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Company Claims Patent On Spam Filtering, Sues World
EvilAlphonso notes news of a "Texas" IP holding company suing 36 actual companies for violating its claimed patent on spam filtering. Techdirt deconstructs the patent itself, No. 6,018,761, which seems to amount to little more than a database lookup. It was filed in 1996 and issued in 2000 (despite the lawyers' press release claiming that it "was awarded... nearly 15 years ago"). Among the companies being sued are 3Com, Apple, Google, AOL, Yahoo, J.C.Penney, IBM, Dell, Citigroup, and RIM. Not Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, or Microsoft, oddly enough.
... it's the only way to be sure.
Seriously, it's bad enough that we have a patent system that allows these patent trolls to exist at all, but it really looks to me like one judge is creating a favorable environment most of the patent troll lawsuits in the entire US (and, given that the US seems to be far and away the number one country for patent trolling, maybe most such lawsuits in the entire world.) Isn't there any way to fire this clown?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I will be filing a patent for my method on submitting comments to websites that involve the use of a mouse, keyboard, computer, and monitor.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
The list of targets picked by that entity is pretty impressive. Even though the article accurately notes that some big names are missing, it almost reads like a Who Is Who of the industry. Sort of duck shooting, but the really big ones...
The bad news is that even such an aggressive behavior isn't the worst that can happen with patents. It's bad, and I'm aware of the fact that non-practicing entities (NPEs) can go extremely far and cause a lot of trouble just to suqeeze the maximum amount of money out of their targets. I don't mean to downplay that problem.
But: form the perspective of a company that gets attacked, an NPE is only the second-worst possibility. At the end of the day, the NPE is just in it for the money and pursues no strategic objectives beyond that. So the big companies that are the targets here (and the IT companies among them are all pro-software-patent regardless) can initially try to get rid of the patent or prove they don't infringe, and if it comes to worst, they can and will negotiate a settlement, write a check and life goes on for them.
That isn't the case when a strategic patent holder seeks to limit the functionality of a competitor's product, possibly to the extent that the competitor gets driven out of business. Exclusionary strategic use of patents is much worse than anything an NPE will ever do. It harms competition and innovation in serious ways. It looks like Apple wants to enforce some patents regardless of whatever royalty the defendant (HTC, and maybe others in the future) would be willing to pay. And there's IBM's use of patents to preserve its mainframe monopoly against such companies as TurboHercules and NEON Enterprise Software.
By the time this patent was filed for spam filters were already around. Indeed, in 1996 one had such sophisticated filters that used by as Jason Rennie's program iFile whiched used a Bayesian statistical approach to sort potential spam into a junk folder. Prior art is going to kill this quickly.
1/ Get ambiguous patent to a seemingly obvious method of spam control
2/ Wait 15 years
3/ Sue every IT firm under the sun
4/ Profit
What is claimed is:
1. A method of obtaining context information about a sender of an electronic message using a mail processing comprising the steps of:
Scanning the message, usinig the mail processine program to determine if the message contains a reference in a header portion of the message to at least one feature of the sender's context, wherein the sender's context is information about the sender or the message that is usefiul to the recipient in understanding more about the context in which the sender sent the message;
If the message contains such reference, using the mail processing program and such reference to obtain [sender] the context information from a location external to the message;
If the message does not contain such reference, using the mail processing program and information present in the message to indirectly obtain the [sender] context information using external reference sources to find a reference to the [sender] context information.
2. The method of claim 1, wherein the reference to at least one feature is a reference to a location where context information is stored.
3. The method of claim 1, wherein the reference to at least one feature is a hint usable to retrieve a location where context information is stored.
Is there not some rule that says you cant just sit there for all that time until making an infringement claim? There is something rather dishonest about waiting all this time to make such a claim for what looks like a rather obvious method.
Those who can, do. Those who cannot, sue.
Robert Uomini of Kensington CA already won a $22 million dollar lottery in 1995. And yes, it's the same person, because the patent application's name and city matches and this article says he's a mathematician and his linkedin says he has a Ph.D in Mathematics. Here's his real software website, notice anything familiar? Yep, the design is exactly the same, no doubt about it this is our guy.
Here's his facebook if you want to leave him a message
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Next I'm going to patent my method for taking a shit.
Anyone caught shitting, is fucked.
I have prior art, you patent is invalid.
Nah, that'd be prior fart
The patent claims obtaining context information about the sender. However, spam filters obtain context information about the message not the sender. In general, spam filters care little about the sender as the sender is almost always forged.
I got notification from them as well but it went to the SPAM folder. Sorry.
... without looking at the headers.
1) the IP address of the originating end of the TCP connection, for lookup in a block list, is not in the headers
2) the SMTP HELO/EHLO - not in the headers
3) the envelope from and to addresses - not in the headers
4) the triplet of IP address, from and to for grey listing - not in the headers
5) the text of the body
6) the domains in any URLs in the body, for looking up in blocklists
7) the IP addresses that the domains in 6 resolve to.
The patent is very badly worded. I would claim that every header would contain some information which would be "usefiul (sic) to the recipient in understanding more about the context in which the sender sent the message".
In that case, how could any message "not contain such reference".
Is the patent just claiming to cover the headers, or the body as well. And as for the misspelling!
Things in the header that might possibly be covered might be any pre-existing "received-from" IP addresses for looking up in blacklists, X-Mailer, Mime and Content type headers.
What about "Missing Headers"? could this patent be claimed to cover looking for something which doesn't exist in the headers?
Some Scottish hippy friend of mine alleged her charity group managed to fight the good fight against patent trolls by applying for their own patent. Back in 1997 some Texan asshats applied for a patent on basmati rice. Of course this is bio-piracy and as insane as it sounds, the patent was actually granted. Clearly the patent system was as bent as a butchers hook (it still is?). Needless to say this would have destroyed countless livelihoods in India and probably left a lot of people to starve to death. In order to raise awareness for this problem and to put huge pressure on the American government to stop allegedly taking backhanders and burying the problem under red tape the hippy group applied for a patent themselves. They decided that seen as people enjoy eating chips (British chips = french fries in the USA) they decided to apply for a patent on a way of eating chips they had invented, and that is of eating chips with salt. They proved it perfectly legal under existing US patent laws and caused enough of a shitstorm to get the press involved and damage the bureaucrats PR until the patent was un-granted.
I cannot vouch for the truth of this tale she told me but I looked it up and found some pages backing up her claims.
http://www.purefood.org/patent/frenchfries032602.cfm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basmati
I'm working on documenting it here:
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/InNova_v._36_companies_(2010,_USA)
Help welcome.
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The Eastern district of Texas was, and perhaps still is friendly to patent trolls