there is assigned to the corporation/school.
-Daniel
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
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.
WARF (Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation) is a huge patent-holder in the biotechnical arts. You can't do anything interesting in the field nowadays without hitting a WARF patent. Not saying that they're a patent troll, just saying they try to patent everything they might have innvented.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Even if it was true that all research at public schools must be made available to the public, this school is not a public school at all, it is a private school. Which means that most of the funding for the schools operation comes from tuition and donations by the alumni, not state or federal aid. Some private schools reject all state and federal funding because they do not which to be bound by rules concerning things like how they administer the school, choice of curriculum or what criteria they use for admitting students. In other words private schools are allowed to operate much more like private corporations than public schools. Some technical institutes are corporate run entities that are run not just with the mission to educate people but also to make money doing it.
Most students doing research are paid by the university. At least, almost all graduate students in sciences are. Plus they are using university's facilities.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
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.
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.
Actually it is a WARF subsidiary now called WiCell. Nonprofit licenses for research are extremely cheap, a couple hundred dollars. Commercializing the research is another story.
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."
Except Uni's are completely free to ignore everyone else's patents in the course of their research, have access to all scientific software at much much cheaper "academic" rates, and can pay grad students slave wages ($15,000 per year for a 3000 hour work week is well below the Federal minimum wage). So while they behave in many ways like corporations, they have a number of government-issued advantages in the competition. Who'd have thunk it, the government giving itself an advantage.
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
Most patent suits are filed in East Texas. It's the in thing to do.
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.
Read radical news here
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.
They are making sure they get a judge who has never heard of a computer before.
Actually, as many software patent cases they've been hearing lately, I'm quite positive they've heard of computers before..
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.
Except Uni's are completely free to ignore everyone else's patents in the course of their research
No. The experimental use exception is very small in the U.S. Universities are not allowed to just use anyone's patented process/thing. You say "Uni" though so I am thinking you aren't in the U.S.
Here's one way to fix the system (albeit only a small fix): make the statute of limitations similarly lengthed to libel claims. When you're libeled, you have to sue those libeling you within a statutory period, that's often at most a few years, and sometimes as little as three months, after you discover, or should reasonably have discovered, the libel.
So, if this were applied to patents, if a mom and pop shop in Nowhere, USA was using a patented production process to make bread for their community of 50, it's reasonable to assume that the company wouldn't find out about the process right away. Or if a company is using a patent internally and hiding it (like a trade secret) then no one could be expected to find out about it. But if the Internet developped a standard for, say, images, and publicized the encryption algorithm they used, then it would be reasonable to assume that the company holding the patent would discover the infringement soon. And, with a short statute of limitations, this would mean the company would have to sue for infringement within a reasonable period, or give up their patent claim.
And complaining about how you don't have the money to sue them is tough: if you don't have the money to sue someone for libel, or trademark infringement, for example, you'll lose your claim. Sure, there's an injustice in the justice system for those who don't have money, but that's not a problem that can be fixed with this. Nor, for that matter, can patent reform. And if you actually have a good chance of winning, and you're suing a big company (like, say, Google), I'm sure some enterprising lawyer will take you on contingency.
Nah, a patent troll is a patent troll is a patent troll. But it fills us with glee if M$ has to pay some cash :)
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
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
Because they are private corporations. They are a company, and they have employees. Students pay for the service they provide: education. You could argue that those involved with the research should get their name on the patent and have some of the patent rights... but saying it should be public domain is absolutely ABSURD. why should the public get it? FTR Northeastern is one of the nation's largest PRIVATE colleges.
to your second point; no and no. Most research is performed by grad students and faculty. A lot of the funding comes from independant contracts, corporate sponsorships, research grants, etc. I'm sure some student money may trickle down; but there are lots of builidings, and professors salaries, and sports to be paid for. not to mention the presidents salary.
Next you are going to tell me that because the students pay for x and x that they should have more control over administrative policy, etc... (note that I actually think this is a more reasonable request).
If you want to fight for this for public schools thats one thing; take it up with your state; but it wont ever happen. Why should Joe public benefit from my work or the schools work (without my / its consent)?
"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."
How about every single case? what gives you any right to be entitled to anything that is developed at if you didnt go there? (I'm not even going to bother to get into the case where you did and still shouldnt have any rights to it) Why in the world should they be freely availible to the general public use, and what standing do you possibly have to make that request? Aside from "it would be nice" and that whole advancement for everyone junk.
Why do you think research universities spend the effort and money they do on research and not on the students education? Because they make money to fund everything else and gain notoriety and prominence. (much to the dismay of students such as myself a couple years ago)
What you are saying is almost as bad as saying that anyone who holds stock in a company should have free usage of any and all patents the company has developed.
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
Don't forget that universities often will receive patents for research paid for with public funds. They spend someone else's money to pay for the research, and then get to keep the licensing rights.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
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
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
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
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Right. As usual on Slashdot, everything must be black and white. It's not as if universities could seek to profit from their inventions, AND educate people and give back to society. Also, since making a profit makes you evil, they are obviously not trying to use the money to improve their programs and stretch their limited budgets.
Because universities are perpetually stretched for cash (this seems to happens everywhere, USA, Canada, UK). They can do several things to solve this:
(1) Cut back on staff and close departments - Not a valid proposition when there is demand for such staff.
(2) Take on more students and create new courses - The reputation of the university may suffer if the quality of teaching/resources go down - students now compare departments in terms of staff/student ratios, student/computer ratios, Internet bandwidth, contact hours and number of papers published per group.
(3) The other solution is to file patents based upon all research carried out. These patents can then be used to protect startups from predators, and bring in money from licensing. It is referred to as "technology transfer" and has several annual conferences dedicated to this.
Here's a link to AUTM (The Association of University Technology Managers) .
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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
Quick, someone Google patent infringement to see what will happen!
to block all Northeastern University and Jarg IP addresses from using Google. Their students and faculty will revolt.
Yes, it was filed in 1994. From reading the titles of references in the patent, many of them written by the inventor, I would expect most or all of them to have been required reading by anyone setting up an internet search engine.
The patent claims stress "non-relational" databases, but at the very bottom there is a poorly worded sentence that appears to claim any related distributed database technology as being under the patent.
My prediction is that Google will have to settle this one and quickly.
That's true of much research though. The government funds a lot of research, both in universities and elsewhere.
-Daniel
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.
Actually, I was saying that in jest. I come from Texas (I now live in Philadelphia).
:-)
If you have ever been in East Texas before, you'll quickly understand the humor in that comment.
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
Certainly not from commercial entities, they know full well their academic discounts are given for the same reason the crack dealer gives the first rock for free. But for software that's written by government entities, paid for by my tax dollars, should be available to all taxpayers at the same rate.
At least in the life sciences, at major research universities, no. The grad students don't pay tuition. They also get reasonable benefits. Doesn't change the fact that in many cases they're being paid well below minimum wage. And while salaried workers can definitely be paid less than they think due to long hours w/o overtime, I'd love to see documentation that they're being paid less than the Federal minimum wage of $5.85 an hour. There are definitly grad students being worked for that (they are, after all, on salary).
My point is that Universities aren't just acting like corporations, they're acting like corporations that have special competitive advantages against private companies, and more than take advantage of that.
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
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.
Of course, you do know that Larry and Sergey were Stanford grad students, that Google came out of a research project they did there and that the basic Google pagerank search algorithm is the subject of US Patent 6,285,999, assigned to The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University (and subsequently from them to the National Science Foundation)