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Doubleclick's Banner Ad Patent
Black Art writes "This Wired Story has information about Doubleclick's new patent on net banner ads. Yet another example that the patent office has lost all touch with reality. " Described as "Method of Delivery, Targeting, and Measuring Advertising Over Networks". Now might be an amusing time to mention that the
Free Banner Ad Server AdFu me and some of my cronies have contributed code to (Specifically Nate, Pater and Vroon) should have a patch out soon that you can already see in action on Slashdot: it integrates mod_perl, Adfu & Slash to allow ads to be served without Layers or IFRAMEs. (the old functionality is still in place if anyone needs that, but this way is much faster).
Hope it doesn't violate any patents. Note:
None of us have ever seen or used any of Doubleclicks stuff ;)
Doubleclick? Doubleclick? I'm trying to remember who they are. Lemme look in my hosts file... oh yeah. They're those guys at 127.0.0.1 whose banners never seem to load correctly. Oh well.
Back in the old days, the outer case of a dry cell was a cardboard tube wrapped around a zinc cup, and that zinc cup was the battery's sacrificial negative electrode. If you didn't throw out the battery before discharging it put the first hole in the zinc (i.e. while the flashlight still lit up just fine), the corrosive electrolyte paste would leak out and eat your flashlight.
Well Ray-O-Vac had a long-running R&D project to improve on that, and it had no luck. One day a member of the team came home in a blue funk and his wife (while cooking dinner) asked him what was wrong. He described the problem, and she says "Why don't you seal it in a steel can?"
Well, DUH!
So they tried it. And it worked. And Union Carbide (Everready), who had run similar but UNsuccessful long-term project, sued because it was "obvious".
So the judge asked the defense how long it had taken them to figure this out (I don't recall how many years). Then he asked the plaintif, and got a similar response. And he threw out the suit.
BUT...
The REAL issue is not whether it's obvious to a worker in the field, but whether the judge THINKS it is. So the game is to try to get it in front of the right judge. (For a long time patent challenges were always filed in the federal court district that tries its cases in Chicago, because there was this one judge who thought that EVERYTHING was obvious... B-) )
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Basically, this isn't all that surprising. And anyway, if the USPTO allows a patent, it can still always be thrown out in court. They don't really see themselves as a judiciary office. They're much more paperwork-oriented.
----
We all take pink lemonade for granted.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
My suspicion is that they're not trying to patent the concept of a banner ad, but rather the nefarious method they use to deliver them.
They distribute ads to hundreds of sites, and they set a persisent browser cookie, thus (sort of) bypassing the fact that cookies can only be returned to the server that issued them.
Since the cgi that delivers the image and sets the cookie is on a doubleclick server, they can track someone through any or all of the client sites. That's how they develop "user profiles". Their cookie mechanism is pretty much the equivalent of a browser history file. It's just a history file that only includes sites that use the doubleclick system.
Oh, I enjoy this.
Once Upon A Life, I used to debate competitively. A common procedure was to take some argument of the opponent and extend it to its "natural conclusion". Often these conclusions would be quite silly, and would be degraded as an example of Reducio Ad Absurdium(Reduction To The Absurd).
Saying that free software means that all programmers will starve to death would be a good example.
Saying that these programmers, in their hunger, will trigger a nuclear war that will destroy the earth is a realistic, debate world example. (I sh*t you not.)
Relevance, you ask? The absurd reduction of the concept that the patent office has the power to expand its own domain is that it will eventually allow ownership over the, well, patently obvious. An abusive debater would argue that government never, ever chooses to decrease its power, only to increase it(thus the use of counterbalanced powers--this way, one branch of government steals from another, and not from the overall pool of freedom), so the patent office would only limit its power grabbing up to the point where the courts would stop it.
Now, watch this. Since the patent office is the legal mediator between the "inventor" and the "infringer", it is ostensibly the objective expert in the matter of what makes a fair patent.
Courts defer to the experts. That the patent office possesses an extreme conflict of interest--it becomes more powerful(and rich) based on how much falls under its penumbra--is completely ignored.
So, given all that, the abusive debater would reduce the patent office into an agency that would apply patents to as much as it could possibly get away with, which would grow larger and larger with the passage of time, the deference of courts, and the greed of claimants.
Only what's funny is, as silly as this conclusion should be, we truly *are* seeing Reducio Ad Absurdium patents in widespread use. The concept of slapping a graphical advertisement on a virtual "page", just like one does with *gasp* real pages--this is not particularly inventive.
Neither, incidentally, is the exploitation of the most obvious security hole in cookie design. Nor, for that matter, naming your own price for a product and hoping somebody accepts it. (Ever been to a flea market?)
The general theme seems to be, if it's something common put online, it's automatically new and patentable. Not only is this an absurd conclusion, it's *debate* level absurd.
That basically means, from a philosophical point of view, one is ignoring every single piece of contravening reality to come to some conclusion that you desired in the first place. Amazingly, this pretty much describes what the patent office is doing.
But there's some beauty in all of this--remember when I was talking about counterbalanced powers? One agency of government has built up a pretty decent power base through its greed, but its completely unsecured. There's no "legitimacy value" to this power, so the potential exists to a) extract large amounts of campaign funding and b) get prestige and national name recognition(Americans love seeing corruption exposed, much like they like moving flower pots and seeing the insects writhe in the sunlight.) by going after the patent office.
In other words, greed will counter greed.
The more ridiculous the patents get, the more exposed businesses small and large become. The more exposed, the more willing to support a "champion" to defend their rights.
The Patent Agency is contributing to its own emasculation. This latest patent is just more of the same.
Run Lemming Run!
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Once you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.
Back in the Good Old Days (e.g. before about 1990), one could not patent software, according to the book "Patent It Yourself", third edition. I believe the logic was that software was simply too flexible to be reliably patented-- it was prohibitively difficult to verify that it was indeed a new unique process.
I'm not sure when the change was made to allow software patents, but I believe we can all now see the wisdom in disallowing them before. The Patent and Trademark office is clearly over its head when things like this are granted patent status. How hard is it for them to adjust their bias towards rejecting patents?
Keep in mind that the whole idea behind patents is fundamentally the same as Open Source Software. In exchange for a limited monopoly, people get full disclosure of how the patented process works. This knowledge can then be used to stimulate others' creativity, leading to new processes that might never have been created had the original process been kept secret.
Patents are a Good Thing, though it's sometimes hard not to lose sight of this when patents on widespread and overly generic processes are granted.
as you present no real arguments but resort to long words
And you do no better, except for the long words part. (Here I make the same mistake that you do, initiating my argument with an attack).
have already responded to your incorrect argument about the USPTO and their authority.
Yes I read your other post, and yes the Federal Courts do hear patent cases. This refutes the main thrust of the argument pertaining to a power grab by the USPTO, but it does not absolve the patent office from fufilling it's duty to make sure that the patents it grants are not obvious.
I had the most problem with the next paragraph.
What things can obtain a patent?
Things are obtaining patents now, it's worse than I thought.
How about traditional business models that have been extended to the computer industry?
How about them? I would think that most people would characterize such an extension as obvious and hence not patentable. Business models as a whole are only recently patentable. As you point out this is a court decision, not a patent office one, but it is a bad decision in any case.
Have you looked at any patent applications? Hint: The patent applications have many references to prior patents. The new patent is simply an extension of prior work.
The tone here is a little combative for my taste, but the point is clear enough. New patents tend to extend old patents and are seldom revolutionary. While this is true, the change should be novel and not obvious to a skilled practitioner of the art in question. It should never be enough to simply extend an old patent with no ingenuity.
Patents are usually very specific in terms of thier applicability. What some ppl hope to benefit from patents is by obtaining one that is vague and all incompassing.
An additional point that you might have made, but didn't, is that the claims on a patent always begin with absurd generality in the expectation that only the most specift claims will be accepted. Such a point, had it been made would have explained the apparent contradiction.
But, consider this. I have a great new
concept for the internet. MS then figures that they also want this.
My good idea is gone. MS now has extended and embraced my idea.
Ok, you have just made the point that patents are good for the holder of the patent. This is clearly true, otherwise there are millions of masochists and corporations that love losing money out there filing for patents left and right.
The issue is not what is good for the patent holder, or rather it is a means to an end. The issue is using law to maximize the societal benefits of innovation. Patents are a legal monopoly granted by the government in order to incentivize the production and publication of new ideas and technologies. They are not a right of the inventor. The only right the inventor has, under any reasonable conception of natural law, is to not have his actual property stolen, and to have his agreements with other parties adhered to. Patents allow the inventor to sell his product without worrying about enforcing individual non-disclosure agreements with each party. In this way they add to the efficiency and profitablity of invention and production.
The balance that must be struck is the encumberance that patents place on other inventors, every bit as inventive and productive as the first, who invent the same or similar technology or who wish to encorporate such a technology in their work, which in it's own right is beneficial to society. In the extreme patents might slow innovation to a halt as patent holders have no incentive to allow the transition to a better technology. While this is not the case, it is more of a threat the faster technology progresses. In the internet arena, patents should, at the very least, be drastically shorter than they are in the automotive hardware arena.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
I bet they could get it...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It seems that this kind of patent is just creating hassles. The only use for it is for Doubleclick to sue some other ad company for infringment. That's going to cost lots of money on both sides (and cost the government money in the process) and there is a high probablility that the patent will just get struck down anyway. There needs to be some kind of stricter patenting process that weeds out overbroad patents like this.
One of the problems with the wide use of computers and the internet, is that new things are being done everywhere, and in lots of different ways. Some one on another continent could be trying to solve the same problem as you, at the same time, and it seems a shame that only one would get a patent on it. (reminds me of Newton and Lebnitz[sp?])
1. Think of what is Right and True -- Miyamoto Musashi
demiurgeInteresting response. Entirely outside of what I expected.
/. moderator has a limited vocabulary.
/. moderator would mark this post as flamebait if I didn't limit my vocabulary.
For instance, you claim the following:
"you present the USPTO as some idealitic world far removed from any contraints."
Far from it. Rereading my post, I find that the federal courts are predisposed to favor the opinion of the official government body for determining patent fairness, the USPTO, when judging a patent infringement lawsuit. Such is the nature of the courts--stick to precendent, stay consistent, defer to experts.
My point was that the patent office is not an impartial judge of proper patentry, and as a method of power aggrandization will eventually attempt to usurp more and more power over obvious monopolies.
Again, I fail to understand how you could possibly claim that I believe the patent office exists without constraints; rather, I think that the primary constraints against it aren't truly counterbalancing, due to the expert deferrance. I also think new constraints will form as more and more money gets extorted from large companies.
While the ability to utilize patent extortion is a powerful source of leverage for many large corporations, the exposure possible from being extorted is so vast that we will see significant reforms on this front, if only because it will be cheaper to pay to get the law changed than to deal with the continual flow of frivolous patents.
Economics at work.
Lets look at some of the things you said. Could be fun.
This to me illustrates some of problems with the moderation as you present no real arguments but resort to long words. This then tells me that the average
This to me illustrates some of problems with your post as you present ad hominem attacks yet cannot intrepret long words. This then tells me that the average
Hint: The patent applications have many references to prior patents. The new patent is simply an extension of prior work.
This is not surprising. Here I am, arguing that the patent office is providing patents to more and more obvious things, and you're saying that the patent office is issuing patents related to previous patents.
The number 0 was novel once too, ya know.
You also have to consider, if you take a bunch of reference patents, then add something completely obvious(do it online!), you haven't particularly innovated much.
But, consider this. I have a great new concept for the internet. MS then figures that they also want this.
My good idea is gone. MS now has extended and embraced my idea.
We shouldn't be bashing Microsoft. They're standing up to Priceline. Brownie points from this Linux geek for that.
Lets extend your example into...like, reality. It's much more likely to be the other way around. MS has the money to patent any tiny idea that happens to spooge out in the middle of a board meeting, no matter how minute or obvious. You only patent your brilliance. Unfortunately, your one patent has been superceded by MS's thousands. They own your idea, or at least they threaten you into silence with expensive lawyers.
If I remember right, MS owns the concept to putting a computer in all those set top boxes that Everyone Will Buy and turning them into a distributed computing environment. Completely obvious to anyone in distributed computing.
Oh, sorry. Your great distributed computing idea...is now controlled by them. Sorry.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Once you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.
Congress passed/modified the patent laws which placed software processes in the same category as mechanical process (e.g., mousetraps). If I remember correctly, there was a very loud uproar from user groups, FSF, GNU, and technical journalists when this was first introduced. But Congress passed the new laws in spite of the objections. Probably because a strong lobby from the likes of Microsoft and IBM.