If you looked at the image of the patent it would be a lot more readable. The.backslash. is just a code that the uspto uses to substitue for "\" to make it easier for their search engine to handle it. It does similar things with divide, multiple, integrals, paragraph characters, square roots, etc...
To exactly copy my reply from a previous poster who said almost the exact same thing:
Just because a piece of software generates poetry does not automatically mean that it is prior art which will invalidate this patent. In order for the prior art to be useful here, it must either directly show or teach the following (claim 1):
1. A computer-implemented method of generating a poet personality comprising:
analyzing a plurality of poems represented in a text file;
generating a plurality of analysis models, each of said analysis models representing one of said plurality of poems; and
storing the plurality of analysis models in a personality data structure, wherein each analysis model in the personality data structure has a set of bigram, trigram and quadrigram, exponent and weight parameters.
Just because a piece of software generates poetry does not automatically mean that it is prior art which will invalidate this patent. In order for the prior art to be useful here, it must either directly show or teach the following (claim 1):
1. A computer-implemented method of generating a poet personality comprising:
analyzing a plurality of poems represented in a text file;
generating a plurality of analysis models, each of said analysis models representing one of said plurality of poems; and
storing the plurality of analysis models in a personality data structure, wherein each analysis model in the personality data structure has a set of bigram, trigram and quadrigram, exponent and weight parameters.
Did the reference that you cited exist prior to November 1, 1999? The patent in question has an effective filing date based on a provisional application back to this date as shown by the following text:
This application claims priority under 35 USC.sctn.119(e) to U.S. patent application Ser. No. 60/162,882, filed on Nov. 1, 1999, the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference.
Also, does this reference attempt to mimmick a specific style?
Bugs in code are a reality for every computer industry. Plus who is to say that port80 are the ones who wrote the code and that it was not contracted out to a different company? Should I not take Microsoft seriously as a company because they forgot to renew their DNS entry for hotmail? How about not taking Redhat seriously for poor website programming?
Should I not take you seriously for misspelling "skepticism" and "professionism"? Errors like this are a part of life, no company or person is perfect.
This is too small of a sample to produce meaningful results. Also some of these companies may be running a certain platform based on business deals made way back in the day and are reluctant to make the investment needed to completely replace their infrastructure (which may explain the strong presence of netscape, who knows).
There are really too many factors involved to simply choose a number of websites and determine which is the best server software based upon what the majority of those sites are running.
What does that say about the quality of the respective servers?
It says absolutely nothing because you are not factoring in the amount of traffic handled by each machine, the connection speed, processing power, RAM, speed of I/O communications between the processing system and network interfaces, hard drive latency for retrieving data, etc...
You can't make an accurate comparison unless you can remove all the other factors which directly affect how the server will perform.
I never claimed that their sampling method was correct. I only claimed that there is insufficient evidence to say that it is incorrect, especially when the evidence presented tells absolutely nothing about the sampling method in question (ie, which sites they chose to sample, how many times they sample the sites, what weighting they give to each site, etc...).
From the evidence at hand all you can say is that they aren't the best ASP/SQL programmers which is completely unrelated to the sampling of websites from a statistical point of view.
Please take the time to carefully read a post before responding.
I guess it all depends what kind of data you are looking for depending on which platform you want to sell, but both of these methods seem to produce equally worthless information to me. I would like to see a break down of webservers used/million hits or something to that effect. I suppose to be perfectly fair connection data and processing power would have to be normalized before hand as well.
Until then I'll happily ignore these poorly done statistical analysis and chose a platform based on my own criteria.
What does this have to do with their sampling method? I seriously doubt that their scanning system is some guy randonly typing websites into that box and writing down the results. The back end code which actually performs the server detection could work just fine and still produce and error during display.
If a claim were written as "a method of converting steam into mechanical motion" it would be rejected under 35 USC 112 which states:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
You can't write claims which leave out important steps or parts in the invention you are trying to patent. In the above example the claim would have to have a part about some manner of transistion between the steam and the mechanical motion. However, the unless the claim specifically mentions how the steam is produced, you are correct. It should also be noted that the only time such a claim would have been allowed in a broad state such as the example above is when the first steam engine was invented. It would still be possible to patent a generic steam engine today if your transistion step from steam to mechanical motion was a novel one.
No, the least-general "general idea" is using one master password to provide access to others so users only have to remember one password. If you invent something else that does that, you are in violation.
This would be true only if your method of providing one master password to provide acess to others is by the same method as stated in the claims of the patent application. If you come up with a new/different method of doing this, then you will not be in violation.
It is true that the specification covers a preffered embodiement of the invention. However, the claims themselves do not cover the general idea as I originally said. The claims will cover the basic steps/parts of what they believe their invention to be. Granted, this is broader in scope than the preffered embodiment described in the specification, but it still only covers a specific implementation of the general idea.
For example, here the general idea is password management. If this patent were granted, IBM would not have a lock on all patent mangagement systems regardless of implementation, they would only have protection on patent managment systems which meet the restrictions set by the claims.
Please try to remember that the abstract of a patent doesn't mean a single thing legally. It is just a short summary of the invention, nothing more. The claims are the only part of the patent that has any legal power, and since the poster failed to actually link to the patent or give us the patent number it is hard to say what this patent would cover.
Also try to remember that a patent is for a specific implemenation of an invention and does not cover the general idea of the invention itself. If this were granted it would be possible to come up with your own implementation for password management and not be infringing on the patent.
This article really isn't written for the slashdot crowd, and isn't the great technological comparison on a chip by chip basis that I'm sure you were all hoping for.
This article is for the technologically illiturate that doesn't understand the differences between flash, SRAM, HDDs, etc... who may not realize that HDDs and running may not be the best mix, or that the ipod only has a ~6hr battery life and it isn't going to last their entire trip to europe. For this purpose it makes some valid points.
As I said, there has to be solid proof in public record (previous patents, products, publications, etc). Simply stating that something could be held as obvious after reading it does not stand up as a rejection according to case law.
Show me a piece of dated prior art that shows exercizing a cat with a laser pointer, if you can't the patent stands. I am willing to bet that you can't.
1) Yes, assuming that the patent in question has utility (ie, whether the implemenation that you are attempting to patent could actually work). See 35 USC 101 for patent utility guidlines.
2) Yes
3) Yes (but in the US the patent would go to the person who can prove the earliest invention date. This is not true for the rest of the world, where the first to file would get the patent)
4) Yes, you can patent something without a working version, but the patent can not just be for the general ideas. For example, you can not patent the idea of one-click shopping, but you can patent a specific implemenation for one-click shopping.
5) No, 35 USC 102 and 35 USC 103 lay out the guidlines for what can be patent. An invention can not be granted if it would have been obvious to one ordinarily skilled in the art at the time of invention. It is important to note that the obviousness has to be based on the prior art which is already on record somewhere, be it previous patents, products, publications, etc. The basis of obvious is not whether, given the problem at hand, someone of ordinary skill in the art would be able to come up with a solution.
The applicant has way to much interest in failing to prove that it has been done for this system to work, and since they can not conclusively prove that it has never been done I really don't see how this would work at all.
What amount of evidence on the applicants part would convince you that their invention is in fact new, and that they are just ignoring that really good piece of prior art that they conveniently forgot to bring with them?
Holy ignorant post batman! Seriously, you should actually learn a little about patents and patent law before trying to argue things like this.
All you have done in the first part ("instructions for obtaining HTML document...") of your argument is take 1/2 of a few claims and complained about them while completely ignoring the rest of the claim.
In the second part you complained about some dependent ("the method of claim 1...") claims, however, dependent claims still have the restrictions of the claims that they are dependent on and don't stand by themselves. So, you at least got something right, that is a cookie, and that second thing is a session ID, but they also have claim 1 incldued within.
Your argument is a composistion fallacy (http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/composit ion.html). You are basically saying that since one part of the claim is invalid, then the entire patent must be invalid, which is incorrect logic.
I have not read the entire patent and offer no opionion as its validity.
The problem is that Open Source projects are rarely innovative. The tend to just reimplement what has been done elsewhere, except they license it differently and complain when it's commercial counterpart upgrades to a new version which no longer works with their own. The amount of blatent (attempted) copying is quite humerous considering how much whining and complaining about how bad the commercial alternatives are.
Slashdot Mirror
If you looked at the image of the patent it would be a lot more readable. The .backslash. is just a code that the uspto uses to substitue for "\" to make it easier for their search engine to handle it. It does similar things with divide, multiple, integrals, paragraph characters, square roots, etc...
To exactly copy my reply from a previous poster who said almost the exact same thing:
Just because a piece of software generates poetry does not automatically mean that it is prior art which will invalidate this patent. In order for the prior art to be useful here, it must either directly show or teach the following (claim 1):
1. A computer-implemented method of generating a poet personality comprising:
analyzing a plurality of poems represented in a text file;
generating a plurality of analysis models, each of said analysis models representing one of said plurality of poems; and
storing the plurality of analysis models in a personality data structure, wherein each analysis model in the personality data structure has a set of bigram, trigram and quadrigram, exponent and weight parameters.
Also, does this reference attempt to mimmick a specific style?
To quote myself: "Please take the time to carefully read a post before responding."
I never said to read the article! I said to read the post that you are responding to, which is something that you apparently need work on yourself.
Bugs in code are a reality for every computer industry. Plus who is to say that port80 are the ones who wrote the code and that it was not contracted out to a different company? Should I not take Microsoft seriously as a company because they forgot to renew their DNS entry for hotmail? How about not taking Redhat seriously for poor website programming?
Should I not take you seriously for misspelling "skepticism" and "professionism"? Errors like this are a part of life, no company or person is perfect.
This is too small of a sample to produce meaningful results. Also some of these companies may be running a certain platform based on business deals made way back in the day and are reluctant to make the investment needed to completely replace their infrastructure (which may explain the strong presence of netscape, who knows).
There are really too many factors involved to simply choose a number of websites and determine which is the best server software based upon what the majority of those sites are running.
You can't make an accurate comparison unless you can remove all the other factors which directly affect how the server will perform.
I never claimed that their sampling method was correct. I only claimed that there is insufficient evidence to say that it is incorrect, especially when the evidence presented tells absolutely nothing about the sampling method in question (ie, which sites they chose to sample, how many times they sample the sites, what weighting they give to each site, etc...).
From the evidence at hand all you can say is that they aren't the best ASP/SQL programmers which is completely unrelated to the sampling of websites from a statistical point of view.
Please take the time to carefully read a post before responding.
I guess it all depends what kind of data you are looking for depending on which platform you want to sell, but both of these methods seem to produce equally worthless information to me. I would like to see a break down of webservers used/million hits or something to that effect. I suppose to be perfectly fair connection data and processing power would have to be normalized before hand as well.
Until then I'll happily ignore these poorly done statistical analysis and chose a platform based on my own criteria.
What does this have to do with their sampling method? I seriously doubt that their scanning system is some guy randonly typing websites into that box and writing down the results. The back end code which actually performs the server detection could work just fine and still produce and error during display.
Most of the examiners take the metro, but it is otherwise a pretty valid point.
I think this is one of the main reasons that lots of examiners jump ship to patent agent/lawyer jobs after a few years, well, and the pay difference.
Please direct your comments to the claims when discussing prior art and not some worthless summary of the invention which has no real meaning legally.
Otherwise, your comments are equally worthless.
You can't write claims which leave out important steps or parts in the invention you are trying to patent. In the above example the claim would have to have a part about some manner of transistion between the steam and the mechanical motion. However, the unless the claim specifically mentions how the steam is produced, you are correct. It should also be noted that the only time such a claim would have been allowed in a broad state such as the example above is when the first steam engine was invented. It would still be possible to patent a generic steam engine today if your transistion step from steam to mechanical motion was a novel one.
This would be true only if your method of providing one master password to provide acess to others is by the same method as stated in the claims of the patent application. If you come up with a new/different method of doing this, then you will not be in violation.
It is true that the specification covers a preffered embodiement of the invention. However, the claims themselves do not cover the general idea as I originally said. The claims will cover the basic steps/parts of what they believe their invention to be. Granted, this is broader in scope than the preffered embodiment described in the specification, but it still only covers a specific implementation of the general idea.
For example, here the general idea is password management. If this patent were granted, IBM would not have a lock on all patent mangagement systems regardless of implementation, they would only have protection on patent managment systems which meet the restrictions set by the claims.
Please try to remember that the abstract of a patent doesn't mean a single thing legally. It is just a short summary of the invention, nothing more. The claims are the only part of the patent that has any legal power, and since the poster failed to actually link to the patent or give us the patent number it is hard to say what this patent would cover.
Also try to remember that a patent is for a specific implemenation of an invention and does not cover the general idea of the invention itself. If this were granted it would be possible to come up with your own implementation for password management and not be infringing on the patent.
This article really isn't written for the slashdot crowd, and isn't the great technological comparison on a chip by chip basis that I'm sure you were all hoping for.
This article is for the technologically illiturate that doesn't understand the differences between flash, SRAM, HDDs, etc... who may not realize that HDDs and running may not be the best mix, or that the ipod only has a ~6hr battery life and it isn't going to last their entire trip to europe. For this purpose it makes some valid points.
As I said, there has to be solid proof in public record (previous patents, products, publications, etc). Simply stating that something could be held as obvious after reading it does not stand up as a rejection according to case law.
Show me a piece of dated prior art that shows exercizing a cat with a laser pointer, if you can't the patent stands. I am willing to bet that you can't.
What about Wind and Heart?
To answer your questions:
1) Yes, assuming that the patent in question has utility (ie, whether the implemenation that you are attempting to patent could actually work). See 35 USC 101 for patent utility guidlines.
2) Yes
3) Yes (but in the US the patent would go to the person who can prove the earliest invention date. This is not true for the rest of the world, where the first to file would get the patent)
4) Yes, you can patent something without a working version, but the patent can not just be for the general ideas. For example, you can not patent the idea of one-click shopping, but you can patent a specific implemenation for one-click shopping.
5) No, 35 USC 102 and 35 USC 103 lay out the guidlines for what can be patent. An invention can not be granted if it would have been obvious to one ordinarily skilled in the art at the time of invention. It is important to note that the obviousness has to be based on the prior art which is already on record somewhere, be it previous patents, products, publications, etc. The basis of obvious is not whether, given the problem at hand, someone of ordinary skill in the art would be able to come up with a solution.
huh?
The applicant has way to much interest in failing to prove that it has been done for this system to work, and since they can not conclusively prove that it has never been done I really don't see how this would work at all.
What amount of evidence on the applicants part would convince you that their invention is in fact new, and that they are just ignoring that really good piece of prior art that they conveniently forgot to bring with them?
Holy ignorant post batman! Seriously, you should actually learn a little about patents and patent law before trying to argue things like this.
t ion.html). You are basically saying that since one part of the claim is invalid, then the entire patent must be invalid, which is incorrect logic.
All you have done in the first part ("instructions for obtaining HTML document...") of your argument is take 1/2 of a few claims and complained about them while completely ignoring the rest of the claim.
In the second part you complained about some dependent ("the method of claim 1...") claims, however, dependent claims still have the restrictions of the claims that they are dependent on and don't stand by themselves. So, you at least got something right, that is a cookie, and that second thing is a session ID, but they also have claim 1 incldued within.
Your argument is a composistion fallacy (http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/composi
I have not read the entire patent and offer no opionion as its validity.
The problem is that Open Source projects are rarely innovative. The tend to just reimplement what has been done elsewhere, except they license it differently and complain when it's commercial counterpart upgrades to a new version which no longer works with their own. The amount of blatent (attempted) copying is quite humerous considering how much whining and complaining about how bad the commercial alternatives are.
Mod me down if you wish but its true.
There are so many misconceptions about patents and prior art here that it is nearly impossible to tell.