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E-Mail Forwarding Patented, PTO Sued

Posted by chrisd on Tue Aug 27, 2002 01:28 AM
from the defining-a-new-bottom-of-that-barrel dept.
Patents
David Lee Ludwig writes "Earlier today, I ran across an article regarding an issued patent on e-mail forwarding. According to the president of the holding company, they're interested in making the technology open-source, however I fail to see where the innovation is. The full text of the patent (6427164) is available online." Sadly, we've run altogether too many patent stories of late. In related news, the PTO has been sued to stop shredding the original documents related to the patents. Read on for more on that...
mgarraha writes "A Washington Post article reports that the National Intellectual Property Researchers Association is suing the US Patent and Trademark Office to stop them from destroying their archive of paper documents. NIPRA claims that PTO's new patent database is not good enough to go completely paperless. PTO had planned to begin disposal today, but they are still negotiating with the group that will take the paper off their hands."
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  • They are almost saints (Score:5, Funny)

    by jukal (523582) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @01:31AM (#4146754) Journal
    "All the software will be free and hopefully, open-source. Only the registration will be charged, and given the scale that we anticipate, we're looking at less than US$20 per year, with substantial discounts for students, etc."

    Now we have someone to continue Mother Teresa's work!

  • Yes, software patents are bad, but this one isn't as bad as the article makes it out to be. Here's what's patented:
    1. User sends out email to an innactive/delted account.
    2. Mail gets bounced back to user.
    3. User's email-agent notices the bounce is of a certain type, so it connects to a central machine and asks "for non-working address foo@bar.com, give me an active address for the same perrson"
    4. Email-agent forward the bounced mail to that active adress.
    So it doesn't come anywhere near patenting traditional email forwarding.
    • Without going into all the IP crap, this kind of makes sense in the days of free email accounts with limited quotas.

      However, what would be even better is if Hotmail et. al provided you with an overflow email address that gets your hotmail mail when your quota is full.

      The ability to get your old/dead mail accounts forwarded to a new account is OK, but a quiet word to your SA in the job you are leaving is cheaper :)

      • However, what would be even better is if Hotmail et. al provided you with an overflow email address that gets your hotmail mail when your quota is full.

        Yeah but then why would you register for their premium service? It actually almost seems like they sign you up to spam lists of purpose just to fill up your mailbox and get you over the small quota they have so you'll upgrade to premium... For kicks, create a hotmail account, in your preferences don't set it to sign up to any mailing lists...Wait a week and login, it will be flooded with spam (much of which the 'bulk/spam email detector' missed) even if your userid is something random and unguessable.

        I'm not singling out Hotmail on this either, Yahoo is the same way and I suspect other free email places are too though I've only used Hotmail and Yahoo myself.

        • For kicks, create a hotmail account, in your preferences don't set it to sign up to any mailing lists...Wait a week and login, it will be flooded with spam (much of which the 'bulk/spam email detector' missed) even if your userid is something random and unguessable.


          my hotmail account (hey hey hey backoff, it came with the damn MSIM messenger account!!! Err, wait, you mean that isn't any better? Oh darn. . . :-D ) has received all of four or five pieces of e-mail.

          Ever.

          Period.

          The first one the customary "welcome to hotmail.com" e-mail, and the rest of them asking me to upgrade to the premium service.

          Not one piece of spam.

          Ever.

          So nyah! (well over a month to!)

        • Re:More Slashdot sensationalism (Score:4, Insightful)

          by John Miles (108215) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @02:54AM (#4146974) Homepage Journal
          For kicks, create a hotmail account, in your preferences don't set it to sign up to any mailing lists...Wait a week and login, it will be flooded with spam (much of which the 'bulk/spam email detector' missed) even if your userid is something random and unguessable.

          They don't sign you up for spam lists. Try creating your Hotmail account name with a random-sounding combination of several letters that don't spell any valid English words or proper names and numbers that don't look like a year in the 20th century. As long as the address is kept private, it won't be spammed.

          "aimfiz69105" at hotmail.com has received zero spams in the past couple of years.
          "rezrov" at hotmail.com has received about 300 spams since it was created last week.

          My guess is that the problem is that Hotmail and other mail providers are apparently stupid enough to accept incoming mail with 300,000,000 recipients in the header. I can't think of any other reason why "rezrov" would get buried in spam almost instantly while "aimfiz69105" never gets any.
          • My guess is that the problem is that Hotmail and other mail providers are apparently stupid enough to accept incoming mail with 300,000,000 recipients in the header. I can't think of any other reason why "rezrov" would get buried in spam almost instantly while "aimfiz69105" never gets any.
            The problem is that "rezrov" is a shorter userid than "aimfiz69105," and there's probably a rezrov@ other domains aside from hotmail.com (like aol.com, or yahoo.com). That's probably about it.

            The classic dictionary attack - sending mail to ajones@, bjones@, cjones@ - has evolved somewhat. These days, some spammers take every valid @aol.com address and try to mail it @hotmail.com. They take every valid @hotmail.com address and try to mail it @yahoo.com. Reason being, a substantial number of people carry the same username across services. If JimBob4494@aol.com creates a Hotmail account, it's likely to be jimbob4494@hotmail.com. If joeuser555@hotmail.com signs up for Yahoo! Mail, he's likely to create joeuser555@yahoo.com.

            So, what's more likely in the case of rezrov {at} hotmail {dot} com is that there's a valid user with the address rezrov@aol.com or rezrov@yahoo.com. So one spammer decided to try that particular user portion @hotmail.com, it didn't bounce, and now you're on tens if not hundreds of lists. Meanwhile, there was never a aimfiz69105@aol.com, or a aimfiz69105@yahoo.com, etc so that address @hotmail doesn't get any spam.

            Sucks, eh?

            My Hotmail/Yahoo account method has been spamproof so far:

            Pull a dollar bill out of your pocket, and use its serial number as your free webmail account username. Guaranteed no spam, ever.

            Right now I'm looking at a dollar bill whose serial number is J57097854N (I need to go put it into WheresGeorge :) and that would make a perfect Hotmail or Yahoo account.
          • "aimfiz69105" at hotmail.com has received zero spams in the past couple of years.

            Until about three minutes after you hit "Submit" and smacked your forehead. :P
      • Yeah.

        Then I can sign up for a HotMail account, set an "overflow" address, and then send it crap until it turns into a pure forwarding address, after which I never, ever log into HitMail, ever again.

        I'm sure they'll really go for that idea:

        1) They get to pay to store as much useless crap as it takes to push the account over quota

        2) They don't get to sell my eyeballs to advertisers.

        3) ???

        4) Profit!!!

        -- Terry
        • funny. i have been using hotmail for over a year however i have not seen a single banner ad, or even seen the website!

          MS Entourage (for mac)
          Outlook 2002 or Outlook Express 6 (for win32)

          Those programs allow you to use hotmail as if it were an IMAP service. No ads, no bullshit, just mail.
    • >So it doesn't come anywhere near patenting traditional email forwarding.

      The procedure you describe is traditional forwarding on some systems. For example, I once had a free GNN account (Global Network Navigator, AOL's "internet connection only" service that went under quickly). When GNN closed house, I was given the option to have everything forwarded to AOL for a period of time. All mail sent to me@gnn.com was forwarded to myotherID@aol.com. All web traffic destined to members.gnn.com/me was forwarded to members.aol.com/myotherID.

      So, "forwarding" can indeed mean what this patent applies to. Not forwarding as in "Fwd:" but forwarding as in automatic redirection of email to a different address; just like the USPS calls it "forwarding" when you move and they send your mail to your new home. Not everyone calls it aliasing, and in fact there are many webhosting companies out there right now who offer "email forwarding" which does exactly this.

      And yes, this patent sucks.
      • So far as I'm aware, traditional forwarding is done by the system the email was sent to. In the patented method, it is done by the user's mail agent; all the system the email was originally sent to does is bounce it back to the sender.
      • The procedure you describe is traditional forwarding on some systems.

        No it isn't.

        Traditional email forwarding works completely transparently to the client. You send your message, and it's delivered. The *server* handles any forwarding, *nothing* is returned to your client.

        The patented method is *different* - in that, the email server knows nothing about the forwarding address, it just bounces the undeliverable mail. The client then (automatically) discovers an address to forward to, from a different server.

        The only similarity is that the forwarding is automatic; the implementations are entirely different.

        The patent still sucks, though.

        Cheers,

        Tim
    • The thing is, this is NOT an innovation, it is merely an extension of what many people do already. My e-mail for the university of kansas has changed, but the old addresses were kept active and "forwarded" to my new address, essentially doing the same thing. the central server being my Universitys e-mail server, and the new address my new address. To move this system from the original institution is no change in technology, just a step in the same direction, it accomplishes the same goal in a slightly different way. It would be like patenting a joystick with 12 AXIS control, simply because you were the first to do it, then claiming that all controllers with 12 axis were under your patent, regardless of design.

      But alas, many of this kind of patent is in force today, especially in the computer industry, simply because of the money it takes to challenge the patents.

    • How carefully did you read the patent? Your description doesn't match Claim 1. sendmail+NIS aliases does match claim 1 exactly. The server does the forwarding, not the client.

    • Agreed.

      While I'm not thrilled with the whole idea of patenting alogrithms, while they're legal, this really isn't an abusive of the system. It's not super-complicated, but then not every patent needs to be.

      I wouldn't mind these Editor Soapbox issues nearly as much if Timothy at least understood what he was posting half the time.

      -Bill

    • Re:More Slashdot sensationalism (Score:5, Informative)

      by Twylite (234238) <twylite@cry p t . c o . za> on Tuesday August 27 2002, @04:17AM (#4147109) Homepage

      The SMTP protocol includes two 3xx response codes; one is "address not local, forward to remote@address" (client agent must handle forwarding), the other is "address not local, will forward to remote@address" (server will do the forwarding).

    • Re:More Slashdot sensationalism (Score:5, Insightful)

      by WEFUNK (471506) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @11:01AM (#4149020) Homepage
      Yes, software patents are bad, but this one isn't as bad as the article makes it out to be .... it doesn't come anywhere near patenting traditional email forwarding.

      I think this type of patent is actually much worse than the kind that might have allowed traditional email forwarding to be patented. This patent is very typical of what makes most software patents so bad. The vast majority of software patents that make it to the front page of slashdot seem to have the exact same "M.O." or recipe. Most seem to describe obvious examples of using a database to store information, relate information, and then perform an automated action based on the linked information.

      None of the component actions are ever really innovative or are even claimed to be (forwarding e-mail for instance). Instead, these patents claim that by using a database to automate a common or obvious process they are proposing a new and innovative solution. Other bad patents simply claim that using networks or the internet with existing processes achieves the same goal.

      I think the examiners wrongly treat these patents like non-software patents that combine two or more existing elements or technologies in a new way that produces unobvious results. The difference is that software patents whose main innovation is the use of a database (or a network) are not only comprised of existing and obvious elements but they are also being combined in an existing and very obvious way. Databases are specifically designed to store and relate information and to allow for automated actions to be performed. Pre-existing elements using a pre-existing architecture or application should not so easily be classified as either novel or unobvious.

  • So.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by k0ala (199123) <n0esc@@@charter...net> on Tuesday August 27 2002, @01:44AM (#4146794) Homepage
    I wonder just who is going to get the patent on patenting things, and then satrt suing everyone? Or did someone already get that too? Leave it to the lawyers... We already know IBM beat you to it...

    US Patent on Using the Bathroom by IBM [uspto.gov]

  • Canada Post (along with probably every other post office type company) provides a change of address you can purchase which will redirect your mail for a specified period of time for a fee. It is the exact same thing as what I believe they are trying to do, only it is redirected a lot later in the process of delivery (after the bounce). Is this what we call prior art?
    • Mail forwarding for first class mail is free in the U.S. Magazines have a slight charge to them.
      • It's sort of free in the U.S.

        If you start mail forwarding with one of those "Movers Guide" pamphlets, you pay for the service in the junk mail that gets sent to you. Read the back, that book is provided by the Direct Marketer's Association or some such thing. The info you supply is given directly to them as an "opt-in" for junk mail.

        This centralized server idea mentioned in the patent will cause spam in one of two ways:
        The owners will sell spammers access to the list, or perform mailings for them
        Someone will hack the sytem and download all the addresses
        Of course by the simple nature of the thing, a simple bot that generates random queries would eventually get you a lot of addresses across many domains. Imagine just sending it millions of queries for random screen names on AOL. MSN and the other major ISPs.

    • Well, the patent doesn't cover this, since its limited to email where the forwarding server is a third party key => value (old email => new email) database, and where it's the client that decides to use it.

      It goes something like this:
      1. Take a current idea that's obvious to anyone.
      2. Patent it with 18 extra claims that limit scope.
      3. Profit!

      This is of course slightly different to BT's hyperlink patent, which is more along the lines of:
      1. Make some dodgy system and patent it in case it might be useful some day.
      2. Get upset when you notice you could have generalised the patent and covered something that could make you money if you could only get rid of some claims.
      3. Try to convince court that because of (2) the patent should cover the more general case anyway.
      4. Profit!

      Personally, I think the patent offices should have a moderation system. I'd vote this one down (-1, File an RFC).

  • * Patent on automatic forwarding from URL to another

    * Patent on "Out of Office" autoreplies

    Actually, I wouldn't mind this last one. Hopefully people would stop using them.

    Mart.

  • From my reading (Score:4, Interesting)

    by flonker (526111) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @01:47AM (#4146809)
    From my reading of the press release, they're looking to start a registry for old email address to new email address translation, in order to handle bounce messages more cleanly.

    Doesn't seem very useful to me. Just adds another layer on top of SMTP that fits a tiny niche. And this layer is dependent on some random startup still being in business.

    Maybe some kind of distributed delivery system, with encryption of bounced messages...

    OK, here's my solution to their problem. All email is signed, and the recipient's public PGP or GPG key is sent with the message. If the message bounces, it gets sent to usenet. The recipient scans usenet for their PGP or GPG key. If they come across it, then the message gets delivered to them. This method has a problem dealing with spam, especially since the disk space cost and bandwidth cost increases dramatically for each bounce.

    The spam problem could be solved by limiting the number of bounced messages that can be sent from one host (NNTP-Posting-Host:, or even Path:), but that's only a partial solution.

  • not exactly e-mail forwarding... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jdbo (35629) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @01:48AM (#4146816)
    ...rather, this looks like some sort of (centralized) email-address registry which can be accessed by e-mail clients/servers to look for a more recent version of an out-of-date e-mail address.

    in other words, this is little more than an internet-based look-up table of e-mail addresses (with obsolete addresses pointing to the most recent address) + protocols for accessing that look-up table.

    in my (admittedly cursory) of the patent, it doesn't seem to overlap with server-specific e-mail forwarding (i.e. what is normally done with e-mail forwarding). this isn't to say that this isn't a silly/sleazy patent, but rather that this won't necessarily interfere with how people currently handle e-mail forwarding (if someone sees an element of overlap that I am missing, please point it out!).

    Not that any of this is clear from the write-up, of course; sometimes I wish that passing reading comprehension and composition courses was mandatory for internet usage... then I think again, because ninjas are awesome [realultimatepower.net].

  • SENDMAIL: An Internetwork Mail Router (1985) (Score:3, Informative)

    by jukal (523582) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @01:48AM (#4146818) Journal
    Ehmm. Great invention. Sorry to spoil the fun but .. :
    "...MMDF and sendmail both support aliasing, customized mailers, message batching, automatic forwarding to gateways, queueing, and retransmission."

    The orginal paper:
    SENDMAIL -- An Internetwork Mail Router [google.com], Eric Allman

  • It's not that bad: read the actual patent (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jon_eaves (22962) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @01:49AM (#4146823) Homepage
    It's not click and forward, or "f" and forward or even ".forward" and forward.

    From the patent link A method of automatically resending an electronic message originally sent to a receiving user at a first address that is now invalid to a second address for the receiving user, wherein the second address has been registered with a forwarding address server

    It's very specifically related to dealing with bouncing mail and having a registry set up for when the bounce occurs stuff can happen to get the mail to the right place.

    Of course, I see a huge gaping security hole in this if I register the bounce address as mine.

    Yet another case of great editor review of stories. What's with the inflammatory headlines ? Clearly the person submitting the story didn't even read the article.

  • Wrong...its another "single central place" patent (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MosesJones (55544) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @01:57AM (#4146844) Homepage
    This isn't about email forwarding its about being the single central place where peoples new email addresses are held. Basic idea is that they act like the postoffice does when you move.

    You tell the post-office
    You move
    People send mail to your old address
    Post office sends to new address

    So they've patented the smail process for email. Not actually original and misses one small but crucial point...

    NO-ONE IS THE CENTRAL AUTHORITY! For this to work then everyone would have to register at this place, and every email client would have to have a plug-in to work like this.

    Its one of those great "if we only get 10%" .com business plans, backed up by a patent in the "e" world that would never be allowed in the real world.

  • I can never escape (Score:5, Funny)

    by KarmaBitch (562896) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @01:57AM (#4146845)
    So now.. When I offically kill an email address because of spam innundation wherever I go I still get all of the crap that was coming to my previous address!!

    Thanks.. I'm glad you patented the most annoying idea possible. So once I register I'm stalked by spam forever!... Wow... Where do I sign up?
  • Wouldn't this just be a huge honey pot (the real thing, like bears and stuff not the other [lucidic.net] one) for SPAMer's? Either: 1) Hack it and get a huge data-base of valid, known addresses to sell. 2) Or exploit it by including the code to get the new valid address to simply follow old email addresses around to continue to SPAM them... Also? Who's to say they won't SPAM the user base generated by the 'new' service they are selling?

  • I think this won't work because... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Advocadus Diaboli (323784) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @02:12AM (#4146883)
    ...of the following reasons:

    1. It would mean that there is a server full of VALID email addresses. Do you really think that this isn't a nice source for spammers to get 100% valid addresses? I as a user won't trust that mechanism, especially there are some users that change their mail addresses frequently to avoid spam in their mailboxes.
    2. There is a nice thing like LDAP that can help me to find out the new address when I receive a bounce with "user unknown".
    3. The patent also says that the users address book will be updated automatically. I don't think that I should give an MTA like sendmail access to my private .aliases file.
    4. That thing doesn't help me at all if I have the address John.Doe@maildomain.com and I cancel this account and 5 minutes later another mail user registers for John.Doe@maildomain.com because then the mail address is not invalid anymore.
    I don't even think that telling my new mail address to the people from whom I want to receive mail in the future is a big deal. :-)

  • Infinite Mail Loops (Score:5, Funny)

    by unsinged int (561600) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @02:12AM (#4146884)
    Suppose I have addresses me@A.com and me@B.com and I go to "themailregistry" and tell it both are expired and to forward A to B and B to A. Then I send myself an email at A.

    A bounces, checks with the registry, forwards to B, which bounces, checks with the registry, forwards to A, ad infinitum.

    Imagine this with a larger sequence of addresses or more groups of addresses, and consider it unlikely they'll scan their registry for graph cycles (since that's essentially what this is), and you've got a nasty nasty problem.

  • Stanford University, IBM, already "violating" it (Score:5, Informative)

    by tlambert (566799) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @02:30AM (#4146919)
    Standford University and IBM corporation already maintain an external "registry" of valid email addresses and forwarding information, and use it to send either 551 or 251 response messages, which a mail client may use to update its address book (see RFC 2821, section 3.4, for details).

    Both of them maintain the information in an LDAP database, but you could do the same thing with a DNS server, or any other reasonable hierarchical database.

    The [internal to IBM] server is called "Blue Pages", and is actuallyan LDAP view onto a VM/CMS maintained database replica.

    -- Terry

  • ...this is a true innovation... (Score:5, Informative)

    by jukal (523582) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @02:46AM (#4146947) Journal
    In addition to not containing anything new since sendmail, see these patents [uspto.gov] too:
    • 6,134,316: Telecommunications network with relocateability of subscriber number
    • 5,832,221: Universal message storage system
    • 5,828,836: Networked information communication system
    • 5,826,039: Universal connection point for resources and communication unrelated to a physical endpoint
    • 5,802,510: Universal directory service
    • 5,742,763: Universal message delivery system for handles identifying network presences
    • 5,675,733: Statistical analysis and display of reception status of electronic messages
    • 5,481,721: Method for providing automatic and dynamic translation of object oriented programming language-based message passing into operation system message passing using proxy objects
    In other words, this is another truly innovative piece of work!! ;))

  • Free kewl email addresses (Score:3, Interesting)

    by XiC (207670) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @03:40AM (#4147050)
    If I understand correctly:
    - I find a not used (1 that bounces back) email address @somecompany.com and register that as being mine and let it forward to my valid email addy....

    Example:
    IwouldReallyLikeToBeBillsWife@Microsof t.com forward to XiC@home.com

    Sign me up, $20 for a whole lot of fun (and porn spam) is a Good Thing.

  • How can you patent this? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Saggi (462624) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @05:24AM (#4147285) Homepage
    In Denmark where I live, we have snail-mail forwarding. If you send a letter to someone who has moved, and the postman arrive at the address and see he can't deliver the letter her returns to the mail office with the letter. Here he lookup in a database to see where the person has moved to and forward the letter to the new address!

    Now this is identical to the patent, except the patent goes for electronic mail. I don't see how you can patent a common method used for ages, simply by applying it to some new technology, when the method is the same.

    If this is allowed (and it appears to be) then you can start looking through all daily methods, techniques etc. and start patenting the electronic versions.

  • Prior Art... (Score:4, Informative)

    by thogard (43403) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @07:37AM (#4147639) Homepage
    (Yes I read the silly patent...)

    ISODE your friendly x.400 email gateway was doing this in '93 or maybe even before. Its part of the requirements for GOSSIP (the us goverments do all email system)

    The more I remember about X.400, the more I'm glad the words "or SMTP" got added to the offical X.400 migration document.

  • Prior art in RFC 821 (Score:4, Informative)

    by riflemann (190895) <riflemannNO@SPAMbb.cactii.net> on Tuesday August 27 2002, @08:46AM (#4148022)
    RFC821 includes almost exactly this patent (hopefully enough to quash it), especially
    the 551 response:

    3.2. FORWARDING

    There are some cases where the destination information in the
    <forward-path> is incorrect, but the receiver-SMTP knows the
    correct destination. In such cases, one of the following replies
    should be used to allow the sender to contact the correct
    destination.

    [...]
    551 User not local; please try <forward-path>

    This reply indicates that the receiver-SMTP knows the user's
    mailbox is on another host and indicates the correct
    forward-path to use. Note that either the host or user or
    both may be different. The receiver refuses to accept mail
    for this user, and the sender must either redirect the mail
    according to the information provided or return an error
    response to the originating user.

    Or can the lawyers see holes in that?

  • .forward (Score:3, Funny)

    by jonr (1130) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @11:40AM (#4149360) Homepage Journal
    When was .forward first used? This is getting even sillier. PTO should be renamed Ministry Of Silly Ideas (ala Monty Python).
  • It's late in the discussion, but here I go....

    Back when I was a poor college student and PSU (The Pennsylvania State University) I remember a professor of mine in an algorithms class talk about the problem of searching a patent database. I forget all the figures, and who this professor was, and all the other important details, but I do remember he said that it was an extremely hard problem, to the point where PSU told the USPTO that it was impossible, because there was no way you could sustain the search at the rate patents were being submitted. It was something like, to do 1 keyword search (nothing fancy) it would take say an hour to do (I forget the numbers, like I said) at the time patents were rolling in at something much higher, like 200/hr or something alot higher than you would think.

    So basically the long short of this garbled mess of memories is to do a really good search using all kinds of fancy algorithms and stuff on the full patent database would never work since there are too many patents to search, especially at the rate they are coming in.

    And before you say "hardware has gotten a lot faster" remember this was brought up in an alorithm class, so it is doubtful that hardware has caught up to the rate they need. I really need to find a link to this problem so I can be a little more intelligent about this post. :-) (to google...)

    • Re:Postfix lets you do this (Score:5, Insightful)

      by srw (38421) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @01:46AM (#4146802) Homepage
      Have you read the patent? The patent refers to a system where a mailserver which receives an email for an address no longer in use checks with _another_ server to determine the new address. Does Postfix do this? It doesn't seem all that useful to me, and possibly exploitable. (...my old scott.walde@sasknet.sk.ca doesn't work anymore. What's to stop someone else from registering a forward for that address to their own address and diverting mail that was intended for me. I haven't read the patent all the way through, so forgive me if they have thought of this.)

    • I agree with much of the sentiment here, except that increasing the costs to get a patent will only hurt the little guy. The big guys have deep enough pockets that they will still go ahead with the more egregious claims. Lower the costs and the big guys just patent everything in sight.

      So it seems to me that unless we abolish the software patents altogether there isn't much that can be done to level the playing field.

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