Slashdot Mirror
Multi-Channel Communication Patent Up For Sale
OTDR alerts us to the latest software patent stupidity in the news as patent number 6,418,462, "methods allowing clients to perform tasks through a sideband communication channel, in addition to the main communication channel between a client and server," snubs its nose at AJAX, ftp, and decades of prior art and goes on sale next month in San Fransisco. "Singled out are AJAX mashups including Google Maps and Gmail, and Microsoft 'Live'... Also in the frame are Amazon's S3 and EC2 and clusters from Microsoft, VMware, and Oracle. eBay's Skype, Napster, and Microsoft's Groove are also listed as potentially infringing on the patent in P2P."
I bid a penny, and if I win, I grant a free unlimited license to everyone so long as they do not sue anyone for patent infringment.
If a crack team of lawyers takes legal action to get this patent invalidated, will the pending legal action depress its price?
Depressing the price is a good thing because it will discourage this kind of nonsense in the future.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Any document that contains the words "while" or the more technical "meanwhile" should be sufficient prior art.
How about talking to someone on one phone while you are trying to get a fax to them? Remember that conversation when you would be talking someone through putting a roll of thermal paper in a hopper?
Actually, isn't this exactly how FTP works? I have a control channel and one or more data channels that are doing the heavy lifting once a transfer starts.
Then there is ISDN, which _requires_ two or more barer channels and the control channel just to join the party.
Isn't the web browser "maximum connections to one server" all about this as well?
Hell, the entire word "sideband" (outside of radio) has the "meat" of this patent as its definition...
Time for the pitchforks and torches everybody, meet me on the hill outside the castle!
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
You fell for the old troll of believing the Slashdot summary of a patent.
For all of these stories, you need to go read the actual patent, including the claims, then you can laugh at the summary and (sometimes) the article for not doing so.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The bravado here may seem surprising, but there's a good reason why the tone of these claims is so different from the tone of typical patent trolling. A typical patent troll will generally be vague about the applicability of a patent, except when discussing a case that's already been filed. Naming a dozen rather different specific technologies gives a defendant lots of ammunition to argue that the technique is obvious, due to the ubiquity admitted by the plaintiff, or to demonstrate prior art in the common technological heritage of all of them.
These claims are simply intended to drive up the value of the patent at auction, by making the big players terrified of letting anyone else get ahold of it. Were it really so valuable, the holder would litigate it themselves. The fact that they're unloading it for some sure money now is a strong indication of how weak they feel it would be in court.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
When will the point be reached when the US patent system becomes so encumbered for real inventors that the US will become a medium-sized (no, not small by any measure) backyard for US patent specialists? If the US patent system keeps diverging from the rest of the world companies and inventors outside the US will certainly have an edge on anything someone in the US wants to bring to the much larger global market.
Patent trolls are idiots, but I'm guessing they're smart enough to learn from SCO. Google, Microsoft, and IBM are the last people they'll be suing. Those companies have hundred million dollar legal teams. On the other hand, there are thousands of tiny businesses who will settle just to avoid the hassle and expense of court.
The problem with patent trolls is that the risk / reward profile is all wrong. The corporation structure protects the investors, and no one is criminally liable if the lawsuit fails. So, the people setting it up can decide how much liability to expose themselves to by how much they invest, but the upper bound on the lawsuit payoff is virtually unlimited. So, when deciding whether to make the investment, there simply isn't an entry on the risk / reward table below "lawsuit fails." The incentive for them not file the lawsuit has to be on par with the potential earnings in the calculation, and someone getting "well and truly burnt" won't do that -- the probability of a big win has to change, since the size of the loss is bounded. (Well, either that or find ways to make the penalties bigger.)
Most good patents are about something that everyone thinks is a stupid idea. In the competitive patent filing environment it's a good way to "file first" as people are loath to spend money on the legal fees for something that is useless. Thing is, a few years from now the computing environment will change and random-stupid-idea might make sense then.
The perfect example of this is the Amazon "one-click" shopping bullshit. When it was filed people were not only saying it was "obvious" but that it was also "stupid". Storing credit card numbers? What a stupid idea! A year later you couldn't find an online store that wasn't doing it. People had gotten used to it so it was now only a dumb idea from the perspective of security experts. And no-one listens to them anyway.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Nope he's fine.
Now the guy with two cans and TWO strings, he's in trouble.