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Singapore Firm Claims Patent Breach By Virtually All Websites
An anonymous reader writes "A Singapore firm, VueStar has threatened to sue websites that use pictures or graphics to link to another page, claiming it owns the patent for a technology used by millions around the world. The company is also planning to take on giants like Microsoft and Google. It is a battle that could, at least in theory, upend the Internet. The firm has been sending out invoices to Singapore companies since last week asking them to pay up."
Anyone know if this technique/ability was in the Mosaic browser? I know it was the first to show images inline with text and hyperlinks.
If this patent was filed at the same time Mosaic came out - and I wasn't able to confirm when the patent WAS issued - then there might be a slight chance. Anything older and the patent would be expired in the US by now, anything newer and there would be prior art to invalidate it.
=Smidge=
From the Vuestar website FAQ:
:-)
"My site has no images only text?
If your site is only text and has no images, icons or other patent methods then no license required."
Sweeeet! Run the images through aalib. Problem solved
It was pretty commonly used back well into the 80's for some of the various graphical front-ends and extensions to BBS packages.
Back in the late 90s I recall Singapore being the wild-west of the internet. It was well known that because Singapore did not care to enforce software piracy protections, that warez were openly available on singapore FTP/WWW servers. I was even told that you could buy CDs loaded with pirated software out of vending machines for a few dollars. ------ And now a firm from Singapore wants their patents and properties protected. How ironic.
If you read their patent claims on their website they aren't quite making that broad of a claim. They believe they have a patent on submitting a search and showing image (of the respective website) links as a result of that search. I agree that was done long before, and they actually state on the website that it was not in "wide use" for "enterprise websites" prior to 2000. So apparently the think they can patent ideas that have prior art, just as long as they aren't being used by the majority of large companies.
If you actually subscribe to their insane claims, or are extremely paranoid, you could get around it very easily by not having the image use a href. Their patent claim specifically mentions hrefs.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
What would be the point of inventing something just to have it ripped off, re-branded, and sold at half the price? Not that I'm defending current IP laws, but some patent and copyright system is necessary.
From TFA:
Established in August 2004, Like.com also said it owns almost 12 patents in the areas of visual recognition and search.
Almost 12? What the hell kind of journalism is this? Is 11 too many to count? Does zdnetasia use base 12 (in which case, I could ALMOST see this being appropriate)?
This sort of "mis-turning of a phrase" is rapidly becoming one of my top pet peeves!
U.S. Patent 7,065,520 (issued in June 2006) would seem to be the US equivalent.
When you look at the claims, all the independent claims contain some key limitations:
receiving a search request from a user,
searching a database,
(other stuff, ending with)
"wherein the visual content comprises a plurality of mini-images in the form of a conveyor belt slide show."
A conveyor belt slide show? WTF? Gee, that seems fairly narrow to me!
Read the claims -- they define what the patent seeks to protect.
I basically used the technique outlined in the patent for a website I built in 1995 assisting a graduate student. (Yeah. This was using CGI with Perl back before CGI.pm existed. Go figure.)
Didn't Prodigy start the whole graphical thing as far as pre-Internet-era systems went? It's been long enough for that type of patent to expire or for it to count as prior-art. Either way, they can go troll somewhere else.
Layne
This is probably why this is going on (WARNING: speculation!):
The SG govt. is extremely business-friendly, to the point of screwing over its own citizens if there's a risk of scaring off investors. As such, they've become singularly enthusiastic about "Intellectual Property" in general - witness them pulling out four riot trucks to suppress a protest by seven people against an anime distributor.
Some smartass has realised this, and decided to play off the govt's policy against itself - the government would hesitate to suppress patent trolls, for fear of scaring off foreign investors. In the meanwhile it rips off thousands of dollars from scared Singaporean small businesses.
A pretty effective scam, I'd say.
Old, but good: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29130
I'm reading Slashdot on an LA36, you insensitive clod!
Off-topic, but I actually used one of these things (or something in the same family; it was 1984-85 and I don't remember the exact model) my first year in college. Freshman CS majors had to write Pascal programs using these on a CDC mainframe. There were 3 video terminals (I don't remember the type, now - they were large, clunky things, not made by DEC or Tektronix or any other company I recognized at the time) in one of the terminal rooms. They were greatly preferred, but since everyone wanted to use them, I was usually stuck at a print terminal. I got access to the manual for the terminals through a friend, and found that you could set a password. I'm sorry to say that I did that on all three terminals, and only gave it to two of my friends, so we could always use them. That's probably the most anti-social thing I've ever done...
I think that is called socialism, at the least, or communism at the worst.
In a capitalistic system, there is a way to provide for persons to have a limited monopoly on "inventions", which is what the patent process is designed for.
The scariest part is I think you are serious. So, no government interference is communism, and government controls into who can do what and preventing people from acting freely is capitalism. I guess that means that Libertarian and Communist are the same thing, since they both want to get the government the hell out of business? IP is an invention of the government to restrict people and restrict trade. I don't think that's capitalist at all. It does generate state monopolies backed by force of law, which all companies want to be on the good side of, but pro-corporate is nothing related to pro-capitalist. Corporations want free markets with a $10,000,000,000 entry fee. That way, once you have enough money, you can do whatever you want but there will be so few able to scrounge up that, there will be no real competition other than the existing oligopoly. But again, that's not capitalist, even if that's every large corporation's wet dream.
Learn to love Alaska
Then my references to Google Images dating back to July 2001 should be prior art. If it needs to be at least a year before the filing date, then (taking SCHecklerX's tip), I found some references to Altavista's Image Search dating to Feb 2000. Either way, this company seems to be your typical patent troll. They have a patent that either has overly vague language or specifically applies to commonly used technology. They sat on it (or recently "discovered" that they have it) and now intend on making everyone using that commonly used technology pay them money for the rights to use the commonly used technology. Once a technology was in wide use, a patent holder shouldn't be allowed to just "appear" and claim patent rights over it.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Yea.... When your nation's major business model involves revolves around charging for information... Most of which is bad information... but regarded as divine... you became America.
Enlightenment is the elimination of that which is unnecessary.
I can run through a huge amount of prior art on this one. And not just from the Web. If this does start to appear in the US we should put together a defense pack.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Sure. I wasn't being specific about what is or is not intellectual property in the theoretical or practical sense, only that it is probably a valid concept for the law to tackle, because the sorts of things we think of as intellectual property (a process for making steel stronger, the design of a jet engine, the process for manufacturing a life-saving drug, etc) need to be described and governed by the rule of law, in a manner not entirely different than physical property (this car belongs to me, my land usage rights are blah, etc etc)
If ownership implies control (car owners control who can access their car), then a mechanism similar to copyrights or patents make sense for the ownership of intellectual property. And like our real property (land, cars, etc), the government (unfortuneately, in the opinion of many strong property rights advocates) has a say in exactly how extensive that mechanism can be. The government has curtailed what owning a car means in such a way that by virtue of being a car owner, I cannot drive as fast as I like (technically, this is licensure to use publicly owned roads, and not a restriction of car ownership per-se). Having similar caveats about how intellectual property may be used by the owner would not be new ground for any governoring body.
The summary is that governments define and enforce property rights for physical property. Intellectual property IS an important and valid concept, because what we usually think of as IP is where the majority of the real value in society is and what differentiates us from our mideival ancestors. Banishing intellectual property as a concept is no more feasible than banishing physical property as a concept.
(As an aside, some people think physical property should also be abolished. Any of them who are serious are necessarily willing to kill you to get you to hand over your property, so you should be wary of them. Consult history if you disagree.)
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
You, and others like you fail to comprehend that presenting and successfully de-certifying a patent on "prior art" is:
1. Looong process that the USPTO is unwilling to process in most cases. Their "business model" is as a certification factory.
2. Expensive process. Who's going to take up this cause? You and I?
The scale at which junk patents are being issued is mind boggling. Remember, this is the new and improved government that measures productivity! In this case it's the number of patents, per reviewer, per year.
This story reinforces the urgent need of abolishing software patents. That's something few are willing to pay enough attention to see this critical mission through. Instead, off the cuff "prior art" posts fly.
end-rant
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
"Us" must be you and your three Xbox buddies. I care about Slashdot enough to know that what this loser is doing is wrong and should be stopped. Failing that, I'd like to know if he's using three accounts to gang up on me because I don't hate MIKKRO$HAFT with enough zeal.
More to the point, if "everybody" knows about then, then that says a lot about the collective IQ around here. Do you need to pretend you're eight different people to have a normal discussion? Anyone who thinks that's OK should get themselves over to a shrink pronto.
Not to mention the fact that he must be modding himself up and other people down with all those accounts. I guess if you're one of his groupies you're safe, but I gather that's a really small subset of Slashdot.
-JC (posting anon because as usual, anyone who mentions twitter's sockpuppets gets the axe, probably from twitter himself)
If I had the even choice between a Huawei router and a Cisco router (and if the service and support was the same), I'd take the Huawei, as it is almost always superior. It's not better because it's Chinese or such, but because it's a rip-off of the Cisco that's not just the same, but improved.
One of the "improvements" of the Huawei ripoff version is the probable "feature" of a backdoor under the control of the Chinese Communist Party. Choose your router carefully.
It's Linux, damnit! Pay no attention to renaming attempts by self-aggrandizing blowhards.
Now, trade secret death occurs every 5 years, as DRM takes its toll on technological advances. Defensive patents are the ultimate MAD device and trolls hide under every technological bridges.
I am going to argue that progress sped up as communication became global, and that very little of that acceleration is due to IP laws. I will further argue that mere knowledge isn't enough, that mastery comes with practice.
The only case where IP laws are necessary, is to balance restrictions imposed by the government. If law forces you to take 10 years to prove your meds are safe, they'd better give you a 10 year monopoly to compensate.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
Software already has protection through copyrights. You shouldn't get double protection. That's the first problem. Another problem is that the software invention can exist entirely without the computer at all. It can be written down as a set of steps that a human can follow to obtain a certain result. There are no physical items involved. That's why software patents don't make sense. It's also the same reason business method patents don't work. The other problem is that 98% of software patents aren't novel, aren't non-obvious, and also have extensive prior art.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.