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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."
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.
First off, they don't quite link to the patent so on a non-slashdottable version is here or you can go straight to the full massive PDF if you want (single file if you have problems viewing above in Linux).
Looks pretty much like a poster child example of why the patent system is broken. Either that or the USPTO needs to start looking at revoking patents in hind sight or after professional review by many leading members of the field. So much for patent reform!
My work here is dung.
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
The inventor of 2 cans and a string could not be reached for comment.
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
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.
Forget SETI at home look at PVM. First release 1989 !!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Virtual_Machine
Description here
http://www.netlib.org/pvm3/book/node17.html
Main channel is to pvmd. "backchannel" is the process to process communication.
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The PVM system is composed of two parts. The first part is a daemon , called pvmd3 and sometimes abbreviated pvmd , that resides on all the computers making up the virtual machine. (An example of a daemon program is the mail program that runs in the background and handles all the incoming and outgoing electronic mail on a computer.) Pvmd3 is designed so any user with a valid login can install this daemon on a machine. When a user wishes to run a PVM application, he first creates a virtual machine by starting up PVM. (Chapter 3 details how this is done.) The PVM application can then be started from a Unix prompt on any of the hosts. Multiple users can configure overlapping virtual machines, and each user can execute several PVM applications simultaneously.
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The general paradigm for application programming with PVM is as follows. A user writes one or more sequential programs in C, C++, or Fortran 77 that contain embedded calls to the PVM library. Each program corresponds to a task making up the application. These programs are compiled for each architecture in the host pool, and the resulting object files are placed at a location accessible from machines in the host pool. To execute an application, a user typically starts one copy of one task (usually the ``master'' or ``initiating'' task) by hand from a machine within the host pool. This process subsequently starts other PVM tasks, eventually resulting in a collection of active tasks that then compute locally and exchange messages with each other to solve the problem. Note that while the above is a typical scenario, as many tasks as appropriate may be started manually. As mentioned earlier, tasks interact through explicit message passing, identifying each other with a system-assigned, opaque TID.
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As above, the summary isn't especially accurate. What the patent proposes is a system where anybody who connects to a webserver is asked by that server to compute a chunk of some distributed processing problem. Essentially, the concept of SETI@home or distributed.net; but allegedly bodged on top of an ordinary communication session with a web server. Trouble is, it's a bloody stupid idea. The system depends on the client system executing whatever code the server asks it to execute. There are two ways of implementing this: the hideously insecure way, and the hideously slow way. The idea that the client would execute a chunk of native code at the server's request is just crazy; riddled with possibilities for misuse and wholly unacceptable. Even if this were alright, the current ways of doing this semi-safely(java and the like) are not lightweight enough to set up, run the numbers, and bring down during a simple client/server connection session. The alternative is the hideously slow way: hack together a javascript implementation of your algorithm and use AJAX tricks to hand out the data and pull back the results. This would work; but there is a reason why people don't do scientific computing with javascript. Also, many browsers are on the lookout for scripts pulling excessive resources, and throttle or kill them to keep themselves responsive. I'm sure that somebody's javascript BLAST implementation isn't going to cause any trouble. If the patent dodges this problem by using dedicated client software then it will work just fine(for the class of very, very parallel problems); but runs into a long list of prior art. That said, I'd be amused to see an AJAXed equivalent of distributed.net or similar, just for the amusement factor; but it would be a monstrosity in performance terms.
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.)
I bid 25c. If I win, I grant a free unlimited license to everyone so long as they do not sue anyone for patent infringement. Except Microsoft. Screw 'em. And except Anonymous Cowards and users whose IDs start with 746004.
Of Code And Men