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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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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
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'
It looks like Jarg is a company with actual products, so I don't know if you can really call them a patent troll (unless you are Google fanboy).
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
Not quite. The patent was for splitting a single query into multiple chunks. In the case of a DNS server, a single DNS server gives you a reply. For round robin; same thing, one request from one client, one reply from one server.
The patent was for taking a single request, breaking it up into subrequests, then distributing the subrequests amongst multiple servers and then gluing the results back together.
So to make the required car analogy, its like taking a shopping list, breaking it up by area of town that the store is in, then deploying a separate car to each area and meeting back at home.
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/
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.
If a north eastern company has to sue a north western company in a Texas court because they're more friendly to patent litigation then you're dealing with a patent troll.
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.
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.
It is very rare to find a law firm to take a patent case on a contingency basis. The cases take an enormous amount of time and resources and are too risky for contingencies.
That's a silly argument. If you sue anybody, you want to do it where its most favorable for you.
A patent troll is someone who never intends to develop a patent but just sits on patents with the only purpose to sue those who infringe. In this case, the professor did not sit on the patent; he licensed it to Jarg, which is a company with real products.
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.
Sure you can... Breaking the work up over multiple machines
has got to be about as obvious as can be.
Soon they will be suing the people who came up with RPC,
because it breaks the same patent.
emt 377 emt 4
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".
I am a recent former student, and my experience is quite opposite of yours. Prof Baclawski, besides having the added benefit of speaking English natively, was an excellent teacher both for myself and the handful of others in my class that I spoke with regularly. He usually referenced "back in the day" stories, but in a humorous way that lead into the subject at hand, and I ended up learning more than most in that class. Also rediculously apparent was his apathy for monetary compensation, he just wanted to teach and research new things, hell the guy wore the same damn dirty coat for the 5 years I was there! The move on google is most likely a move by the NU corp, as they are bloodthirsty when it comes to money, just look at tution costs of NU.http://www.neu.edu/admissions/costs/tuition.html
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
They have no competing product, they're hiring lawyers on a contingency basis, they're filing in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas based on the most stretched association with that venue and they've demanded a jury trial and an injunction up front. They're basically trying to force Google to make the suit go away and they're just rolling the dice to see if they get lucky.
Looks like a patent troll, sounds like a patent troll, smells like a patent troll. They're not going to be able to claim damages for lost profits. The only difference between these people and a typical dedicated patent troll IP firm is that they don't employ their own lawyers and they make some shitty, unrelated product that really has no relevance to this case.
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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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.
"Reality is that there's a lot of things that are "obvious" in hindsight ""
Dividing the search up among multiple machines if one
machine is not enough is pretty obvious. And not just
in hindsight.
"but who gets to say so?"
I see the problem, but I don't think we should allow that
as an excuse for such things.
emt 377 emt 4
How is this different from any parallel divide-and-conquer algorithm?
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
In other words, it was such a simple and obvious solution to a distributed computing problem that they shouldn't have had a patent awarded to them anyway. Well, that and you shouldn't be able to patent algorithms in the first place.