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Patent Troll Sues Google, AOL Over Search 'Snippets' and Ad Serving Tech
First time accepted submitter WindyWonka writes "Google and AOL were sued for patent infringement Thursday, accused of violating two former British Telecom patents via Google's search 'snippets' and by Google AdSense and Advertising.com ad serving technology. Incredibly, the lawsuit by apparent patent troll Suffolk Technologies asserts that every Google search result 'snippet' display violates one patent, and that another really broad server patent is violated every time Google and AOL serve up ads."
Who is behind the funding of this Patent Troll?
AOL? American Organization of Lamers?
Patent trolls. Just another manifestation oh human greed and stupidity. It makes me wonder why they're allowed to exist in the first place. Trolls, not humans.
you're killing the goose that laid the golden egg with these shitty patents!
This never-ending series of X sues Y articles bores the shit out of me. Constantly presenting them implies the average technology reader does, or should, have an abiding interest in these corporate hijinks, these capitalist dick-length spats, the outcomes of which are of concern chiefly to powerful, monied interests and their lawyers.
The degree to which our attention is focused on this garbage shows how much our souls are being sucked dry. Science, math, even technology offers much more than this kind of crap.
When Vernor Vinge wrote True Names in 1981, even he couldn't foresee the coming-to-a-world-near-you technological singularity would be held up, not by warfare or massive economic disaster, but by simple antiquated litigation.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
Google has a ridiculously good record of winning against patent trolls, and I have no doubt this will be another one that they vanquish. You'd think companies would know by now to stay away.
They need to modify the patents so that unless you are doing something useful with it (actually creating something based on it) that the patent runs out within x number of years. This is ridiculous.
Someone really needs to find something more constructive for these lawyers to do, like lining the bottom of the oceans.
Showing the use of a search term in context (i.e. showing a "snippet") is a feature of a concordance - a kind of document that has been produced manually for hundreds of years. So there seems to be lots of prior art.
If you said to these people, "If you lose, you will be fined 1000x the cost you are seeking", it wouldn't make a difference because these are normally shelf companies set up for the sole purpose of hurting society at large.
In this instance, noone re-enforced the patents quickly enough, so they should be dismissed fairly easily. However, there will be little consequence to the a**hats driving this charade, but there will be lengthy headaches for the companies defending themselves.
We all need to lobby our local official to fix the system, starting from the registering and granting of patents. We've got some great collective minds and muscle to tackle this problem.
If this one actually goes to court, it's gonna get good. I love watching Google stomp on patent trolls.
Just another reason why trolls should be forced to live under bridges. "Anyone can speak troll, all you have to do is point and grunt". Trolls are very strong, but also very stupid. They are always trying to get anything shiny and of value from unsuspecting travellers, and will try and stop people and force money from them. Remember, the reason trolls like dark places is that if sunlight is shone on them, they crumble and die. Trolls can be eradicated by baiting them, and getting them to go after shiny things like gold and money. If you can get them to run out from under the bridge on a cloudy day when they aren't suspecting anything, they can be far from where they like to hide. When exposed to the full light of day (and truth) trolls die quickly. Get these trolls to go after shiny gold. When they think the gold is within reach, they will run to get it. Its at that time that you shine the light (of truth) on them. They will be caught in the light and die their troll like death. Its one of the reasons trolls live under bridges: if they don't have to go far and do much to 'shake money out of people' they are happiest. Threats are their big thing, along with willing payers.
some of my websites may violate those patents as well. For example, (it's a message board), you hover over a post and it shows a snippet of the post without having to open the whole thing. By creating that 'snippet' using an 'algorithm', wouldn't that fall under it?
Secondly, the other patent uses a 'signal' from the referring page to determine what to send... my board software uses query_string 'signals' to determine what pages to 'send'... gosh. Could it be any more broad?
What a f'ing troll.
The snippets patent isn't legit, Altavista and Lycos BOTH PREDATE this patent and both had snippets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine
Even without going to terminals searches like ORACLE and BBS searches, this patent, patented something that already existed and once again shows how bogus the patent system has become.
Patents are supposed to be inventions, yet here,yet again, its just someone documenting the techniques of the day.
We're so bombarded with adds that hopefully the patent system will put a stop to anyone trying to advertise. I'm sick and tired of commercials and advertisements. Lets all obtain patents sue advertisers for infringement.
Adastral Park is in the Village of Martlesham Heath near Ipswich.
There is no way that it is 'just south of Cambridge' in the same way that London is 'just south of Cambridge' or New York is just south of Albany.
Ipswich is a good hour away down the A14 from Cambridge(accidents with HGV's permitting). You are going SE almost as far as you can go without getting your feet wet in the North Sea.
BT do still have a research outfir there but it is a mere shadow of its former self. I worked there for a while in the early 1990's.
BT have spun off a whole load of non essential businesses. It wouldn't surprise me if this 'troll' company is just a one man and a dog outfit where the man used to work for BT and got laid off.
There was a time when I worked for BT that the mantra in Martlesham (As it was called then) was 'Patent Everything'. BT had been hit by some stupid patent suits that delays us getting SDHC services into operation. We'd bought some chips from a supplier. The chips used some patented tech but the patent owner decided that one bite of the apple was not enough and came after us, the end user. In the end it got resolved. I heard through the grapevine that BT Had bought the company outright but I can't confirm that as by the time this was sorted, I'd left BT and moved on.
If you go read the patent, there are two things to note.
First, is that the patent provides very explicit flow charts that describe the algorithm that generates the summary. All Google and AOL have to do to win is show that they generate their summaries using a different algorithm.
Second, is that the patent is for an algorithm to calculate which section should be shown in a summary. You cannot patent algorithms. The patent shouldn't have been awarded in the first place.
I hate the USPTO and I hold a (hardware) patent.
I void warranties.
Although the RFC was only published a month later, it had been circulating in draft and discussion forms for over a year before it was published, and the notion of the Referer header and its use by servers in deciding what content to return was already public knowledge by the time of both patent application and publication.
In short, this is yet another fraudulent patent where someone has claimed to invent something that was already standard practice. The patent-holder and applicants should be prosecuted for attempting to obtain money by deception. The egregious criminal bastards just took something that was being developed in a public standards process, wrote it up in generic and abstract terms, and rush-filed a patent just ahead of the completion of the standards process. Fuck them and the horse they rode in on.
Strategy 1
If BT had really known then how to build a search engine, they would be Google.
They had a big head start in resources.
But they didn't and they ain't.
Part of the reason is that they didn't know how to build what the 132 patent 'teaches' at scale.
Strategy 2
Claim 1 describes a general method for making a concordance with an 'apparatus'.
It seems likely that the algorithm has been implemented with the 'apparatus' being a group of monks.
Sounds to me like the trolls think they have a patent on all methods of wiping one's nose, or picking up a piece of paper and putting it into a waste basket. . Grind up trolls and market them as dog food.
Jared Rhine, then at Harvey Mudd College, wrote a feedback form CGI that took the "Referer:" header into account to allow the feedback form to be dropped onto various web pages, and caused the content to change based on where it was referred from. He did this in 1994.
Kee Hinckley at Utopia, Inc. documents the specific process he used in an email dated 30 May 1995.
You need to be careful there. Redirection is often used to do some
processing at point A and the continue on to point B. You don't want to
cache *that* result. It's not always as the result of a form submission
either. In fact we do this when people point a Lycos, Yahoo, Infoseek or
OpenText search at one of our mailing lists. We check the Referer field,
figure out what you were searching for in the particular file you are
hitting, and then redirect you to the same document, but this time with
parameters (including a #xxx) which will take you to the right point in the
document. Caching that would make it impossible for the user to ever go
directly to the top of the document.
That's probably prior enough art to invalidate in the UK as well.
-- Terry
Almost On Line
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.