Slashdot Mirror
Patent Attempt on some forms of Dynamic Web Posting
Scott Ainsworth writes "ZDNet has a new story on a company patenting distributed processing. This time it is about distributing the generation of Dynamic Web pages accross multiple servers. The story is here. " The company apparently says that they hold the patent on many of the load-balancing technqiues that companies use on the Web. *sigh*
Companies interested in more information about the InfoSpinner patent should contact Brad Carl, vice
president and general counsel for InfoSpinner, at 972-479-0135.
...and...
Elizabeth Walker
InfoSpinner, Inc.
972-479-0135
lizw@infospinner.com
It was about 2-3 years ago and somebody called our ISP to signup for an account. We asked him if he wanted a dial-up PPP or SLIP account, he immediately asked us what PPP was, we told him and he was furious. You see, this guy owned the trademark for PPP and during the phone conversation was threatening us to cease and desist using PPP without permission. His trademark represented each initial in his name, some sort of family tradition. At first he thought just our company was using the acronym, then when he realized that it was used across the computing industry as a whole he became more irate...
;)
He went on for weeks about how he was not going to permit the Internet to use his trademarked name and we all got a good chuckle over the whole thing...
Bottom line? Watch your mouth and only use bland and generic words to describe the world around you
Basically, the patent system works far better in theory than in practice. For every abstract argument you can make about the need to spur innovation, I can give you a dozen horror stories from real life about how it has destroyed businesses, careers and products and denied the public the benefits of competition and innovation. I have personally been involved in the defense of a very high stakes patent dispute, and I can assure you that it is even more expensive, messy, arbitrary, unfair, emotionally draining and wasteful of talent and resources than you can possibly imagine if you haven't been through this experience.
Even the patent attorneys I know concede, in their unguarded moments, that the system is almost totally broken. Why does it continue to exist? Some of it is simple governmental intertia. But the people with the most influence over the policy are the patent lawyers, and they always win whenever a patent is litigated, no matter what the outcome. The going rate for reasonably experienced patent attorneys working on a litigated case is $400/hour, and you may have several dozen working off and on over the space of a few years on a major case.
Nor do the patent lawyers have a monopoly on greed. There are countless individuals who, mindless of the historical experience to the contrary and heedless of the general damage to society, see the patent system as an easy get-rich-quick scheme. It's the same mentality that keeps casinos and state lotteries in business. At least I have the choice of not playing the lottery or patronizing a casino; I don't have that option with the patent system.
The whole thing is so sickening and depressing that it almost makes me want to give up engineering.
Phil Karn
Perhaps we should create a list of companies that have filed questionable patents with the intent of boycotting them. I can't think of any other form of protest that would work or be generally free (i.e. hiring lawyers to fight these companies would be expensive). If companies learned that technology managers boycotted companies filing questionable patents it could have an effect. Along with the whole open source credo/ideal I personally don't want to support companies that seriously try to infringe on others people's ability to do basic tasks. Things like patenting style sheets, the whole idea of selling data online, etc.
I suspect (although I have not done the research) that there is quite a bit of prior art for this patent. Unfortunatly digging up configurations for the web servers from 3 years ago may be quite difficult.
Of course what we really need is a documented channel for challenging patents that are too obvious/trivial.
I guess this is as good a time as any for the obligatory "Why are they only looking into infringement opportunities now? Certainly they've seen these kind of server setups popping up all over the place for a couple of years now, why did they wait so long? It must be the money."
I read the internet for the articles.
And remember... it's just an idea.
Why not allow patents on ideas?
The patent holder could carefully word his/her idea and back it up with hard data. The patent holder could not keep anyone from using the idea but if money had been made using the idea then the patent holder would be entitled to a royalty. The royalty period would expire after a certain amount of time had passed.
The idea is not to halt or impede the free flow of information but to reward those with good ideas! It would also allow scientists and engineers who were especially productive to get quite wealthy too! In turn, rapid advances in technology would result due to the increased incentive. New markets would be created for even higher profits for corporations. Private research would become commonplace.
Is this idea workable? If it is then I've already gotten my patent application in for it.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
No no no, you're missing the point. What I'm talking about would piggyback on the recent Appeals Court decision which ruled that the U.S. Law forbidding export of strong crypto could not be used to restrict publication of strong crypto source code, because such restriction would violate First Amendment rights. Essentially, source code is free speech which cannot be restricted.
.tar.gz, cvs repository, or any other form of source code.
So, an SRPM is source code is free speech, and restrictions on it, e.g. Software Patents, are invalid. Same for a
As I said though, we do have to wait for the Supreme Court to either rule on the case or uphold the Appeals Court ruling before posting such code, because if they rule otherwise, then the case is shot and there could be pretty steep damages to pay. But if this works, then OSS gains MASSIVE competitive advantage!!
Sorry I wasn't more explicit the first time. Is there any hole in my logic?
"...the firmament sheweth his handiwork" (Ps. 19:1)
Firmament Science and Engineering
Standing on the Solid St
We have to wait a little while for the Supreme Court to rule, but...
:-)
If source code is Speech, protected by the First Amendment, then software patents cannot legally restrict it, and we can post patent-breaking SRPMs with impunity, right?
This would be fun to litigate.
"...the firmament sheweth his handiwork" (Ps. 19:1)
Firmament Science and Engineering
Standing on the Solid St
Many areas of technology have load balancing. Why is this novel?
At the manufacturing plant where we use steam to cure special plastic compounds, we have two boilers to balance the load during high demand. We have two electric feeds into the substations. We have a multimegawatt backup peaking generator. The list goes on and on.
In fact, load balancing does not stop with technology, it has been in our lives. Some people balance high social needs with a backup significant other. Its human nature to be redundant.
Patents are evil.
It would be nice to live in another country, perhaps for the experience. If some chick over the internet invited me overseas, I'd be over in a heartbeat (yeah, like that's really going to happen...) Meanwhile, I just read about the fun people have when they take long vacations or move, even if it is only across the border.
My biggest fear about jumping ship is that I only know my native language. I could find myself quite unemployed and worthless. I do not think programming fluently in several computer languages count if I needed to talk in a new place.
Jumping is a thrill. The biggest fear is moving to a new place is knowing employment is not guaranteed.
I jumped once. Four years ago, I quit what was thought to be a very good job working for the university administration in Kansas City. I moved for a sweetheart in some small Mississippi town (internet addiction does things like that.) I moved with $500 in cash. My credit card went unpaid for five months. In my case, I was lucky. I got what seemed a decent job at a decent place. Promotions came fast. Turned out I work for a very good employer. State run employment offices really do work. The only problem was I failed to do a background check on my partner. In that case, I was unlucky.
Its great we have freedom to change. In my case, even good came from the bad. Would I move due to silly laws? I'm afraid it would take more than that for me as challenges seem to be a way of life. Its easier running to something good than running away from something bad.
Uhhh, read this quote from InfoSpinner:
.. but I think we're in agreement that no matter how you read it the technologies have been around long before Apr 96.
"When the browser makes the request to a Web server,
the patent covers the notion of redirecting that request to
other machines [application servers] within a cluster and
having those other machines dynamically produce a
response,"
No mention of load balancing here. Redirection fits into the above if you set cluster size=1.
This is me playing devil's advocate in any case... and they probably couldn't stand up in court -- but that won't stop them from trying to intimidate others.... the granted patent may be more specific so InfoSpinner might get shot down in going the whole nine yards as indicated above.
As previously covered by slashdot.h tml
"Eddie is a suite of three software applications that together make web sites robust and scalable. It consists of a load-balancing DNS server,an admission controlfront-end and an IP migrating facility."
http://slashdot.org/articles/98/11/09/1858201.s
"Eddie provides advanced automatic traffic management and configuration of geographically distributed server sites, consisting of one or more Local Area Networks."
http://wwweddie.serc.rmit.edu.au/what.html
so are patents.
nature already provides plenty of motivation to innovate. we don't need the government to mess with the incentive system given to us in the form of the free market.
copyrights and patents are just another form of corporate welfare. copyright is the source of the next war on drugs.
information is free.
the only question is:
Scott Draves
Doesn't this patent simply describe apache (which existed before 1996) ? Apache uses a single parent process to receive all requests. This parent passes off requests to its children, which often generate dynamic content.
"Don't throw the baby out with the bath-water" is an old adage. However, when the way you're doing things involves keeping the baby in the bathtub all the time, it's time to significantly rethink the whole mechanism.
We can acknowledge the idea of patents as good and still have a severe problem with the way the U.S. Patent Office (or whoever) implements it. I stand in this particular category. I would really like to see the Patent Office working hand-in-hand with organizations in the software industry that are really knowledgeable and who would stand to gain by committing their legal department to verifying a patent application's viability (I'm sure in light of Microsoft's recent "CSS belongs to us" fiasco, the W3C is one group that would gladly lend some of its legal and technical advice to close the barn door BEFORE the horses have left).
As long as the Patent Office continues to operate on its own, blindly, in the dark, I cannot in good conscience support it.
Nothing worth doing is worth doing today.
Im getting quite sick of these patents are evil, everything should be free garbage. For the most part (and this means you fellow American) our society could *not* be where it is today without patents and trademarks. They are what helped form and shape our capitalistic society. If you don't like the way its done look at the alternatives... they aren't doing so well. In China things are stolen and ripped off so often there is very little drive to innovate. Japan tends to have even more protection for inventions than we do, and what do you know, they must seek more curious and interesting solutions to problems. Yes the patent office is letting some real crap through but for the most part it is doing a decent job of rewarding those that do innovate and do the hard work it takes to come up with a new idea. I would gather most of you have never seen what the patent process is really like, its not nearly as easy as you may think. I know because I am applying for a couple of patents right now... and yes I do think my ideas are different and novel enough to be rewarded (then again they arent really computer related).
F /...
---
Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
This patent described the process IBM implemented
in it's CICS transaction processing system in the
early 1970's. CICS implemented a system called
Multi-Region Operation, where a Terminal Owning
region would route transactions to various
Application Owning regions, which would further
route data requests to various Data Owning regions.
Change the name of the Terminal Owning region to
a Web Server and IBM's CICS is an exact duplicate
of the patent.
Thanx Doug...
It seems to me that this kind of thing can be easily prevented for future patents. People in the open source movement code because they -enjoy- coding, they like experimenting with ideas. How many of us have written throwaway programs just to 'see if I can do it'? How many of those ideas are now patented by somebody?
Don't throw away those 'see if I can' programs. Publish them on the 'net - preferably digitally signed to a newsgroup archived by DejaNews et. al. Just be sure to clearly label your program 'proof of concept' so that nobody thinks it's supposed to be more than that. And if everyone puts the phrase 'proof of concept' in the keywords of their postings, a search of deja-news will quickly spit out prior-arts to challenge future patents with - assuming, of course, that some enterprising soul doesn't start a prior-art archive somewhere with thousands of these little programs.
Remember that most of these patents are founded on sloppy little programs just like that, that prove the concept but are utterly useless in the real world. And remember that it isn't prior art unless it's published.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
There is also no exemption from patent law for research. A competitor can keep you from conducting research if it involves using their patents. This is a particular problem in the biotech industry, where patents on genes and gene products limit the kind of research other institutions can conduct.
Those patents can also be used by private companies to force publically researchers to agree to restrictive terms when they want to conduct publically funded research involving genes or products that are patented.
All of this is very recent, and I don't think the impact even has begun to make itself felt.
When it comes to enforcing such patents, technical content makes little difference. What matters is mainly a tradeoff between management time spend on dealing with litigation vs. licensing cost. As long as the licensing cost is kept below the cost of management time, the patent will get licensed, valid or not.
This is an economic problem: patents are enormously valuable and impose risk on others; their cost compared to their value is tiny (although the cost of entry for making any money off them is fairly high, since they need to be prepared carefully and be backed up by a believable legal team in order to actually get licensing revenue).
And the solution, I believe, has to be economic, too: there should be real costs and risks to the patent holder if a patent is later invalidated because of obviousness or prior art. For example, people who paid licensing fees should be able to have them returned, legal fees should be reimbursed, companies who lost revenue because their management was kept busy through legal tactics should be able to recover expenses and damages, etc.
Changing the patent office itself won't help, and neither will increasing patent fees (that will only keep out the small inventor). The beauty of making patent holders liable if their patents are invalidated is that it is self regulating and puts the burden of careful evaluation on the patent submitter, where it should be.
There are two things that can be usefully done:
I don't really have much of a problem with copyrights, but patents really bug me. Especially these days, too many companies are patenting obvious processes by applying it to the Internet. All of a sudden, it's some whiz-bang new invention and the lawyers get richer.
Software is much more analagous to writing than construction or invention. Copyright law protects an author from someone simply copying the sequence of words written on a page. Authors can't patent a particular passage, paragraph or novel. I believe software is more like a novel. It just happens to be written in a peculiar style with a rather limited vocabulary.
Most of the time I see patents in other fields besides software, it's on tubes of toothpaste. Colgate can't make a squeeze tube like the one that Crest has, but does this really affect the product inside? I'm not convinced the patent office has a useful purpose these days.
So if Rob was to set up a second machine to help dynamicaly create some of the many of thousands of webpages /. produces in a day would he be infringing on their patent?
I seem to remember computers doing things like this way before 1996. Maybe it was the 70's or something. Really what is the difference between serving up webpages and distributed code compiling or distributed 3d rendering (ok 3d rendering wasn't happening in the 70's but you catch my drift.)
Maybe it's time we started up a defence fund.
----
"War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left"
"War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left"
Steven Wright
Come on...
;)
The US Patent office has issued so many unenforceable patents it is not even funny.
If this patent went to court, it would be smashed apart. As far as I am aware, you can only patent a PROCESS. In software terms, this would mean patenting code.. not the IDEA for a code base. Ideas are un-patentable.
But then.. we already have copyright for code, since it can be considered a written work. So what the hell is the patent office doing issuing patents for software based solutions?
Let me put it another way.. you can patent the subsystem of a car, but you have to patent the apparatus that performs that work.. you can't patent the -idea- of a windshield wiper. You can only patent a particular windshield wiper assembly. You can even patent it all the way down to the rubber used in the wiper. But if Joe Cars sees your wiper, and comes up with his own method of making windshield wipers, you have no claim.
Am I totally off base here? Hopelessly off my legal rocker? Please correct me, legions of legal liasons, and I shall recant.
----
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Freedom."
Copyrights last longer but aren't as all-encompassing as patents. Copyrights have a higher voltage, but patents have a higher amperage - and it's the amperage that kills you (OK, so it's a silly analogy).
If I patent an algorithm, you can't implement it without my permission for 20 years. Period. End of discussion. You can't even improve upon it, because that requires my original algorithm. On the other hand, if I copyright my algorithm, all you have to do is implement it in a different language or on a different architecture, or think of a different way to do the same thing.
You can't copyright an idea, but you can patent one. The creator of Visicalc (Dan Bricklin?) could have patented the software but made an informed decision not to do so. If he had, though, no one would have been able to create a spreadsheet program legally without getting his permission - he would have been RICH.
The patent law definitely has more teeth than the copyright law, and software patents are definitely bad. And I think the 75 years you mention is actually 75 years after the death of the creator, so if a corporation holds the copyright, it never ends. Though I could be wrong about that.
The way the system works is that someone files an obvious patent, rattles a saber, and then someone else in the industry goes to court to prove the patent obvious and thus unenforcable. That is exactly what is going to happen here.
My $.02 -
No corporation would EVER allow a judge to rule on their obvious patents, because they know they'd lose them. They'd settle out of court.
The way the system works is that big corporations file obvious patents and rattle a saber. Then all the other big corporations rattle their sabers (their obvious patents). Then they all get together and cross-license their obvious patents. Then, when an upstart startup comes along (without a $10E6 legal budget), all the big corporations in the industry rattle their collective sabers and chase the little guys out of town.
Obvious patents thus function as a barrier to entry. No sane non-lawyer would check to see if an obvious idea was patented, since (conventional wisdom) you can't patent obvious ideas. it wouldn't even occur to them that some procedure or algorithm they were using was patented. So a patent violation gets put into production and the giant corporate patent holder sues them out of business.
It seems they're claiming that they have a patent on the process of pushing web requests off to other servers which reside in a pool of available servers in a manner such that no server is overloaded. Hence load balancing.
Even though this is more specific than redirecting or spawning new threads, it is still a very obvious process. I can't understand why the patent office is letting things like this slide. Why is such a simple process considered new when you put the word "web" in there somewhere?
This exact thing has been done for years, but now that it's a web server (ooh, new technology!) it's patentable. I wish that the patent office would realize what all this technology they're reviewing means and what the implications of these broad patents are.
-- atomly
While patents may be being systematically abused, I can think of an example where a patent almost certainly exists or is applied for and makes perfect sense:
Scientists working for IBM developed a method for depositing copper on silicon VLSI substrates. This is remarkable because copper (normally) would diffuse into the silicon lattice and "poison" the semiconductor junctions that make up the transisitors that make a chip useful in the first place. Prior to this some other metal was depositied (I think, actually, it was aluminum, but I am not an EE). Copper is superior as a conductor because it can handle more current per unit area (allowing more gates per square millimeter) and the device will, therefore, use less current and produce less heat. It can, therefore, also be clocked faster.
AMD will be producing a CPU chip that uses copper technology. They are talking about GHz clock speeds and lower power requirements. Intel and Cyrix may be working on/with the technology, but they aren't telling us.
Now, should these companies be able to go off and make billions upon billions of dollars without giving IBM (and/or the scientists who figured out how to do this) one red cent? I'm sure IBM will get their red cents. I'm also sure they should.
There is a lot broken about patents, but I sure as heck don't think they should be scrapped.
My co-workers and I have gone around and around on this topic over many a cold soyburger down in the corporate cafeteria (I hate turbo fish!). We went back and forth on the value of patents.
;-)
Personally, I think patents are very important. They encourage two things:
1) Innovation, by protecting the exclusive right to exploit an idea for a period of time, allowing a person to profit from his/her cleverness without getting trounced by someone with more money than ideas.
2) Improvement in the state of the art. Part of the patent is an exhaustive description of the invention or process. (AFAIK, specific machines and specific processes are patentable). When the patent expires, there's the full description in the patent -- go to it folks, have a field day!
This system works reasonably well for machines and industrial processes. The length of the patent (I'm not a lawyer, I know it is several years, and the the exact number varies from country to country -- how many years in the US? It's like 7 or 9 or something like that) makes sense for something you to "tool up" to make.
My thought was that software, which has very low capital requirements to produce, and which, therefore, changes much more rapidly than machines and industrial processes, could use its own patent. A software patent would expire in 12-18 months. This is much more in line with the rate at which change occurs in our industry.
This isn't a fully-fleshed out idea, just one of those ideas tossed out like turbo fish over lunch. Still, I think such a system would be better than applying current patents, and might even be better than copyright. Copyright has the virtue of protecting only an exact code version, but the defect of lasting much much longer than needed (60 years, isn't it?)
Well, I'll let the amateur Matlocks point out how ignorant of the law I am...
What if a product (i.e. php3), is given away for free? Even though this product still infringes upon a patent, can anything be done about it? No one is making money off of it, and there could be a hundred different developers, from some bright 10 year old on his dad's computer, to a 90 year old guy with nothing better to do. You can't just sue some of them, can you?
And you can't charge them royalties because they are not selling anything.
What if it is just the source code that is distributed? The source code, in itself, does not infringe upon the patent because it doesn't do anything. Only the compiled binary would infringe upon the patent. With the recent ruling that encryption source code is considered free speech, wouldn't source code to php be considered free speech also? If so, banning people from releasing it would be a violation of our first amendment.
Just a few thoughts.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
The patent is available at:
http://www.patents.i bm.com/details?pn=US05894554__&language=en
Review:
On a side note, they reference a patent from Oracle which seems to claim that they invented the idea of having a web server retrieve data from a database through a stored procedure. It seems anyone can get a patent for anything these days.
Scott Severtson
Software Developer
Auragen Communications
scotty@auragen.com
Scott Severtson
Senior Architect, Digital Measures
So, if I remember correctly, IBM used a system called "Womplex" to host the 1996 Olympic website. After receiving an HTTP request, the system would send out a message on a private WAN to several servers placed around the world and have them each ping the recipient, and then determine what the "best" webserver for the user to be on the resulting ping times. It would then feed the user a dynamically-built web page with all of the links pointing to the server that had the lowest latency to them.
There was a C|Net article about this dated June, '96 (two months after the Infospinner filing), but the system obviously was built and running at that point. Sounds like prior art to me. Did anyone dig through InfoSpinner's filing enough to know?
It takes a long time to get a patent. If they filed in 1996, they may very well have received it this year.
The ambitions are: wake up, breathe, keep breathing.
Until recently, I was a patent attorney. I have written and secured software patents. IMHO, the patent system is hopelessly flawed, and I am not sure any form of patent protection is justified. I keep reading the Slashdot discussions regarding each new software patent, and I am waiting for people to wake up to what the patent system is about.
People have this notion that a patent is granted on "real" inventions (you know, light-bulbs, transistors, etc). The idea is that we reward those who solve the big problems. Unfortunately, that is not how the system works. I have read thousands of patents, and I can tell you that very few of them solve a problem in a new way. The vast majority of the time, what happens is this: someone, upon stumbing on a new (to them) problem, quickly figures out the most obvious, straight-forward solution. The solution they find is the same one that most people in the same field would come to when they stumble onto the same problem. But because this particular individual was first to find the problem (in a fast moving area of technology, they may have found the problem a month or less before their competitors), they were first with the solution. They are, under our system, entitled to a patent, and entitled to exclude others from their solution. It simply doesn't matter (practically) that it was a simple solution and took no real spark of creativity. What matters is that this person was first.
Follow the logic here: Everything was new at some point. Under our patent laws everything (at the time it was new) could have been patented and held up for a period of twenty years. As long as the person who came up with it first applies for a patent, forget about using it for twenty years. Does this promote science and the useful arts? In a sideways kind of way, it might. But generally (and overwhelmingly in an area like software), it cripples innovation.
I have absolutely no idea whether this particular patent is valid. What I do know is that there is no reason in principle (under our patent system) that the person who first applied the notion of load-balancing to web-servers could not get a perfectly valid patent. What I see in this discussion is people trying desperately to explain why this particular patent may not be valid. The key is this: why do you want so much for it to be invalid? Because it would be wrong to stop programmers from applying a common-sense scheme like load-balancing to web-servers just because someone else was the first to run up against this particular problem. In other words, those who are trying to innovate can only hope that the patent system does not work as designed. In still other words, our patent system is wrong.
I hope you will all forgive me for venting, but I have been close to this problem for a long time, and I hope that the day will come when ordinary people come to realize the nature of our patent system and dismantle it (or at least gut it so that it is no more harmful than copyright).
-Steve, a recovering patent attorney
Democracy is a poor substitute for liberty.
I know that these guys filed in April 1996, but we presented "Creole" in October 1996. Although the SIGDOC documentation says "Latte," we had discovered that Borland had a product in the works named that, so we changed the name to "Creole."
Creole was an SGML/HTML parser and compiler with a built-in scripting language and virtual-machine -- the CVM (Creole Virtual Machine). Requests to any number of web servers would be passed by a webserver plug-in or CGI script to the Creole server for processing. Creole itself could also run as a CGI program.
It seems to fit the bill.
NC State University was using the first version of Latte on their website in late 1995 and 1996.
We might have prior art... but it'll be hard to prove. I'd love to prove it, of course, for the sheer pleasure of invalidating their patent and returning to the public domain the idea of distributed processing for the web.
The SICDOG proceedings abstract is here.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.