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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
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.