The concept of moving emails and all from Exchange is simple but doing for $19 per company, flawlessly, without need for customer support, without risk of blowing up the Exchange box would be really tough. Most people who are in the $19 product range are not that technical. If it wasn't perfect this would be brutal on the support staff.
If Google was having trouble and this company showed them how not to have trouble, then Google seems to owe them something.
Everyone always thinks the other person's product is easy....rare they think their own is.
This was just a case of bad journalism. If you read the patent there is NO WAY that an image hyperlinked could be covered.
Maybe they have crappy lawyers, maybe they are just trolling and trying to scare people. But if you read the patent it is clear they have a patent on images that are attached to the results of web searches. How many websites do that?.1%? How many website have to do this?.00001%?
Still a lot but not something to have a heart attack over.
It seemed a little late for this to be given to them but even if it holds the only impact will be stuff like google news where the image with the news story is next the search result. Google image searching wouldn't trigger this patent. It just returns images.
I wonder if anyone had experience building these search systems. Is it that different to have references to images integrated into your search database? It seems like web search results were returning the product of the html anyway. There shouldnâ(TM)t be any technical difference between returning a chuck on HTML without an image and a chuck of HTML with an image. Maybe the difference is on how you have to set the page up to display the information, the patent says they are showing the images in a particular way if I remember correctly.
I feel like you are saying "hey we do this for software and it works so why not do it for the real world"
Software is complex, but not nearly as complex as the real world. It is actually pretty amazing how well our system does in a country of 300 million people.
Most of the problems seem to be opinion or resource related. People feel laws are too strict/not strict enough, should exist/shouldn't - or there are not enough resources to enforce them.
I think that is the perception but I think it is the wrong perception. If we were able to delete the top 100 bad patents then I don't think this would be the perception. I look at all the new laws around patents that have come down and I am happy. A lot of bad patents are taking a big hit.....but... I personally worked for a company that had an important patent in their field and because of it they never had to raise money. Which meant that they didn't have to give up most of the company to a VC. Which meant when the product had a bug they stopped production on new features to fix the old one. They even pulled on new sales for one year to 'get it right' before they actively sold again. How amazing is that for the software world where crap is continually stuffed down customers faces.
If we got rid of patents people claim that innovation would reign. I totally disagree. I think we that whole business models would surround coping any cool idea that comes along that isn't back by big money. I think it is well established that a vendor with much more money and a bad product will always crush one with no money and a great product (most slashdot's would scream Microsoft right now).
Then we would all be working for large companies with enough money fund a dominate go to marketing strategy or we would try and carve out a niche small enough not to be noticed.
While patents can be abused I think they allow an inventor to breath....it is hard enough and risky enough to think of/develop/go to marketing with your baby. To have no protection it would be almost impossible to go it alone. While we can point out a handful of companies that did and did succeed it is not many.
It seems there is a huge bias against patents here which if fine as long as it doesn't detract from good data.
I rely on the slashdot scoring to filter which posts I read. It seems that all pro-patent or more to the point all non-anti patent posts have a 3 point penalty. Any post that includes "patents suck, one-click die" gets at least 2 points. What????? There were some really interesting comments made by pro-patent people that are worth reading but the scoring is such crap on this issue that slashdot is worthless for an unbiased view.
Whether you believe in patents or not you should believe in unbiased coverage of them. Slashdot has always been a great place to find great information on topics that the normal media can't cover due to their lack of knowledge. On this issue slashdot is worse than the normal media...
This is a real black mark on slashdot.
these guys can sue google for any single claim in their patent. They don't need to start with claim one. They also don't need to sue google for as broad of use as people on this board are joking about.
Auto responders would seem to distroy claims 1-3 but claim 7 starts to get really specific as it is a grouping of claims 1-4 and 6 and 7. The prior art you are referencing doesn't touch on that subject matter. If google is doing that then they would need to bring prior art shows a product that did all those steps or an article outlining all those steps.
Just trying to bring the debate up a notch. Not a big fan of patents although I know some little companies that would not exist if they didn't have that type of protection.
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The concept of moving emails and all from Exchange is simple but doing for $19 per company, flawlessly, without need for customer support, without risk of blowing up the Exchange box would be really tough. Most people who are in the $19 product range are not that technical. If it wasn't perfect this would be brutal on the support staff. If Google was having trouble and this company showed them how not to have trouble, then Google seems to owe them something. Everyone always thinks the other person's product is easy....rare they think their own is.
This was just a case of bad journalism. If you read the patent there is NO WAY that an image hyperlinked could be covered. Maybe they have crappy lawyers, maybe they are just trolling and trying to scare people. But if you read the patent it is clear they have a patent on images that are attached to the results of web searches. How many websites do that? .1%? How many website have to do this? .00001%?
Still a lot but not something to have a heart attack over.
It seemed a little late for this to be given to them but even if it holds the only impact will be stuff like google news where the image with the news story is next the search result. Google image searching wouldn't trigger this patent. It just returns images.
I wonder if anyone had experience building these search systems. Is it that different to have references to images integrated into your search database? It seems like web search results were returning the product of the html anyway. There shouldnâ(TM)t be any technical difference between returning a chuck on HTML without an image and a chuck of HTML with an image. Maybe the difference is on how you have to set the page up to display the information, the patent says they are showing the images in a particular way if I remember correctly.
I feel like you are saying "hey we do this for software and it works so why not do it for the real world" Software is complex, but not nearly as complex as the real world. It is actually pretty amazing how well our system does in a country of 300 million people. Most of the problems seem to be opinion or resource related. People feel laws are too strict/not strict enough, should exist/shouldn't - or there are not enough resources to enforce them.
I think that is the perception but I think it is the wrong perception. If we were able to delete the top 100 bad patents then I don't think this would be the perception. I look at all the new laws around patents that have come down and I am happy. A lot of bad patents are taking a big hit.....but... I personally worked for a company that had an important patent in their field and because of it they never had to raise money. Which meant that they didn't have to give up most of the company to a VC. Which meant when the product had a bug they stopped production on new features to fix the old one. They even pulled on new sales for one year to 'get it right' before they actively sold again. How amazing is that for the software world where crap is continually stuffed down customers faces. If we got rid of patents people claim that innovation would reign. I totally disagree. I think we that whole business models would surround coping any cool idea that comes along that isn't back by big money. I think it is well established that a vendor with much more money and a bad product will always crush one with no money and a great product (most slashdot's would scream Microsoft right now). Then we would all be working for large companies with enough money fund a dominate go to marketing strategy or we would try and carve out a niche small enough not to be noticed. While patents can be abused I think they allow an inventor to breath....it is hard enough and risky enough to think of/develop/go to marketing with your baby. To have no protection it would be almost impossible to go it alone. While we can point out a handful of companies that did and did succeed it is not many.
It seems there is a huge bias against patents here which if fine as long as it doesn't detract from good data. I rely on the slashdot scoring to filter which posts I read. It seems that all pro-patent or more to the point all non-anti patent posts have a 3 point penalty. Any post that includes "patents suck, one-click die" gets at least 2 points. What????? There were some really interesting comments made by pro-patent people that are worth reading but the scoring is such crap on this issue that slashdot is worthless for an unbiased view. Whether you believe in patents or not you should believe in unbiased coverage of them. Slashdot has always been a great place to find great information on topics that the normal media can't cover due to their lack of knowledge. On this issue slashdot is worse than the normal media... This is a real black mark on slashdot.
these guys can sue google for any single claim in their patent. They don't need to start with claim one. They also don't need to sue google for as broad of use as people on this board are joking about. Auto responders would seem to distroy claims 1-3 but claim 7 starts to get really specific as it is a grouping of claims 1-4 and 6 and 7. The prior art you are referencing doesn't touch on that subject matter. If google is doing that then they would need to bring prior art shows a product that did all those steps or an article outlining all those steps. Just trying to bring the debate up a notch. Not a big fan of patents although I know some little companies that would not exist if they didn't have that type of protection.