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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?
It makes me wonder why they're allowed to exist in the first place. Trolls, not humans.
To be honest, I'd just as well apply the first of the quoted sentences to cover most of humanity, too.
It makes me wonder why they're allowed to exist in the first place. Trolls, not humans.
I'm pretty sure the trolls are asking themselves the same question about us... :-)
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
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
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.
That's not the problem. Patents already do expire in X number of years.
The problem is twofold:
1. "X" is an eternity in an industry where "obsolete" means "more than six months old"
2. The patents are being granted on utter bullshit 'inventions,' bogus 'business processes,' and algorithms, and are not properly researched or vetted before being rubber stamped.
Your solution really doesn't solve anything.
Inventions are cumulative. There are inventions that are hundreds or thousands of years old that are still used as part of modern technology. However, the base invention itself is obsolete.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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.
yes. the macbook air design patent story surprised me. i think it's probably legitimate as a design patent, but really it should have been granted 4-5 years ago and expired at least 2-3 years ago. these lifetimes are silly.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Since they often use broad wording, you see people being sued for internet inventions over a patent that was intended to cover a fax machine etc.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
Does not mean trolls aren't to blame either. Even if you can do something does not mean you should.
Quick way to get 30% Funny 70% Troll: defend Opera browser on
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.
It's not enough that they had snippets; they had to have snippets which worked in the same way as described in the patent. More importantly they need to have either patented how it worked or published that. If you do know such a publication putting it up would be really helpful to someone.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
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.
Welcome to the world of AdBlock! Or alternatively, Userstyles or Greasemonkey...whatever floats your boat.
The snippets patent isn't legit, Altavista and Lycos BOTH PREDATE this patent and both had snippets.
Altavista only showed the first line or two of the matching web page. One of the reasons I switched from Altavista to Google was Google showed you the context around your search term, which I found more useful than Altavista's summary. Of course I lost out on Altavista's "near" operator.
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.
Or what about if you are an employee where who is only tasked with dealing with patents all day long - are you somehow an evil patent troll minion?
I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with abstracting out a concept, for example we prefer to deal in money rather than trading eggs and bags of flour with each other. The term patent troll seems to be thrown around a lot here on slashdot, yet I see a contradiction with what I believe is a community wholly comfortable in dealing with the abstract.
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.