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Facebook Ordered To Turn Over Source Code
consonant writes "A Delaware District Court judge has ordered Facebook to turn over ALL its source code to Leader Technologies, who allege patent infringements by Facebook. The patent in question appears to be for 'associating a piece of data with multiple categories.'
Additionally, while the judge in question deems it fine to let Leader Technologies look at Facebook's source (for a patent, no less!) in its entirety for a single feature, it would be 'overboard to ask a patent holder to disclose all of their products that practice any claim of the patent-in-suit.'"
Pretty much every search engine (Vector Space Model) ever invented infringes heavily on Leader's patent. In the vector space model every document or page is categorized under every term that appears in that document. Doah! Poor internet is doomed! Pretty soon Google will have to hand over all of their code too. No more multiple categories per thing.
If this is part of Discovery, then the requirement to turn over the code should be to the plaintiff's attorneys, not to the plaintiff. And the plaintiff doesn't actually get to see it themselves.
At least, that's how it worked in SCO vs IBM.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
No, the detailed exerpt just doesn't add anything. It's still equally bogus.
The fact that the judge claimed that there is no "legal theory" to support
the idea that the suing party should not have to give good examples of
things that use the patent in question doesn't mean it's a bogus idea to
deny the request.
"Show us some examples" is hardly a high burden claim.
It's not even in the same league as "show us all your sourcecode".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There's been dozens of Myspace and Facebook clones out there. None have particularly succeeded. The underlying tech isn't what drives their success. It's the ability of their Marketing Droids to convince people that the emperor is really not, in fact, stark naked.
I think what really drives Facebook is that it reached the critical mass to get a strong network effect.
As you pointed out with the source code, there are numerous sites that could have served the role Facebook presently serves. I suspect this is a system that was destined to converge on one particular website, but was chaotic with respect to which site would get the crown.
Another reason the patent system needs to be updated is because patents are written for lawyers, not for practitioners. Ex: If the patent is about software, a software engineer should be able to read and understand the patent. If it is a patent on a food recipe, then a chef should be able to understand it.
But the patent above requires a lawyer and a linguistics expert to read it, then explain it to the software engineer. The engineer won't understand the patent, and the lawyer won't understand the software. So it is like there is an intentional "gap of unintelligibility" there to protect the patent holder from anyone actually being able to challenge it.
Not all patents are written this way. But patents filed by trolls, and companies with more lawyers than engineers wind-up this way. I worked for a company that did this: The software guys gave design documentation and code to a lawyer. The lawyer turned 10 pages of diagrams into *hundreds* of pages of text. The software people then reviewed it, and had no idea what it was about. The inventors didn't even understand their own design.
Certainly some of the claims in the patent are what are known as "context management", and would have significant prior art. The specific linking of them to the exact framework they describe (web-based context switching and data tracking within contexts) may or may not have prior art, it's kind of hard to tell w/o spending more time than I care to reading the material. I certainly think that I used tools that could do much of that prior to 2003 though.
Slashdot better watch out, Follower Technologies might want to look at their source code too.
Why would anyone want to volunatarily look at slashcode?
Jerry, Thank you for pointing out my omission of the networking requirement. I am not a lawyer, but I have worked on a few patent cases as an expert, so I know to read the patent before talking about it, even if I am not as careful as a lawyer at reading over it. :-)
I believe the networking requirement you mention will be fulfilled by any system which needs to use a network to validate user information from a central source, such as kerberos authentication or Windows Active Directory mechanisms. Of course, LDAP was mentioned in the patent, but these go beyond LDAP.
These thoughts come after less than an hour of investigation. It seems strange Facebook could not come up with something compelling...
-Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
If you actually read the patent, which is something that the submitter appears to have skipped, it goes quite a bit further than just many-to-many database relationships. For something written in 2000, it is definitely novel. Whether it is appropriate for patent protection is debatable, of course, but it's not just a description of a relational database.
Where I can ignore the insane US patent system.
Seriously, someone needs to explain the process of object-oriented
domain modelling, analysis, and design to the USPTO, and explain
how virtually every outcome of such a process is "obvious to a qualified
practitioner in the field." These patents on every "complicated-seeming"
computer system that uses basic symbolic modelling of a domain and
implements a few obvious methods on the objects, are ridiculous
beyond belief, and one can take no position on these patents
except to studiously ignore them.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Congratulations. You've described a rule 34 inspection almost perfectly! Sadly, I'm not even being humorous.
Oh, there is one minor difference though: a rule 34 inspection is normally used for something like a large machine that can't reasonably be delivered to the other side.
The rest of it is pretty accurate though. For one example, I was involved in a case where the other side was ordered to produce a copy of a floppy disk -- so they sent a Xerox copy. This was recently enough that even the judge realized that was a problem, and told them that they needed to send a copy of the contents -- so they loaded executables into a text editor (Notepad, to be exact), and printed them out -- in a font that didn't have characters for many of the codes, so about half of it was the Windows Empty Square Box. The best part was the (literally) couple of thousand blank pages where a padding character (or something on that order) happened to correspond to a form-feed...
Tactics like that can be dangerous though -- the judge clearly recognized what was going on, and didn't like it a bit. For the rest of the case, he didn't cut them a break on anything. At the beginning of the case, I'd told our clients that IMO, the facts only favored them by about 60:40 or so, but by the end, there was virtually no way we could lose (and we didn't). In his decision, the judge even commented on the "assiduous and ongoing dishonesty" of our opposition (I think I'm quoting that correctly -- it was close to that anyway).
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
First, the problem that they're attempting to address with this patent: when you create a document or receive an email, it's up to you to categorize that document or email by whatever context (category/job fuction/etc) is appropriate...like sales or engineering. Usually this is done by creating categorized folders to stick the files or emails or whatever into.
Their solution: When you're working on something on your computer (using their technology), you're doing so within a certain context. For example you might be working on Sales, Marketing, or Software Developement, etc. So if your current working context is Marketing, everything you create while in that context is automatically associated with Marketing. If you send someone an email, it's automatically tagged as related to Marketing, so there is no need for you or the recipient to stuff it into a Marketing folder for filing. When you switch contexts from Marketing to Sales, all the content you create is then tagged as Sales, so once again, there is no need for the user to organize their stuff.
It sounds like their idea also provides for things to be associated with multiple contexts, and workspaces can be created that cover multiple contexts, so things get tagged accordingly. Also, it allows for manual tagging.
I can't really think of how this applies to Facebook...and Leader Technologies doesn't appear to have an active product that does any of this. What do you guys think about my interpretation?
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
Well yes. The fact that it's voluntary makes all the difference. You are free to make a facebook accound with false information if you so please. Nobody would be outraged if the government made a voluntary database that you could easily provide false information for.