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Yahoo Patents Dynamic Page Generator
Here is the abstract of their patent: United States Patent 5,983,227 (Nov. 9, 1999)
Dynamic page generator
Abstract
A custom page server is provided with user preferences organized into templates stored in compact data structures and the live data used to fill the templates stored local to the page server which is handing user requests for custom pages. One process is executed on the page server for every request. The process is provided a user template for the user making the request, where the user template is either generated from user preferences or retrieved from a cache of recently used user templates. Each user process is provided access to a large region of shared memory which contains all of the live data needed to fill any user template. Typically, the pages served are news pages, giving the user a custom selection of stock quotes, news headlines, sports scores, weather, and the like. With the live data stored in a local, shared memory, any custom page can be built within the page server, eliminating the need to make requests from other servers for portions of the live data. While the shared memory might include RAM (random access memory) and disk storage, in many computer systems, it is faster to store all the live data in RAM.
Maybe, but making paople pay me for the ability to have sex would be a lot more money for me in the long run. I'd charge by the minute, plus charge licencing fees to use the patented "tools" each year. I better not talk much more as I might give Gill Bates an idea. (nice avoidance of defam lawsuit there huh?)
It is time to change the buisness practices of the drones of the world.
so if the date on IPC::Shareable is more than 1 year over the patent date, it obviously falls into the prior art clause. hopefully nullifying the yahoo patent
--"oh dear" said god, "i hadn't thought of that" and vanished in a puff of logic--
how bout a dunce cap with the caption "really obvious sh*t"
- bridgette
It looks like the usual scam - there's enough prior art to sink this if it was ever fought but they're hoping people will find it cheaper to pay the $80,000 protection money they're asking than the legal fees to fight it. The letter their lawyers sent listed several large companies that are being sued and asserted that many other companies have already paid for licenses.
I think the whole industry is starting to be challenged by those lusers. Outside of suing the US Patent Office for negligence, I think we need something like John Walker's PATO, where software companies could pool their resources to defend against these leeches.
I'm not contributing a lot to this conversation,
but I am getting some good answers (like Ed Aus')
to my questions. Just how the hell[1] do you
patent a gene? I've got about a bunch(tm) in my
body. Am I infringing on someone's patent?
It seems to me that the human genome project
id discovering what we're all made of. I cannot
see how this is patentable. We've been around
for a few hundred thousand years. Is this not
prior art? If any one has any links to how
this is being justified I'd love to see them.
[1] pardon my french
Any method, process, set of instructions which produces directy or indirectly results in any new or original patents.
This way I can claim royalties on every patent out there.
(Please Moderate me as "lame".)
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
True. I believe Volkswagen (I know someone did this, may not have been VW) patented the seat belt, but let everyone else use it free of charge. If this the the route Yahoo wants to take with this patent, then by all means let them, and hail them as the protectors of this technology.
They'd have to be really stupid to try and patent something like this with the intention of mass lawsuits, IMHO... but who said big businesses were intelligent?
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
It's here: http://worldforge.org/website/about/pa tents/. Credited it simply to 'slashdot' as it touches on ideas brought by many people here. You might like Ideas For Fixes.
This is ridiculous. I think it is about time to start a bit of Civil Disobedience: everyone should just ignore stupid patents like this one. Just make the patent system go away by simply ignoring it in Thoreauean fashion.
Yes, I realize that this idea needs work because it is not 'realistic'. Is there a way to make this suggestion realistic?
Reading about all recent *silly* patents stuff I thought a simple rule that could be used:
the patent request should be *invalidated* if someone else can prove (documenting the matter)that the process isn't a real innovation, having discovered/experimented/used it *before*.
Isn't it a moral issue?
Think about Marconi VS Bell.
Think about Micro$oft too, the "freedom to innovate"
* You could be the next one! *
Use the Encheferizer to get a totally unique, non-obvious solution to your problem! Look how it saved my latest web application:
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Any high performance db will attempt to cache and share data in memory when it's appropriate. It's the obvious thing to do to enhance performance. Yahoo's only feature seems to be that they also cache the per-user view of the data as well. As the general principle of cache/don't recompute is always an option that can speed up access, there's little original here.
Use the Encheferizer to get a totally unique, non-obvious solution to your problem! Look how it saved my latest web application:
Link:More Coupons
Result: A Clear patent violation
Link:Mure-a Cuoopuns ...
Bork! Bork! Bork!
Result: A wholly unique, non-obvious application of technology! Looking good for my *own* patent
At barrapunto we have a "patentes" topic. Check out the section logo. It plays on the simplicity of the device and on the Spanish phrase "The Law of the Funnel" (the mighty always do what they want, the meek always suffer the consequences of both the mighty's actions and their own).
-----------
-----------
Kandinski is a member of the
When I hear about some new attempt to force the church into the state, or to decrease protections against arbitrary search and seizure, I know the ACLU (of which I am a card-carrying member) will coordinate efforts against it.
There is widespread agreement that software patents are evil. But who's binding and guiding the outrage? The only name that keeps coming up is the LPF, but there doesn't seem to be much more there than a name - I can't even join or send money through their web site (http://lpf.ai.mit.edu).
Don't look at me - I'll give money, and write letters, but my organizing and people skills are zero. Maybe that's the problem, the old canard about how organizing geeks is like herding cats.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
People, this is getting rediculous. Please, call and write your congressmen and demand that the patent system be reformed. Any lawyers on slashdot? Draft a bill and send it to congress! My God, this system is stuck in the late 1800s! Hell, even copyright law was reformed in the 70s... is about time patents be changed.
-----
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
In all seriousness, I think that the more that silly patents like this are discussed, the more the eggheads in DC will get a clue as to what they are actually approving. This, and the McDonnel Douglas y2k patent, etc.. should not become the intellectual property of the filing parties; it just doesn't make sense. By leveraging the collective eyeballs and knowledge of people like /. readers is a good way to debunk these "ideas". If there were a section on /. that addressed this issue and became known to people in the patent office, then maybe that would prevent things like this from happening.
For the love of $DEITY, loose != not win!!!!!
What would be the effect for free software interests of the inadvertent weakening of intellectual property itself? One cannot cynically trust the legal system to always reward the rich and punish the poor and disenfranchised (as seen by the recent antitrust findings of fact). Supposing this mechanism ends up in court cases where intellectual property is drastically weakened because judges or juries won't accept patentholders clubbing 'the little guy'? This could seriously weaken the usefulness and relevance of patents in general. Surely it's a bad idea to assume (out of some sense of teenager hip cynicism?) that such abuses of the IP system can just happen without consequences to the abusers? Again, I question whether this may be weakening IP in general, since patents are being granted that are clearly in error and unworthy of such status. That considered, what would the implications be for free software if the millenium saw a collapse of the significance of intellectual property- for instance, picture this patent mess and also the ludicrous behavior of the music and film industries on behalf of intellectual property. If all that ended up 'pushing it' too far and breaking the usefulness of IP, one might envision a Sampling World where everything is copied from everything else, perhaps with a layer of obscurity, perhaps as openly as mp3s of commercial music are traded. Picture software being similarly used, with the 'rules' of IP and patents so convoluted that nobody can ever in good faith keep informed on what they might be infringing on. In a world of such information fluidity, would this be an arena where free software would thrive, since it is primarily suited to maintaining information flow in situations of severe _restriction_? Perhaps it would grow like kudzu vines in the newly boundless environment :)
This invention seems to be a reinvention of report generation from a database according to a template. For example, in a large bank, the tellers have many terminals, all displaying different account information based on a customers' profile. The account database is live,
being updated constantly as checks clear, ATMs
are used to withdraw cash, etc. The account
display can have additional fields or pages that
appear depending on which services that customer
has (checking, savings, loans, etc.).
I don't see what is new and un-obvious about the
Yahoo patent.
A long time ago I was reading through some GNU software and they were pushing another organization called "The League for Programming Freedom". I managed to find their web site at http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/ However it looks like the organization isn't doing to well. "Getting a domain name might not be a priority until the LPF has an actual committee to take it forward". The organization really is a good idea and we really should be pushing to turn it into a decent lobby organization, or perhaps the EFF should branch out. Though for letter writing/emailing you get your representatives address info here. I'd really recommend sending them something. Remember to be polite and to include the address you're registered to vote at. (If you're not registered you should be.) On the list of recent news that had this little tidbit "02 Sep 99: Lucent gets patent on sine/cosine table lookup" Hmm... hasn't that one being done by hand since, say shortly after sine/cosine were invented? diane
Is there a link to the patent database? I only trust spoon-fed info so far...
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
You might as well patent Fortran Common areas...early example of a template potentially shared by other processes.
This is a subject coming up more and more frequently on slashdot. I think it's time that we contacted somebody at the patent office for the weekly interview. You never know, it might make a difference. At the very least, they might tell us how we can make a difference.
-Dom
This is incredibly vague, but hell, even QLink on the C64 did stuff like this back in the mid-80s. And they got a patent on this?!
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Give it a coupla years and somebody will patent "fire" and the damfool PTO, ignoring prior art, will let em do it.
This is kind of unbelievable. This is such a standard technique -- used by many, many systems, including I'm sure ones written by the readers here.
I vote for slashdot.org oversite on all software patents!
:-)
Since the US patent office are completely clueless, it is in EVERY company's best interests to try and patent every technology they use. If they don't, someone else will. We all agree that the patent office is out of control, but as long as they are, patenting your work is a no brainer in order to protect yourself.
What we need to watch is whether the companies who are granted these insane patents attempt to use them as clubs against other companies, or whether they're only getting them to avoid being sued themselves. I worked at a company that held at least one fairly silly patent that could have been used against several other companies, but never was. We had it just for our own protection, and I can tell you I would have quit at the first hint of our company actually suing someone over it. But it never came up, except jokingly.
So don't get mad at Yahoo for patenting this, only get mad if they try to use it as a weapon.
We need to make a "No Bullshit Patents" law.
Who's with me?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
It may be that the ideal approach to the problem is to flood the Patent Office with prior art of every conceivable sort, in a form they can quickly and easily use to test patent applications.
A possible better idea, inspired by the above, is to simply flood the Patent Office. It's relatively cheap to get a patent through the patent office if you don't care about its validity or usefulness, so it would probably be practical for the programming community to churn out a few hundred thousand junk patents per month.
Would that be enough to clog up the process ? Would it bring the patent office to their senses ?
This is not about the word 'more' but about a technique
to use fvwm-style or Xfree86-style virtual window management, but with visible bars to indicate the function.
A definite improvement over the fvwm and X feature as far as I'm concerned.
As far as I can see, it's about a specific application of a very specific OS feature: SysV Unix shared memory.
The other patent (one electronic shopping cart instead of lots as I understand) looks almost as bad. Maybe Yahoo are planning to use their new patent as part of their defense (anything can be patented, so patents are meaningless)
Patents like this make you wonder about
our country. Even if the patent office is
using fresh-outs stuff like this should
never squeek by. Any one with a little
smarts in the patent field have any info
on prior use?
Does anyone know when the M-D patent was issued/filed? Unless my memory is painfully flawed. Good old MS-DOS has been doing that for dates since about 1981 (or at least since the days of 3.1 in about '85). IIRC, any 2-digit date less than 80 yielded 20xx, while 80=year=99 gave 19xx.
The US patent office is out of control; the entire software patent issue is the modern equivalent of the Church's indulgences (give me money, and God will forgive your sins... more money... bigger sins!)
Somewhere at a bottom of a thread someone mentioned a class-action suit against the patent office. Is there any reason why this isn't possible? Perhaps we can use the lawyer pig-dogs against themselves in order to stop this stupidity.
The fact remains that software patents are all based on a shaky legal interpretation of a late seventies patent that was a hardware/software solution. The fact also remains that the US is one of the few countries that allow software patents (I think it is only US and Japan). The final fact is that software patents are significantly delaying innovation (look into the whole RSA issue and then think of the state of "secure ecommerce").
Someone really needs to find a good, greedy lawyer and wake up the patent office to stop this madness. Alternately maybe someone can file class action suits against Yahoo et al for even daring to file the patents.
The reason they'd lose that case (don't think their legal staff hasn't contemplated it - I would lay odds that they've thoroughly investigated it) is that you can't copyright "look-and-feel". If you could, Microsoft would still be paying Apple for ripping off elements of the Macintosh GUI, or they might both be paying Xerox out the nose for the same.
--Corey
Not only will they not deserve liberty or safety, Mr. Franklin, they will be DENIED both!
That's almost a reasonable amount of time given that it seems like the net lives in dog years (1 year real time = 7 years of internet time).
Of course, patents made much more sense even 10 years ago when product development time was measured in years, not months or weeks. Rather than protecting what a company might have put it's entire existance into for five to eight years of development time, with similiar development cycles for competitors, it made some sense to protect physical inventions.
Now, with product to market leadtimes measured sometimes in hours or days, software patents, particulary those dealing with the net, don't so much protect the ideas as provide a fallback blunt instrument to bludgeon a competitor with.
Given that patents take months to review and be awarded, by the time the patent is awarded, the time frame the patent applies to has passed. A year is effectively worthless, even in Internet time, since beaurocracy doesn't even seemt to work in "real-time."
Finally, could anyone point out where on Yahoo's site they said "Patent Pending" to serve some sort of notice to the community?
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!
Like the subject says, we need to break out the pen and paper (or keyboard and printer) to write our duly appointed Congressmen -- and women! -- and tell them that the US Patent and Trademark Office is royally screwing things up lately.
Don't send email -- Congress-people just do not take email seriously yet. (When they do read it, they send a snailmail reply back -- that gives you an idea of how they operate). Even phone calls are not as good as letters, because letters stick around when a phone call is over when you hang-up.
Congress created the USPTO, and they can modify it as needed. It is obviously not doing what it was intended to do, nor is it benefiting the people of this country.
We need to get moving, write our Senators and Representatives, and let them know what is going on. If enough people make their displeasure known, action will follow. Put the Slashdot effect to some use, and write Capitol hill.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I think i'm going to patent breathing and drinking...living while i'm at it and make everyone pay royalties for doing it, I'LL BE RICH!
JediLuke
JediLuke
-Do or Do Not, There is no Try
It occurs to me that Yahoo's motives in this may not be as broad-sweeping as people are trying to predict... just like Amazon apparently got their one-click patent specifically to sue B&N, I wouldn't be surprised if this were a mechanism designed specifically as a hedge against Excite.
My Yahoo and Excite start pages already look surprisingly similar; if Yahoo believes they found competetive advantage in how they are putting them together, they may simply be trying to protect that competetive advantage using whatever means they happen to have at their disposal.
Although, quite frankly, my Excite page loads faster...
I'm not being an apologist here at all, I am also fundamentally opposed to the concept of software patents. All I'm trying to present is a guess at what might be their strategy behind it.... I will say that it makes absolute-zero sense for Yahoo, a company whose core business is still being a search engine (ok, directory, technically, but nevertheless...), to go after any number of sites they're indexing; it makes a lot more sense for them to target specific competitors building similar portals by attempting to hamstring their technical options.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
That's it...I'm throwing down the gauntlet...
:-) " that everyone uses, they're my patent too. Those cost alot to use, so be warned. :-)
I'm gonna apply for ASCII text to be my new patent. That way anyone who wants to type anything has to pay me the big $$$'s for each letter they type. Of course, there will be a sliding scale for the fee, letters used more frequently will be discounted, such as vowels and the letter "s". Unpopular letters like "x" and "q" will cost more as keeping that kind of intellectual property around has some overhead attached to it. It'll be just like Scabble!
Oh by the way, those little smiley faces "
BUWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH......I win, I win!!
-colin
"I'm not trying to insult your intelligence, you have to have some to be offended"
I have to disagree with the notion that the Internet will not continue to grow. Just look at the campus of any modern university and you will see an abundance of terminals and a populace utterly dependent on them. In addition Palm like devices with Internet capablilities will only hasten this process.
As for patents, remember they only last 20 years. The RSA algorithm for public-key encyption is one that is about to enter the publice domain. And as far as these absurd 'everyone's doing it, but I got the patent' patents, all it will take is a company with enough resources who wants to use the technology without paying royalties. I assure you they will be quick to bring prior art to the court's attention.
Actually, looking at my server, I see exactly 8 processes currently sleeping known as apache. If my understanding is right, when a connection comes in, all of them are awakened, and the first one to accept the connection handles it. If I had it configured differently, it would use threads.
/. code, but Rob may want to examine it to make sure that it does not violate this patent. Seems to me that the Slashboxen could be considered "real-time" data obtained from other servers.
As for IIS, I'm quite certain that it uses threads, rather than forking (very seldom does a daemon on a MS OS fork to handle a new connection).
I'm not sure because I haven't looked at the
LPF is at http://lpf.ai.mit.edu (no www).
Sumner
-- rage, rage against the dying of the light
No, you now have one year to file for a patent on your idea. If you don't, someone else can. If no one else files within one year, your idea will safely be in the public domain.
- John
I'm sorry, but when it comes down to it, if you program it yourself using your own code it should not be patentable. I can understand copywrite issues put on software (ie. you hack our system, steal the code and use it for youself and make gobs of money) but patenting a process of doing something is BS when it doesn't actually create something solid, ie a car. I think I'll patent the method I use to put my pants on in the morning.
- Xabbu
- Jimbob
Serious comments:
The more patents they grant on these sorts of processes, the less enforceable all patents become. Recent developments indicate that the USPTO is totally out of their depth when it comes to the Web.
-- Dave Aiello
You might also want to look at IPC::MM, which implements a hash in shared memory using C code. Should be faster for apps with a lot of read/write access.
I have a cold today, so my virus-addled mind may be missing something here, but it would appear that this claim really amounts to a description of a data-base view on a transactions-oriented database that just happens to be executed over-the-web? Or does the claim hinge on the notion that the view was "user-generated" (also pretty weak, given current DB products)?
Presumably the idea of a database view cannot be patentable these days given a metric buttload of prior art, but is the "mere" webification of such an idea legally patentable, given the theory that it wasn't trivial to do since database-backed web sites didn't exist from day one?
If so, I note that this patent was filed on June 12, 1997, and I am therefore virtually certain it is invalid due to the specific prior art of Philip Greenspun's online version of the bookDatabase Backed Web Sites, which originally appeared on the web before it's 1997 publication, and was republished as Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing in 1999. Chapter 10 ("Sites that are really programs") and Chapter 11 ("Sites that are really databases") being te most relevant pieces.
Really, I think Greenspun's prior art tells you exactly how to achieve the central claim of this patent, so I would be very interested to see somebody argue how the Yahoo claim holds any water at all, even in the "we webified it!" sense.
Babar
This is kind of long, but bear with me. There are already several distinctions:
trademark - a catch phrase associated w/ a company
copyright - to protect a person's intellectual property from being unfairly duplicated. Books and pictures - things that are just content, not process or service.
patent - a temporary monopoly on an invention is granted to advance technology
So why are IP patents bogus? No invention. Period. The computer is a computer and its already a computer. They are all bogus, and they last too long, to boot. I think I will write my congressman and suggest the following:
process protection - if somebody comes up with a revolutionary new way of doing things, s/he gets something similar to a patent that lasts 20-50 technology years (i.e. 2-5 solar years), but unlike a patent, the source is closed while it is protected. Additionally, more than one person can protect the same "process" at the same time, as long as its unique code (which must be submitted and compared).
After expiraiton, the process or the code itself becomes public domain. Not sure whether straight out GPLing it would be fair to the creator, but something along those lines. Don't just make the process public domain, make the code to perform that process public. Similar to the GNU GPL (only w/ a grace period), so the original creator can still make money off it after the process protection expires.
All executable or interpreted computer code (any process) should be protected under this kind distinct, unique set of laws. Its fair to the creator, the industry and the consumer!
As for GUIs, really cool, unique GUIs like Kai's Photo Soap, can be copyrighted as art, but the interface code, functionality or layout cannot. GUIs based on standard component libraries are S.O.L. and are public domain.
Oh, and to keep corporations happy about their public image, all contributors to the current flavor of any software must be credited. Just look for the circled P. (p) My company, Inc.
To summarize
If it can be done on paper, its a copyright. If it is a machine, it can be patented. If it is code that controls how a machine (i.e. computer) operates, a different set of rules need to be present, and I think going close-source to open-source/GPL after a reasonable amount of time would be fair to everyone and would promote innovation radically faster than the typical system used today.
The only considerations I suppose are:
- whether it is practical to force people to GPL their software if they want it protected for a limited amount of time (and what happens if someone chooses not to)
- whether or not it is more fair (and more appealing to corporations) to only make the process public after a grace period, but the code itself is still protected (and can only be used as reference), as opposed to a flat-out GPL
- how this be can written to allow license agreements
- how to protect company/product association (keep someone from marketing the *exact* same product as you w/ a different name in 5 years)
If they actually go through with this patent, it will be completely useless in the court room. I think the goal is simply to discourage young entrepreneurs. It's supposed to be impossible to get a patent for something which is indistinguishable from the current state of the art. Thus if Yahoo gets this patent, it'll be because their lawyers managed to pull the wool over sombody's eyes, and they'll never be able to collect money from anybody currently using this technology (/. for example, or any one of the sites I've been building lately).
Is very much like trying to patent Newton's laws of motion. "That's it, no one else's airplanes are allowed to use Newtonian physics in their flying apparatus." Locality is the one fundamental law of computing.
abrams's advice: when eating an elephant, take one bite at a time.
From what I understood from that program (and I could be wrong), you are patenting the use of the genes in question. Using an example, lets say the sequence of genes that have been patented are related to breast cancer. So doing a test that looks at these genes to see if someone might get breast cancer is infringing on the patent. Developing a drug that uses these genes to target breast cancer is infringing on the patent. Anything that uses these genes in relation to breast cancer infringes on the patent.
;)
Reminder: IANALBMSIETSWFTNLRB (I am not a lawyer buy my sister is even though she works for the NLRB) and I could be wrong, even though its never happened before.
No, but perhaps the combination of BOLD ITALIC CAPITALS to convey stronger emphasis...
In order for there to be an infringement on claim 1, there must be:
a plurality of user processes, one process per user accessing the server system;
This does not appear to apply to Apache, because Apache uses a single process to handle multiple requests by different users.
Does anyone know enough about the internal workings of IIS to know if it allocates one process per user, or request? If so, then this patent claim may only be infringed on by sites using Microsoft software.
Claim 2 appears to be infringed on by all web servers that use user logons for any purpose, including slashdot, and that store any user preferences locally.
If so, then the rest of the claims are irrelevant, because it appears impossible to construct a useful web server without infringing claim 2.
Right on, but you would probably have to change it to PNG on moral grounds.
I know its off topic, but I laughed.
Its easy to bad mouth the PTO when they make decisions such as this, but remember, their existence allows us to live in a world where not all technological marvels are hidden behind trade secrets. Who among us hasn't, at one time or another, benefitted from this invention?
So they patented it, if they actually try to sue someone over this, the PR fallout would be so bad it would make them look seriously stupid.
I really have to wonder why they bother filing the patent in the first place. Didn't any of their tech people tell them that this is an obvious use of technology in a web server, and therefore not really eligible for a patent???!
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
You will recall that what Yahoo actually gets is not the abstract, but what is actually claimed. It appears that Claim 2 is their broadest claim. Claim 2 states:
>2. Using a page server, a method of providing
>real-time responses to user requests for
>customized pages, the method comprising the
>steps of:
>
>obtaining user preferences, wherein a user's
>user preferences indicate items of interest to
>that user;
>
>obtaining real-time information from information
>sources;
>
>storing the real-time information in a storage
>device;
>
>combining the user preferences for the user and
>a template to form a template program specific
>to the user;
>
>receiving, from a user and at the server, a user
>request for a customized page customized
>according to the user preferences;
>
>executing the template program specific to the
>user using the real-time information stored in
>the storage device as input to the template
>program to generate the customized page; and
>
>providing the user with the customized page,
>wherein the steps of executing and providing are
>performed in real-time response to receipt of
>the user request in the step of receiving and
>wherein the customized page includes at least
>one item of real-time information selected from
>the storage device.
This is quite a bit narrower than the technologies discussed on Slashdot. Specifically, there appear to be two limitations that relate directly to the news being customized. By specifying that it is "real-time information" they probably get around a lot of old technology that customizes standard pages that do not preset news or the like.
It is much much worse than a claim on use of shared memory. The real killer broad claim is #2, which is an attempt to claim ALL pre-compiled user-specific template pages.
Use of shared memory (#4), server-farms (#5), and cacheing (#6) are additional claims over and beyond the basic claim #2. Claim 2 applies whether these other claims are implemented or not.
The nitty-gritty of claim #1 is just a fallback position, which protects Yahoo's detailed process in the event that Yahoo's other claims are ruled too abstract. Claim #1 does not apply unless you specifically generate lists of relevant sports teams and weather reports from user postcodes. The real horror is claim #2.
Claim 2
Claim 4
The term "template program" would appear to cover any per-user pre-generated page which includes ASP or PHP or Javascript to fill in the blanks. Bespoke formats in which the user template contains just field names instead of script fragments might also be considered "programs", executable by the web-server plus appropriate module.
Very, very nasty.
So why don't we boycott Yahoo? It's not like there
aren't a million other search engines out there!
-- Archi
There should be severe penalties for things like this. Make these greedy corps pay millions of $'s each quarter until they give up the patent.
Ater reading a gob o' comments, it seems like most semi-aware folks are disgusted by the blithely ignorant ways of the US patent office. Few, however, have ideas about what to do. Lobbying is good. Opening the eyes of the mainstream media is good (the ABC News (I think) coverage on gene patents the other day was fantastic). But it's not enough.
/. is somewhat constructive, but it seems to me that that's a step short of a public discussion forum dedicated to discovery of prior art. Instead of lamenting about how bad the patent process is on /., howzabout a place where every article is a ridiculous patent, and the typical reply is "check out XXXX and YYY which both did this years before LudicrousPatentFiler Inc did." Moderation categories could include "prior art," "common knowledge," "other patent infringment," "nonoperative," or -- god forbid -- "valid."
/source go, anyway? Think I could run such a thing on a 384k dsl line?
But how about more focused public discussion? Tossing these up on
The mere existence of such a community-led patent debunker might make the average company a bit more careful about throwing several thousand dollars at a patent that gets invalidated in an hour or two.
Where did that
Jon (xeno*wolfenet!com)
I think not...(*poof*)
A suit swinging from a tree with his clothes on fire.
Measure your wealth in hours, not just dollars.
Every other day on Slashdot there's a story where the legislature is trying to pass a law to interfere with the internet, and that irritates me to no end. Yet in in the cases of Amazon and Yahoo patenting technology used by thousands of others, they do nothing.
It's the government's fault that this is happening because of a loophole in patent law, yet instead of fixing that loophole, a serious problem, they're passing laws to protect my privacy when I don't want my privacy protected.
I'm not sure about this, but I think these patents might not hold up under common law. There's no real precidents, it would be like a pre-internet age company patenting the invention of a screwdriver. We'll see what happens when Amazon v. Barnes and Noble finishes up.
-- I don't really have anything useful to say. ~Tuts
Philip and Alex don't appear to specifically suggest this.
Suggesting that the per-user files in transactional databases would count is very interesting.
My guess is they would not represent enough of the content of a served screen to count as "template programs". But definitely a good try.
Domain names don't matter. I can server a .com adress from Siberia if I want too. (Which I don't, cause it's cold enough in Sweden.)
-
__
Comment submitted. There will be a delay before you understand what you posted.
latest news:
http://www.freepatents.org/
You know, you really want to screw these patent people over? PATENT THE PATENT ITSELF! Submit a patent proposal for something like "method of maintaining ownership and retaining value of intellectual property (yadda yadda lawyer speak science speak etc.)", submit it, and if it goes through, take it to the press as an example of patents gone haywire. Go on TV and threaten to sue the US Patent and Trademark Office, the World Intelluctal Property Organization (WIPO), etc. and point out all the BS patents that have been obtained on software and other things. Hint to Bill Gates/Microsoft: next time you're in front of a camera, tell the media that the stupidity of the US Govt. and Patent Office are stifling innovation for everyone with this stuff. Call for a judicial review of all patents issued since a certain date. Do something positive with your monopoly.
I'm going to be lynched for bringing up Bill Gates, aren't I? In this case, he is probably the lesser of two evils, though not by much.
My opinion was, that patent law was for protecting inventors who came up with an original idea, not for people who scanned for original ideas of others or just very basic or obvious ways to do something, long since in use and well working. Isn't there somewhere in patenting a step where you have to show that what you want to patent is something original and has not been done before?
That would also make 'preventive patenting' needless, since a publication would suffice.
I mean, what will be patented next? Use of the electromagnetic spectrum as carrier of information? ("Hey you, either close your eyes or pay royalties!")
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
...Yet another US Patent Office Run Amok Story!
What next? A patent for bold and italic fonts?
The way they give out patents right and left, it ought to be pretty easy to patent the concept of shared memory itself. Then sue Yahoo for patent violation!
IPC::Shareable can (and is) used for this technique on mod_perl sites. I've used it myself. I haven't read the patent yet, I guess I'll go check it out.
See the modperl archives for many other people using this method for caching data (templates and other stuff). I guess it could be argued that anything using a <perl> section or startup.pl in modperl is using a similar technique.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Why aren't there any more Einsteins at the patent office making sure that crazy stuff like this doesn't get passed? Put this patent in a room full of competent web engineers and ask them if it is an obvious idea. The answer would be an immediate and emphatic "yes".
... they're all in Silicon Valley or similar places making tons of cash off of patent-writing web startups ;-)
So where are these people? Ah
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Latest News:
After the resounding win by the DOJ against Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), the 180 online states (IE ALL 50 US states, Canada, Australia et. al.) in conjunction with Yahoo is now filling a patent enfringement suit against all Microsoft, Linux and Cold Fusion developers.
Under a bizarre ruling by the we-have-no-idea-what-we-are-doing court of "International Waters" an old precedent has determined that the actual webmasters and developers of Web Sites (patent pending) for breaching Yahoo's Patent.
If this suit is upheld, everybody will have to pay a licensing fee to Yahoo for every page that uses scripting, server side includes or anything that could be determined as creating either an image or graphic, html (or derived technological form of text) or combination of both.
A spokesperson from Yahoo was unavailable for comment however Bill Schiggly from the Patent Office has this to say "I bet you wish you thought of it first hey".
Former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates had this to say "As pointed out in the case made against us, freedom to innovate was what was on trial not our products or the inclusion of our products into the Windows operating system. In our widest dreams we hadn't even thought of patenting web pages and charging every browser user a license fee to view pages. This subscription model once licensed will be available in Windows 2002 as poart of the standard EULA and CAL"
--------------------------
The above article is totally ficticious and meant for Humour value only and any relationship to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
The MyTh - I am a figment of the Imagination - [Im Probably even not here]
I don't understand why people are patenting such kind of ideas. I am working on a Web project as well, and I had a similar idea: filling out templates with live data to optimize server response time. This is so ridiculous. I mean, anyone working on Web projects who have a brain are likely to come up with ideas similar to this -- who gave them to right to patent it and deny other's right to use what they came up with? It's not like this is some "deep" and "sophisticated" technique that takes a genius to figure out. Anyone could have come up with a similar technique and they would be "infringing" the patent. I think patents like these are just sick. I might as well have gone and patented linked-lists and charged royalty to every university that teaches linked-lists. Disgusting.
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
They go so far as to say that the shared memory may include RAM, or hard disk.... soooo, any file on your hard disk is essentially in shared memory. Don't go accessing any files on your hard drive - better retype them all to be safe. :-)
Any idea like this requires software developers to spend more and more of their time and resources working as lawyers, instead of building software. At some point, we need fundamental reform in order to make it possible and practical for professions other than the legal profession to flourish. Otherwise, everyone might as well give up everything that they were trying to do and become lawyers. We will all be out of a job.
Measure your wealth in hours, not just dollars.
According to the last sentence in the abstract, shared memory includes disk storage, not just the "conventional" shared memory. This would include databases as well. Ouch. I wonder what would have happen if an artist were to patent their brush-stroke technique, or patent the fact that they used cubes in their paintings. As I see it, artists patenting these types of things are very similar to programmers/corporations patenting the way they develop apps. So sad.
Can't we throw over this patent based on preusage?
I'm quite sure someone had this before yahoo...
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Ben Sugars has IPC::Sharable. See http://people.canoe.ca/bsugars/ip c_shareable.html for details.
Ludicrous patents?
How about a shoe with a spring coming out of the bottom?
[Doesn't matter to me, I'm a crusin' in Lynx.]
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
But it is pretty sick that Yahoo is even attempting this.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
No. Vignette StoryServer caches page fragments to disk. Of course, if it happens to be caching to a filesystem that itself is cached in memory, pretty much the same thing is happening.
However, good old GroupLens, the personalization server they bundle, does cache user preferences and such to memory. Of course, these aren't page components. But plenty of other systems do that.
I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it, not that it would make much impact.
Any idea or expression which can be thought by more than one person by sheer coincidence should never be allowed to be protected.
Expression is not an entity to be hoarded. Implementation may have its merits in the varying methods used, but the thought processes which led to those methods are ultimately responsible, and come from varying sources of inspiration which law can neither protect, enslave, or induce.
Research which truly *is* research, could be protected, certainly, as one protects the fruit of any labour (although for moral reasons, medicine, science, etc. they often shouldn't be). But clever programming tricks, methods that are already taken for granted, or legal wording of common-place procedures written and submitted for the purpose of making a buck... that's not justice, that's not even moral.
Patents fall under law, law is imposed to promote justice, and a capitalistic greedy move like this on the part of a bunch of Yahoo's does no justice to anyone.
mindslip
I think two things would make patents useful again.
1) Make patents non-transferable property with only limited duration leases allowed.
2) Make the life of a patent reflect the rate of change of the technology in the applicable field.
Heres why. If you assume the original idea of a patent was to give the inventor(s) a short term monopoly to use the idea in exchange for disclosing the idea to the public then we have a problem with 99% of the patents being granted today. The problem is that the patents are being granted to inventors who work for corporations BUT the patent rights are automatically going to the corporations! The inventor in many cases gets next to nothing. Corporations do not have ideas, inventors do. Thus solution 1) will put the power back into the hands of the inventors.
Imagine: you work for megacorp A. You have a bright idea that you know will improve megacorp A's product. The law lets YOU patent your idea and then lease it to whomever you please. YOU get some nice royalties from being creative and the public gets your idea put into the public view. Megacorp A gets to do what megacorps are supposed to do - efficiently bring massive resources to bear on meeting societies needs. In this case by leasing your patent to help them produce a product more effiently.
Of course the Corporate world has a lot to loose from something like this. As a society I think we would have a lot to gain.
I suspect item 2) speaks for itself.
90% of the wealth is in 2% of the pockets. Bummer to be in the majority.
America is the most rabid dog running amok in the patent field but all nations subscribe to the practise just as all nations crib to protect their agricultural industries. It's seige mentality. Unfortunately Americans have caved in completely to the litiguous school of business practise in which government only polices the most flagrant breaches of the law and then lays the burden on the courts to sort out legal rights. Shakespear had it right about lawyers.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Suggestion /. with all the patents coming out that deal with hardware/software like this one ie shared mem, maybe it would be a good idea that when someone submits an article for a patent, they are prompted to also send the patent number, and a link to where they got this info, and all that jazz. Rather than just the abstract.
I mean really the abstract is just that 'abstract'. IT is supposed to be a 1 paragraph summary of the invention in less than 150 words.
flames > /dev/null
moderate -1Million
send flames > /dev/null
Only 'flamers' flame!
Netscape's Server-Side Javascript (formerly known as Livewire) is a buggy, sloppily-written engine for running compiled web apps in a memory-resident manner. In other words, the templates are kept in RAM, and have been since late 1995.
Since the version in their 3.0 webservers, it has had decent server-level object support, too. Which means, yes, data cached in memory at the master HTTP process level. A common tecnique is to populate an array element at the server level when a piece of content is first retrieved, and only hit the data source again for records that aren't present, or which have aged.
Even more fun, I'd be glad to show interested lawyers an application I architected at a past employer that's been in production use for almost 3 years now. It's a distributed custom-email delivery system that caches content data both at the server level and at a spoke client level, in RAM. The clients request and use the cached data to assemble outbound messages.
As for using OS-level shared memory for this sort of thing, I'm sure some database and high-performance filesystem vendors are having a good laugh right now.
Maybe Yahoo are just covering their arse, lest UniSys buys up the patent. :P
POKE 36879,8
I got there first! Talk to my law firm: Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe.
I really like the idea of a prior art repository, where we could stick a lot of the OSS stuff or pretty much anything we wanted to. It could probably be structured so that it would be easily accessible for searches, indexing, and so on. I'm sure it'd get really big, and harder to manage over time, but on the other hand, the larger it gets, the better it supports the OSS community. It could even end up encouraging open source developers to take on projects in an area that they're interested in.
The main reason for the idea, at first, would be to "help" patent officers determine if there is clearly prior art on something they're about to send through. (e.g. "Doh! It looks like this idea of 'sending e-mail over the internet' has already been done. I guess I should reject it.") In the end, it could become an anti-patent database. (Meaning copyleft is to copyright as anti-patent is to patent.) For example, I could have some great new idea. I'd just go over to the repository and donate it to the world by submitting it as an anti-patent. I don't know if there are any legal problems with this, but I would assume the anti-patent author would have to make sure that his idea wasn't already patented.
On the other hand, IANAL but I think there are some legal benefits from *not* researching an idea to see if it has been patented. Something to do with knowingly infringing a patent vs. unknowingly.
Anyway, food for thought. What do you guys think?
the full patent is here
That's it. I think I'm going to take up rug weaving - or has someone already patented the process of taking strips of fabric and combining them in a pattern attached to a backing sheet in order to produce an item of floor covering?
The whole patent process has gone mad. It's got down to people just paying lawyers to produce patents for "industry standard" processes. Putting data into a shared memory space? Using it to rapidly generate pages based on user preferences either provided or randomly generated? Hang on...it's this what the vast majority of portals do already using "industry standards"? This is just some plain english wrapped around some technical jargon and served with a large cheque to the Patent Office.
I think I ought to patent the idea of submiting stupid patents that are no more than dressed up "industry standards"
What the fuck am I on about - "industry standards". There don't appear to be many left now...
Netcenter and t.o both have "themes" for web sites that customize based on user preferences. Im sure prior art would negate this anyway.
"We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Well, beyond the first posters who always get it wrong...
What will this do to me, the average geek? Or rather, to my friend at the University who has his own site that uses the now patented Yahoo technology? Will the Yahoo Police come beat down his door and kick his small dog? Will he spend twenty years in prison where he can write MORE code violating said patents? Who knows? And more importantly, who cares? A patent is a patent is a patent. If you call it by any other name, it's not quite as mysterious. Say good day to the patent life style. I'm sure that someone somewhere used it before Yahoo did.
That's the pattern of technology, isn't it? Nearly all of the whizzbang ideas of today are based on two or three not so whizzbang ones of yesterday. And isn't proof of prior existence all that you need to call a patent stupid and null it? Or am I just rambling because it's so early?
Target
There's a 68.71% chance you're right.
Hmmm... how about the patent office in a big room with white, padded, rubber walls, with the patent examiners standing out front in straight jackets, and the words "CLAIMS: 1. A method of handling mentally maladjusted persons through the use of protective enclosures."; somehow shoved underneath.
This is an excellent idea!
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
So it's probably a self-defense patent. So what?
The very fact that self-defense patents are obtained and used (despite their cost) shows that the patent system has broken down.
And if the big guys have a portfolio of self-defense patents, where does that leave the little guys who can't afford them? At the mercy of every peredatory lawyer in the employ of a big guy whose product is threatened by competition from the little guy's invention.
Maybe the current administration of the company really intends to use the portfolio defensively. But gore their successors' ox and those "defensive" patent portfolios can become offensive in very short order.
Maybe the EFF needs to start collecting patents and giving free liscense to them to prevent this. Maybe have a patent fund that patent authors can donate their patents to under the condition that they are liscensed freely.
Or perhaps used against anyone who attempts to enforce bogus patents? Or who goes after a little guy at all?
Now there's an idea! A common-defense patent pool for the little guys! B-)
(It could even be self-funding, as part of the settlement when they bring their guns to bear.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Really, just because someone owns a patent doesn't mean that similar works can't exist or be created.
A patent means nothing until someone challenges it in court and the organization/person holding the patent wins.
Granted, it takes money and time to challenge a patent in court, but if a patent is obviously unwarranted, it is unlikely that the company owning the patent will go to court to protect it because they know they will lose and don't want to waste their money on a bunch of lawyers.
OK, I'm just wondering - how often are Yahoo going to be able to find out whether someone is using such a system? I mean, I could program a system to do that tomorrow - but unless I make the code available, nobody is gonna be any the wiser.
/.'s and other Open Source developers of the world, but for developers who are creating custom systems for clients, such a technique is surely impossible to detect.
Of course - that is a real issue for the
Secondly - can they prosecute someone for using a program that contains such code, or does the patent only cover writing code to implement such a system in the first place?
Finally, can Yahoo use such a patent - originating in the US - against companies in other countries, or does the patent only cover US applications development?
Also intersting to note - Yahoo are currently being sued themselves over patent violation, Wired have the article.
A little planning goes a long way...
As I understand it, what they're saying is that they pre-allocate a large chunk of memory per user (rather than dynamically allocate what's needed), and then fill it with whatever that user is doing.
In addition, live data is regularly polled from other servers and stuffed into shared memory, thus removing the need to access the servers at the time of request.
This would seem to give Yahoo a 2-tier caching system:
Servers --> Shared memory --> User Cache --> User
This may or may not be efficient, depending on how it's set up. It certainly means that the data from real-time data sources stops being real-time, and can be as old as the time-out on the shared memory cache.
As for being innovative, well, that is arguable. There is certainly prior art for cache heirarchies (nlanr, the makers of Squid, have an entire network of web caches, for example, and Squid is built for exactly that kind of work). Using shared memory as a caching system is a trivial derivative of traditional caching, and wouldn't pass muster on it's own.
Using a heirarchy inside a single system, to link multiple servers, is perhaps slightly more novel. I don't recall seeing that being done before.
However, the patent could be considered a non-issue. If you use a heirarchy of -dynamically allocated- cache spaces, you automatically have something that is distinct from the system described in the patent. Also, if you have an N-ary graph of caches, rather than a simple tree, you would avoid the patent by using a distinct structure.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
And is this patent worldwide? (If it is, then surely other countries should have some say in the matter).
No. Patents only apply in the countries they were granted. US Patent Office's patents only apply in the US, and if there is no patent granted here in Finland we can do whatever we want. (At least as long as we don't come and sell our product in the US that is).
--
It has to work - rfc1925
This would be a great idea. A lot of us know about prior art, but it will mean nothing if there is not a place for that information to be logged and searchable. Even if it were not verified, it still could cast lots of doubt on any patent litigation...
Blogging because I can...
Nice for the inventor, but imagine this:
You manage non-megacompany Z. You dont push your employees very hard, since you want them to have time to be creative. Sure, both you and them would make bigger bucks if you could bill every hour to a client for cash, but you figure that creativity is better in the long run than short term cash flow. One day someone gets a brilliant idea. Yippee, You think. It really pays off to be humane. One day a cold shover awaits you: The guy with the brilliant idea has gotten a patent and now megacorporation X is buying him over.
You lern your lesson: Always think in short term profit. not a very nice one though...
All opinions are my own - until criticized
The whole idea of patents is to patent NEW and NOVILE ideas.
This is pritty much just a web server caching system hardly a new idea.
Even if they did come up with a novile way of implementing it (most likely how they got the pattent) it's not novile and not worth a patent.
It's patents like this that throw the whole idea of IP into question.
It's vertually imposable for an indupendent inventor to get a patent on anything (thats as it should be) but anyone with money can patent garbage and commen sence.
Tomarow I patent using unix commands as curse words when an NT box crashes.
I don't actually exist.
ASP's Session and Application objects have done this for years. I use it to cache weather, stock quotes, news items, etc. Microsoft might do something good and sue the crap out of yahoo for this...
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
What I doubt though is that it will continue to grow. We will never have a reality such as in Star Trek, or some of the worlds the Sliders go to. We will never have a world with terminals in every room of every building hooked up to the internet linking the whole world.
I say this because all these internet patents are scaring off lots of people that could be developing the websites that would make such a thing feasible. Linking the world together is nothing without the content that would be needed. Think about it, there is no more one-click shopping without a royalty be paid to Amazon, so E-commerce sites will have to do things the longer, harder way. If they do not do it the hard way they will have to develop a new concept which if history shows they will run out and patent and leave the followers in the same boat.
The bottom line is for all these internet businesses is all about the Benjamins, and the world has never benefited from greed alone. These people claim to be "innovators" of the internet, as far as I'm concerned they are all just a bunch of greedy bastards holding the world back.
So you're saying that it's not the template idea itself, but the use of explicit caching to partially fill the template? Whee! If that's the case, you're probably right, although I'll bet that, in the bowels of many an Oracle database application, similar things have happened for a long time. And implicit caching is just the way you build a workable RDBMS.
The claim still sound pretty shaky, even if Phil and Alex don't count as prior art against this form of the claim.
I agree that they wouldn't necessarily represent enough of the content, but they certainly could do so, and almost certainly have done so many times in real life. But, here, the question could boil down to whether the webification of an old and boring idea can still be new in the eyes of the patent attorneys who will determine whether this actually gets challenged.
Another question, I suppose, is whether Media Lab work in the late 80s on electronic personalized newspapers could count as prior art, although here again, if merely using http as a means of transmission makes it new, then this wouldn't count either. Well, unless somebody else has already patented a similar idea making claims against a broader class of electronic media than has Yahoo. :-)
Babar
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?topic=ludicrous_pa tents
but what would the logo be?
This just illustrates how inappropriate patents are for software. Even if this were an original idea (and as others have pointed out, it certainly isn't), it wouldn't be worth granting a patent on it, because it would restrict competition far too much and subject developers to legal harassment. It's also merely a combination of existing ideas - filling in templates, and caching data in memory - that would be obvious to any skilled programmer.
Of course Yahoo are free to copyright the code they are using, and that makes sure that they can get a good return from their effort. But allowing companies to patent particular ideas and then sue other developers is bad news both for the software industry and for consumers.
The paper Against Software Patents is slightly old, but a good introduction to why granting patent monopolies on software techniques is a bad idea.It's not too late to stop software patents being introduced in Europe - check out freepatents.org if you live in the EU.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Not quite, bucko! You may have patented the process of breathing IN, and the associated diffusion of oxygen into hemoglobin, but if you want to breath out, then you'd better send me a check! I bought that patent from a subsidiary of NCR that went out of business 5 years ago!
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
I tell you something that really bothers me about this - somehow I can't see Jerry Yang being really into the idea of broad software patents like this.
Does anyone have his email so folks can (politely) ask him about this policy? Maybe we can convince him to pledge to not use the patent, but hold it open for community use?
A little planning goes a long way...
See http://www.thinkgeek.com/geekgod for the
anti USPTO T shirts. Also take a look at and join
the LPF (www.lpf.ai.mit.edu). If enough people
join it starts making a difference
Alan
Well this is great! i think I am going to patent the use of the Penguin in Linux.
It is becoming rapidly apparent to me that the Patent system as we know it is in need of serious modification. I'm open to argument about what exactly is wrong (IANAL), but if something like this can actually get patented then *something* is definitely wrong
I suspect the patent office clerks (or whoever actually reviews and issues these things) lack the technical knowhow they require to properly evaluate (or, hell, even understand) these things and look for prior art. This unfairly allows those with $$ to take advantage of their ignorance and engage in the kind of frivolous litigation we so love here in the U.S.
To my understanding (and again, IANAL. do we have any lawyers here on Slashdot? any care to comment on the basics of patent law?) patents are basically a legal monopoly for a set time period to allow the inventor of a particular 'technique' to profit from his labor, at least in an intellectual sense. Generally speaking, this is a reasonable idea, imho. I seem to remember that the time period allotted is 7 years (someone correct me please?), and while this may be fine for real world (meatspace) inventions, that's simply aeons in computer time. It's like a 200 year patent in the real world. Perhaps we should consider some modifications to our patent system to account for the rapid pace of modern technology?
Has this type of practice always been common in patent litigation? A lot of it seems blatantly sleazy and deceptive. I've only noticed it recently, but then again, I've only been paying attention recently...
Anthony
^X^X
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
"I think any time you expose vulnerabilities it's a good thing." -Attorney General Janet Reno
I think we will soon hit critical mass with patents. Couple of nights ago, one of the major evening news magazines (like 60 minutes or 48 hours -- side note, why do they always use a number as the first word in the title?) was doing a story on human genome patenting. They covered the fact that several institutions cannot even screen for Alzheimers or breast cancer, because the genes were patented. The doctor made it clear that the tests were not patented, just the genes, making *any* test that screens these genes subject to the patent.
Patents like that -- where there is a direct detrimental effect on people as a result (who are unable to even get a test done!) might push the patent reform to front and center. Perhaps then, we can push the absurd software patents to the forefront and try to get some good ole fashioned reform going ("Its a good ole patent lynching, mama").
The need for reform *is* coming to the consciousness of the mainstream. Lets make sure that software patents are not forgotten when that happens.
Everyone. That means everyone that's a patent examiner, all of the patent lawyers, any judge involved with patent issues, and everybody that works at the PTO (even the secretaries).
Just wipe the slate clean.
A very scary patent indeed, be very afraid!
Geek Industries LLC and CEO Mindstorm have filed a patent (# 666,666,666) on a biological process called "breathing". Developed in the precambrian era, this process is used by millions of organisims worldwide.
Is estitmated that if the patent is approved, Geek Indusries can impose a $5 per breath royalty fee. Mindstorm quoted as saying "One of my ancestors invernted this process. It has been passed down from generations. Unfortuately we're just getting around to patenting it. That's life in a dot.com start up."
When asked what would happen if people could not aford to breathe, he said "Well, your just going to have to hold your breath."
Hey vignette legal dept. care to comment?
comment directly in my journal
pls make that patents & trademarks
Isn't "usa" a city in Japan?
;^}
I didn't know that patents apply to that city alone?
They use to make products there and label it "Made in USA", until the US government made them stop. -- or is this just an Urban Ledgend?
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
This is where us non-americans will start buying up .co.wherever domains wholesale and then selling them on for huge sums to american companies that want to avoid the patents !!
I did this some time ago already. Get with the times, Yahoo.
I can't speak for Canada, but thankfully in Australia the U.S. patents are not automatically valid (as copyrights are); someone filing a patent in the U.S. would need to file separately in Australia to cover their patent - and in a strange twist of fate I can quote the Simpsons "Down Under" episode: "We don't take that kind of crap here." ;-)
The claim for over 1,000 servers also isn't met by Statnet to my knowledge. It has DIPC distributed shared memory support, so the memory could be shared across 1,000 servers. I just am not aware of any such installation yet.
Technically, I'm not quite sure how it handles processes and if uses shared memory to store live data. Although I believe it is extensible to use shared memory. We've used it in many situations: for displaying "custom selections" of news, search results, etc. similar to what's described in the abstract.
I'm sure there are several more free-software solutions out there that are similar. Can anyone else concur?
Dan
*My first post! Woo Hoo!*
I..just..can't..take..it anymore. These things get me so fired up. Am I making myself sick? How long will it go on? Heh. You've made your point, /., and I don't need anymore examples: The US is truly the home of the stupid and the greedy. Ugh.
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
Well. That's pretty broad. It seems to describe shared memory itself. Anyone know if I can still #include without paying Yahoo royalties?
Really, there should be a category just dedicated to stupid patents, so you can browse all the ones collected by Slashdot when you're bored. Would also make a handy reference when someone asks, "What do you mean, sometimes patents don't make sense?"
Oh wait... don't tell me. Someone patented article categorization?
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
one of the main requirements of any pattent is that it wasn't obvious to do it this way. This pattent won't stand up because we see that even slashdot worked this way before the pattent was announced. don't worry, the world isn't going to pay me royalties because i took out a pattent on spinning orbs. The world isn't going to stop spinning either. -red
I guess with all these silly patents being issued we are all lucky Al Gore didn't patent the Internet when he invented it.
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
I am not a lawyer, although I've been known to play one in my consulting fees.
Slashdot ran an excellent article on the basics of patent law a few weeks ago. It's reposted on Advogato, the new community site I'm starting for free software developers. I'm hoping to collect a solid set of patent resources at Advogato over time, among other things.
Hope this helps!
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
We've seen many stupid technological patents, but while Wang's File->Open or UniSys's GIF patents could be enforced, I see no chance of anybody suing me for internal working of my web site. Nobody sees it, nobody knows and I'm not required to disclose my source code, so there's no actual danger. Am I wrong on that?
I wonder how long it's gonna be before someone patents the idea of collectong royalties. Uh, now if you'll excuse me, i have some forms to fill out. .^
^.
The worse the patents get, the better the odds of software patents being thrown out en masse.
Consider: Government powers explicitly derive from Constitutional assignment. Clause 8 of Article 1 grants the following:
Clause 8. The Congress shall have Power To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Promote, eh?
The patent office has expressed gross incompetence in its assignment of software patents--indeed, it may not be possible, due to the rapidly iterative nature of software development, to correctly apply standard patent methodologies to software. (As I've argued before though, lots of unwarranted patents make for a rich Patent Office and very rich Patent Attorneys! So I don't particularly believe the overworked and underclued patent examiners are being overworked or underclued accidentally.)
For whatever reason Software Patents are completely failing their Constitutional mandate, there is widespread consensus that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has long since wasted away any shred of legitimacy when it comes to the realm of software patents.
Without a legitimate claim to the constitutional powers they derive their right to regulate from, all their powers dissipate, and the software patents already assigned become null and void.
Comments? I have more to say, but I'd like to hear what you think about this.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
That is patented? Jeeze. Oh well, I have lots of ideas on improvements of the system (like adding in various dithering and resampling to improve the large-scale image quality), so maybe I could one-up that guy. :) Oops, nevermind, I just divulged that idea to the world at large - which means it can't be patented at all. How about that, folks. ;)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
I though you could only get a patent for a new and original idea, not for something that is used many other people already. Does anyone know whether they patented the idea in other countries aswell, or only in the USA? If it is only the USA, then you could go elsewhere and create your website as currently you must patent the idea in each country, unless the countries have an agreement.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
IMO, Patents, as a general concept, are a good idea. If done correctly, they reduce trade secrets, allow the inventors to profit from them, but after a while, everyone benefits. Patents were designed to promote free access to information, and the designers understood that businesses don't just give stuff away, they need a quid pro quo hence, the exclusive access for a time period.
/. are torn to shreads, with prior art examples, obviousness, etc. But, at that stage, they are granted, it's too late. So, what about making all patent applications public upon filing? Then allow a time period where people can object, and send in examples of prior art etc. to the patent office. This would not require a court case to reverse the decision, and hopefully it would then make it less likely for stupid patents to get through. The PR for a company trying to patent obviously would also be harmful, acting as a deterrent.
However, the implementation has screwed up royally. It doesn't protect the small inventor, trying to challenge a granted patent, even if it is "obviously" wrong is expensive. They are now used as weapons, bargaining chips, and the time peroid in a fast moving industry is too long.
Many patents that get posted here for discussion on
Also it would eliminate the worst type (IMO) of patent - the submarine patent. Imagine what would happen if a new technology (eg XML) that was touted as "open" was massivly deployed, then it was discovered to be patented? Think of style sheets, and it's definitly a possibility.
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Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
I thought you could only get a patent for a new and original idea, not for something that is used many other people already. Does anyone know whether they patented the idea in other countries aswell, or only in the USA? If it is only the USA, then you could go elsewhere and create your website as currently you must patent the idea in each country, unless the countries have an agreement.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
It's expected, planned in and budgeted for that a project produces a number of patents. Development managers' performance is measured by this. It's often more vital than the performance or maintainability of the produced code. (Well, everyone knows that that will be bad anyway, don't you?)
So, people write patent applications for something...anything, just to keep the monkeys off their backs.
Now, I don't know about yahoo. This patent presented is a least a Good Thing for performance. By reading /. more people know about it - maybe some websites get faster over the next months...;)
Another possibility is that this fund could be used to pay the royalties in bulk for all GPL software. So, for example, somebody from GNU goes over to Unisys and offers to pay them a lump sum to permit royalty free use of the patent for all software released under the GPL.
This would have two effects:
1) It would provide a way for people developing free software from having to pay royalties on something that they might not make money off of in the first place.
2) It would encourage more people to use the GPL because they could write their software without having to pay various royalties that they might otherwise be committed to.
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...before we can plug lawyers into a Doom interface, and take out the bad ones? :) Maybe we could do this with patents?
Right fscking on man :) My previous post covers basically the same points. We (the people ;) should be looking to do a major overhaul of the patent system in the coming years. It is becoming more of a hinderance than a help in its current incarnation.
:)
I'm sure serious discussions of this are already underway. Anyone got pointers or recommendations for these kinds of resources? I saw a link on an earlier post to a T-shirt designed by Alan Cox at www.thinkgeek.com which I found simply delicious
Anthony
^X^X
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
"I think any time you expose vulnerabilities it's a good thing." -Attorney General Janet Reno
so if they are being sued for one riduculous
patent, maybe they are doing this just to make sure nobody sues them for this too
My thought was "I used to write applications that ran pretty well on a 1MHz processor in 16K -- maybe you should tighten up your code," but they are adamant about it. Unless Yahoo's patent is too narrow to apply to anything beyond some special case that works only for them, it should bluescreen the moment it's challenged.
In this particular case, what does Yahoo!s patent really mean? Not Much 1) If another site wanted to use identical technology in their code to increase the performance of their access, how would anyone (including Yahoo! and the Federal Government) know? The only way would be if there was an inside informant who squealed. 2) If the other site was known to be using a similar set of programs, so what? Copyright law provides protection (supposedly) to prevent copying of code. There is some (very) limited protections against backward engineering a piece of software. But if someone wanted to develop, say, a new word processor that looked just like Microsoft Word, Bill Gates would have a really hard time seeking any recourse in the courts. "Look and Feel" cases haven't done well. As for the garbage that we see getting patents these days... don't get me started.
Mike Eckardt
meckardt@yahoo.nospam.com
http://www.geocities.com/meckardt
Apparently IBM tried and succeeded patenting using the word 'more' for flipping through multiple pages of text:
The US patent system is fundamentally unreformable. Patents should therefore be abolished.
Shame!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Unfortunately the US Patent Office is driving the whole herd of PTO's of the world before them. Today you can get a patent on _anything_ as long as you limit the field it applies to. In programming the US PTO has recently begun not only accepting innovative algorithms - which might have a resonable scientific height for patents - but also implementations which IMHO is creative engineering, but still only engineering. The driving force in this are the major US companies who trade patents for patents, thus keeping everyone else out.
1: The windows icon
2: A Swastka
3: handcuffs/ blindfold/ brain padlock (the first two should probably be avoided
Alternatively, place these as a subsection of humor (albeit fairly morbid humor) or under justice (?)
I don't suffer from insanity- I enjoy it immensly!
This is what I figure it's about.
It's all to do with portal type sites, not templates and not just shared memory. The idea is that when a user comes into a portal site for the first time his/her preferences are loaded not into the current (CGI?) process out of the database, but into a shared memory cache. The next page they view doesn't have to fetch them from the database - just from the cache.
Seems still pretty universal - although the patent does specifically talk about user preferences in portal web sites, so anyone whining on about using shared memory in their PDP-11 application can stop now. However anyone who's developed a portal-type (and yes, this applies to slashdot) web site that caches user preferences in shared memory then this affects them. I don't believe slashdot is affected - it calls the database every time for its user preferences.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Yahoo's patent seems to be the work of, well, some dumb yahoo. The concept of caching content locally to cut down on server load (and network traffic) has been around for decades.
Slashdot, yesterday, carried an item about Hotmail joining the spam Black Hole list. It seems to me that one way to put an end to this patent silliness is to do the same thing: block email from known patent abusers. Block unisys.com, yahoo.com, etc.--and give the software patent enthusiasts the option of continuing to abuse the system or be able to connect to the rest of the world.
I have already blocked unisys.com from my network, due to the GIF nonsense. (Not without pain--a major client uses Unisys A-series and Clearpath servers.) I'll block yahoo.com too if it turns out that they have any dream of enforcing this.
As Arlo Guthrie once pointed out, if just one person does this they'll think he's crazy. And if two people do it they'll think they're both [well, we'll just skip what he said, since it ain't considered genteel these days]. But imagine, my friends, imagine if dozens of people, hundreds of people block domains that use software patents. Why, they'll think its a movement....
Write an HTML page that explains why you won't permit connects to Yahoo, post it, and redirect any Yahoo links to that page. The power of the boycott is the most effective weapon you have.
How would this apply to using a ramdisk? Its shareable, its persistent memory.
My guess is that this patent won't hold in court, because they didn't invent it, they're just claiming it.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I lost count long ago over all "This should never have been patented"-stories. Every time there are the usual replies about how evil the system is and the "what if i patent _this_"-posts.
C'mon You are supposed to be more creative than this! Can we think of a system that:
- Protects the guy who really spent years of research coming up with something novel. He/she really should have the chance to make something of it before he is overrun by the Big Evil Company.
- Stops the same guy from blocking the whole market for decades if the invention succeeds.
- Lets me protect the name of any product I might sell.
- Doesnt sent lawyers on me when I happen to use a name similar to something the Big Evil Company has TM:ed
- Doesnt require me to scan every business area in every country for names that might sound similar to mine
- Somehow deals with the situation where two local businesses suddenly meets over the net.
- Actually is more suited for inventors than lawyers
It is obvious that the system is not working right as it is. Please be bright!All opinions are my own - until criticized
But don't they do any research in the area of the patent to find out if it is in fact a new creation?
Why can't they ask some computer body (IETF?) if this is in fact something that should be patented, or if everyone else is using it already?
And is this patent worldwide? (If it is, then surely other countries should have some say in the matter).
*sigh* I wish I had a patent on filing patents so that I could stop dumb patents like this from being filed.
I don't know who came up with the patenting idea but I don't think they intended for it to be used to patent even the most basic concepts.
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IanO
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Objects in Mirror are Losing!
You bring in a few patent attorneys and having a standing arrangement that they give a price tag for the battle and when they get that much money in the coffers, they can go out and start taking down the patent. If not enough money is collected after a given period of time, then the money would not be charged to the credit card and the patent would go on its merry way.
Thoughts?
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Fortunately this does not appear to affect our beloved ./ as it's no real time data here. Or is it? Better cut that wire now!
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Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
There is an outstanding patent, number 1635894, issued to Michelin in 1927. So long ago, I couldn't find any info online, but it wouldn't surprise in Michenlin already patented the wheel.
Ok people, this stuff has been pissing me off for quite a while now, so where's the petitioning, phoning congress members, active complaining? I mean why can't we take advantage of the /. effect?
-- Making computers see, hear, and think... http://www.componica.com/
This is a complete outrage! I have been working for 6 months on members only pages for my company which uses dynamic HTML in much the same way, if not exactly. How about I go patent human female and male sex organs right now and cease developement of the human race right now? It would be just as rediculous and possibly possible. Hell, some stuff like that is already happening. One company just patented the gene in the human genome for breast developement, and a gene that could be the cause of breast cancer! What the hell? Are they purposly trying to make the genome project pointless? This has got to stop. Even though I plan to own Yahoo! in two years, it is still very Microsoftian of them to patent something like this and wrong.
It is time to change the buisness practices of the drones of the world.
Several people have pointed out that patents like these not only won't stand up in court, but that they're not even intended to. I'd like to expand on that a little.
I remember reading somewhere that a patent-office official had publicly admitted that they couldn't keep up with the flood of applications and were as a matter of policy allowing dubious patents through in the hope that the courts would sort things out. Whether the admission was real or just a figment of my imagination, this is clearly what the patent office is doing.
Patents are supposed to be (a) innovative, and (b) non-obvious, among other criteria. This patent is obviously neither, and there are enough other companies with enough legal muscle to ensure that it's never enforced, so I don't think it's much to worry about. The danger comes when a patent is granted on something obscure and the only people who care are little guys who don't have the resources to fight it successfully in court by themselves.
This brings me to my other point: patent fights. It's very common nowadays to respond to an accusation of infringement by pulling out a few of your own. "Oh yeah? Well, you're infringing our patents X, Y, and Z. Are you sure you want to take this to court?" That is what's really behind a lot of the "preemptive patenting" to which several other posters have referred. One of the tools of the high-tech business is developing a patent portfolio not so those patents can actually be used to club others over the head, but to avoid being clubbed oneself. Companies have been bought just to pad patent portfolios. It's sick, I know. I'm not defending the practice, just reporting it.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Isn't this caching method also called a RAM Disk?
Make them last 2 years maximum. That would probably make Yahoo's patent already out of date, but at least if gives people a chance in the ever moving internet world. On second thoughts, make it 1 year. :)
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Go to the Patent Office Search and type in the patent number [5,983,227 (keep the commas)]. And ten miles of script will get the patent. -d