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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.
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.
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 However, the base invention itself is obsolete.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.
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.
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.