Northeastern University Sues Google Over Patent

kihbord writes to mention that Boston's Northeastern University and Waltham, Mass. based company Jarg have brought suit against Google for apparently infringing on a distributed database system developed by Kenneth Baclawski. "The patent describes a distributed database system that breaks search queries into fragments and distributes them to multiple computers in a network to get faster results. The patent was assigned to Northeastern University, which licensed it exclusively to Jarg, according to the lawsuit, filed last Tuesday with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas."

Solution in the last Slashdot story?

[ErikTheRed (162431)]

Too bad we can't apply the Stupid Filter [slashdot.org] to the patent system.

Bayh-Dole strikes again

[GrEp (89884)]

It looks like Bayh-Dole strikes again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh-Dole_Act [wikipedia.org] .

Lawyers Troll the Patent Office?

[huckda (398277)]

The lawyer's firm would not take up the case unless it was paid in advance, and it took Belanger two and a half years to find a company willing to pursue the case on a contingency basis, the Globe reported.

and then ask to be paid UP FRONT for their services to litigate something THEY found whilst trolling the patent office archives..

Guess what they say about lawyers being greedy bastages ain't far off the mark...

Re:Lawyers Troll the Patent Office?

[DustyShadow (691635)]

It is very rare to find a law firm to take a patent case on a contingency basis. The cases take an enormous amount of time and resources and are too risky for contingencies.

Interesting Dates

[nursegirl (914509)]

FTA, the patent was filed on Dec 2, 1997. From Google's Corporate History [google.com] page, they describe setting up their first data centre in 1998.

Still absolutely ridiculous that this idea was patentable, and that the patent infringement case could happen this late.

Re:Interesting Dates

[bstone (145356)]

Aside from obviousness, the idea has been around forever. nCube built a business around it in the early 80's.

Re:

[harlows_monkeys (106428)]

FTA, the patent was filed on Dec 2, 1997

It was filed on October 5, 1994. December 2, 1997 is the issue date.

Oh come on

[ILuvRamen (1026668)]

Come on, people. It's a fairly strange, unique idea that they came up with that I don't think anyone had done before and they were actually using the patent by leasing it out to someone or whatever you want to call it. That's not really patent trolling. Trolling is coming up with some ridiculous idea and sitting on it so you can sue someone when they try to do it

Patent In Question & University Patent Portfol

[eldavojohn (898314)]

A a link to the patent, according to the article [uspto.gov] with the description:

A distributed computer database system including a front end computer and a plurality of computer nodes interconnected by a network into a search engine. A query from a user is transmitted to the front end computer which forwards the query to one of the computer nodes, termed the home node, of the search engine. The home node fragments the query and hashes the fragments of query to create an index by which the hashed query fragments are transmitted to one or more nodes on the network. Each node on the network which receives a hashed fragment uses the fragment of the query to perform a search on its respective database. The results of the searches of the local databases are then gathered by the home node.

However, I submitted this story yesterday and found a list of patents by that professor with that company [uspto.gov] and suspected a more interesting patent [uspto.gov]. From that description:

A distributed computer database system connected to a network, e.g., the Internet or on an intranet, indexes interests of agents that have registered with the system, examines information objects, for example, that reside on the network, and, responsive to a match with the registered agents' interests, specifies to the agents the relevant information objects.

It's your decision whether or not he's a patent troll but that professor seems to have many patents. I fear that the future only holds more and more patents being acquired by professors. I do not think this was the norm 10 years ago but my professor at George Mason University gave me a very frank lecture one day that essentially spelled out that the university rewards them for these things and the university is building a portfolio. What the states pay a professor is not much compared to what they could be earning in the field so he really has no choice.

I congratulated him on the several patents he just acquired. Although I can't say I was very happy about his recent moves.

Re:

[antibryce (124264)]

One of the interesting things I've noticed over the past 10+ years of working in IT is that more and more companies are asking questions like "How many patents do you have?" on job applications.

Combine with the graduate degree requirement that's slowly coming into practice and a BS/BA doesn't seem to be worth much nowadays.

Re:Patent In Question & University Patent Port

[Ash Vince (602485)]

One of the interesting things I've noticed over the past 10+ years of working in IT is that more and more companies are asking questions like "How many patents do you have?" on job applications.

But the answer will almost always be zero as the patents would be owned by whoever was paying you when you came up with the idea. Even if you come up with the idea while studying it will just be the uni that owns it.

The fact is that the patent system has long been designed so that you need money to enjoy its protection, people who are unemployed very rarely have enough money to file a patent and most contracts of employment sign any patent rights over to your employer.

Prior art (?)

[geophile (16995)]

Breaking a query into pieces and evaluating them at nodes containing a subset of the database has been written about since the 1970s. I read about it in grad school back then. Whether that's actually the thing actually patented by jarg is an entirely separate question. If it is, the PTO has screwed up once again. If it isn't, then perhaps there is a deeper similarity that TFA isn't describing.

Dont be so quick to shout troll

[quo_vadis (889902)]

I know the initial urge of a small company suing a larger one (especially a darling of slashdot such as Google) will have a lot of people yelling patent troll, but this may not be the case. The fact that this is a company from a university professor means that the company very likely has a working product that has been derived from several years worth of research. To those who are not used to the American system of research at the university level (for Professors and PhDs), any researcher can apply for a patent on the research they have been doing in the lab. The patent is usually issued in the name of the university or jointly in the name of the researcher and the university. There is usually an exclusive licencee for the patent. This forces the university to allow the researcher to have first dibs on licensing the technology he worked on exclusively to some company he decides. This is done as university's usually take anywhere from 50-75% of all royalties generated by the patent as research was done on university property. Thus many profs usually spin off companies and sit on the board of directors for the company and earn a supplementary income this way.

So , heres how it works :
1. Do research on some area.
2. Get funding from $Federal Agency of choice
3. Make a few students get PhD's doing research on this topic
4. Go to the office of tech licensing on campus and draw up patent
4.a Make sure the exclusive license clause is in the patent
5. ??? -> Form company and sit on board of directors
6. Profit.

Re:

[MozeeToby (1163751)]

Yeah, but on the other hand, sitting on a patent for years and years while you know its being violated by numerous other companies IS patent trolling.

Re:

[Jeff DeMaagd (2015)]

Maybe I would agree and not call troll if they didn't freaking file in Texas. What filing in Texas gets them is a jury that's sympathetic to patent plaintiffs.

Re:

[hedwards (940851)]

Because that is largely the definition of jurisdiction. The argument of proper venue in this case largely comes down to a question of whether or not this part of Texas has jurisdiction over the case.

It probably shouldn't as the University probably doesn't maintain a presence there, and Google doesn't directly market its services to that locality. The question of jurisdiction will likely come down to whether Google should be required to exclude business ties to that area.

Honestly, IANAL, but that really seem

Re:

[DustyShadow (691635)]

If Google has even 1 customer there, they can be held to jurisdiction there. I think I'll take the bet that someone there has given Google money in one way or another.

That's what we do with it!

[Baavgai (598847)]

Ok, we have this, um, network, we'll call it a network. ARPANET? Sure. And we'll take a job an run it on multiple machines to get a faster answer? Yeah, that will be great. Now, what do we do with it? IBM says play chess...

Seriously, isn't this pretty much the definition of a distributed computing job? What the hell do they teach at this school? Punch cards? It's not just patent trolling, it's embarrassingly ignorant.

Stop offering services in Marshall Texas

[addikt10 (461932)]

If the courts of Marshall Texas are so popular for patent trolls, and the way you justify jurisdiction is to claim that "services are available there", blacklist every Marshall Texas ISP's IP range in that area.

If one of those IP addresses tries to access your service, put up a nice, static HTML page declaring that it due to the local court's ignorance of patent issues and the resulting popularity of those courts for patent litigation, it isn't a good business decision to provide services to that area.

Have

Re:

[Kristoph (242780)]

I have a patent on that so unless you pay me a royalty I'll see you in Marshall Texas. :-)

]{

Combinations not valid patents.

[headkase (533448)]

The Supreme Court [bloomberg.com] in the states has ruled that patents that are combinations of existing inventions or would have come about anyway are not valid. Geez! Didn't Sun Tzu demonstrate the 'divide and conquer' method like millenia ago? Just because you combine it with a computer network does not make it new or novel.

I Thought Google was Highly Secret

[Nom du Keyboard (633989)]

I thought Google was highly secret in what they did and how they did it. The way I've read this, it seems like a pishing expedition of Google needing to prove that they don't violate the patent, and not that there is yet any proof that they do violate it.

And then there's always the specter of Prior Art raising its unwanted head.

Have these guys ever built such a database system themselves for sale?

Prior BUTT, not prior art

[unity100 (970058)]

I cant even find any logic to explain why this can not be patented, and many people did similar things a prior. Not due to complexity, but due to simplicity of the issue.

This search method is Ancient

[EEPROMS (889169)]

In my postgrad years in the early 80's I worked for a now defunct computer company that often supplied minicomputers for Government departments. The patent is an exact copy of how we did information searches across a network.Honestly there is no other way of doing this type of search efficiently back then and I dare say the same method pre dates my early years within th computer industry. Think about it, user enters search criteria into stand alone PC/Terminal then it is passed onto a primary node minicompu

Too quick to dismiss Northeastern as a troll

[The Empiricist (854346)]

The /. posts labeling Northeastern University as a patent troll or claiming that the patent should not have issued have been posted too quickly to be credible assessments of the morality of this suit and the worthiness of the patent. The current Wikipedia definition [wikipedia.org] is that a patent troll is "a person or company that enforces its patents against one or more alleged infringers in a manner considered unduly aggressive or opportunistic." If the patent was obtained through lawful and ethical means, is valid, and is infringed on by Google, then how is it "unduly aggressive or opportunistic" for Northeastern University to enforce the patent?

Some argue that a patent troll is merely a person or company that seeks to enforce a patent but does not practice the patent. Maybe Northeastern University is not practicing the patent. Then again, the mission of most universities seems to be conducting research, not applying and commercializing research. Licensing research to companies that can and will apply and commercialize that research is one way that universities fund additional research. Maybe universities should have to give all of their research away for free. But currently they do not. And it seems unfair to fault Northeastern for exercising its rights while not pushing the scope of its mission.

Given how quickly Northeastern was accused of being a patent troll, and given that there was no discussion about the proper role of universities or any real analysis of the worthiness of the patent (which was filed in 1994...almost 4 years before Google was founded), it seems likely that some people consider a patent troll to be any person who tries to enforce any patent rights.

Maybe Northeastern is acting like a patent troll. And maybe their patent is worthless. But it takes more than a quick glance at the 20-page issued patent or the 6-page complaint against Google to come up with a reasonable assessment of these issues.

Some analysis of the complaint would at least show that it doesn't look like Northeastern really knows the details of Google's search infrastructure:

13. A part of its search engine services, Google uses one or more hashing algorithms.
14. As part of its search engine services, Google returns search results responsive to user queries.
...
16. Google maintains and operators clusters of networked computers to provide search engine services to users.
...
26. Google has directly and/or indirectly infringed on one or more claims of the '593 patent, and Google is continuing such infringement by practicing or causing others to practice one or more of the inventions claimed in the '593 patent. For example, Google makes, uses, imports, sells and/or offers for sale search engine services and systems that infringe or that are used in ways that infringe one or more claims of the '593 patent in this district and elsewhere in the United States.

Then again, Google's code is not open to the world. If it was, more detailed analysis would be possible. How can Northeastern try to get access to the code? By suing and demanding it as part of discovery. Does this make Northeastern a patent troll? Maybe. But the alternative (aside from discarding the patent system altogether, at least for software innovations) is a system that rewards patent infringers who keep their source code inaccessible to patent holders.

Yuck. Glad I left that school.

[raddan (519638)]

The fact that a university is behind this patent lawsuit is the most disturbing part to me. I probably have no real basis for this opinion, since I only spent three semesters at the school (I transferred to another school), but I had the overwhelming feeling that Northeastern U's primary concern was: bring in the money. That's why I transferred to UMass Amherst. In my experience, Northeastern was overpriced, and filled with students and teachers who just couldn't give a damn about academics. UM Amherst's admission standards were certainly lower than NEU's, but I found that the students who wanted to be there were really motivated, and that the teaching, in general, was outstanding.

That's not to say that NEU didn't/doesn't have some strong departments, nor do I mean to disparage anyone who is presently working their ass off there. I just didn't see it. This article strengthens my opinion of NEU as essentially "for profit" and not "for education".

Prior art?

[kbahey (102895)]

Well, there were products on the market in the 1980s that did break down the queries to several CPUs.

One such example is Teradata [wikipedia.org], which had the database tables partitioned among many CPUs (done automatically on insert), each with its storage.

A query would be split automatically to all the CPUs, and each would fetch and return the rows matching the criteria in its part of the table.

The results are then combined from all CPUs and returned back to the application.

Later the CPUs were just emulated in software, as hardware became more powerful.

Prior art then ...

Re:

[cybrthng (22291)]

So something even as basic as DNS or anything that is load balanced/round robin or indexed in some form or fashion would be susceptible to this?

I mean, back when i ran a heavy Nutch/Lucene system the basic idea of balancing a query volume is to distribute the load. This is akin to patenting putting in a 4 lane highway so you can handle traffic a 1 lane highway couldn't.

Re:Just another patent troll...

[EvilRyry (1025309)]

Not quite. The patent was for splitting a single query into multiple chunks. In the case of a DNS server, a single DNS server gives you a reply. For round robin; same thing, one request from one client, one reply from one server.

The patent was for taking a single request, breaking it up into subrequests, then distributing the subrequests amongst multiple servers and then gluing the results back together.

So to make the required car analogy, its like taking a shopping list, breaking it up by area of town that the store is in, then deploying a separate car to each area and meeting back at home.

Re:

[caffeinemessiah (918089)]

The patent was for taking a single request, breaking it up into subrequests, then distributing the subrequests amongst multiple servers and then gluing the results back together.

How is this different from any parallel divide-and-conquer algorithm?

Re:

[Nazlfrag (1035012)]

In other words, it was such a simple and obvious solution to a distributed computing problem that they shouldn't have had a patent awarded to them anyway. Well, that and you shouldn't be able to patent algorithms in the first place.

Prior Art?

[CustomDesigned (250089)]

We had a system in our office in 1985 that distributed records for each table to N processors via a hash function, where N could be a large as you liked. Queries were sent to all nodes and run in parallel, and the results combined (since SQL is set based, this works perfectly). Queries on any size database could be made arbitrarily fast by adding more nodes. The only bottle neck was the band width to the control processor and any order by clauses, which was proportional to the result set size, not the database size.

Re:Prior Art?

[yorugua (697900)]

Well, TFA mentions Dec 7 1997 as "the day". In 1996, I worked in a project which involves Oracle Parallel Server on a RS/6000 SP2 parallel system. OPS used "I/O shipping" to send to several nodes the I/O request for a given query, and used the VSD subsystem for doing that (VSD stands for Virtual Shared Disk. The disk were attached to several SP2 nodes, which did the actual I/O while the many OPS nodes all saw the complete database as directly connected to it). Back then, 1996, the other "standard" of doing the parallel-database-thing was called "function shipping", in which not the IO, but the query was split among the nodes that had the tables and/or data involved. Of course, in both cases, all the nodes were networked using the SP2 switch in order to have huge bandwidht and low latency. Sounds familiar...

Re:

[Mr. Underbridge (666784)]

Don't be so damn cynical! Obviously Northeastern just wants to play fair by moving the disupute to a neutral venue.

You, sir, have a future in PR.

Re:

[MontyApollo (849862)]

It looks like Jarg is a company with actual products, so I don't know if you can really call them a patent troll (unless you are Google fanboy).

Re:We need a solution to the madness

[Talez (468021)]

If a north eastern company has to sue a north western company in a Texas court because they're more friendly to patent litigation then you're dealing with a patent troll.

Re:

[MontyApollo (849862)]

That's a silly argument. If you sue anybody, you want to do it where its most favorable for you.

A patent troll is someone who never intends to develop a patent but just sits on patents with the only purpose to sue those who infringe. In this case, the professor did not sit on the patent; he licensed it to Jarg, which is a company with real products.

Re:We need a solution to the madness

[Talez (468021)]

They have no competing product, they're hiring lawyers on a contingency basis, they're filing in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas based on the most stretched association with that venue and they've demanded a jury trial and an injunction up front. They're basically trying to force Google to make the suit go away and they're just rolling the dice to see if they get lucky.

Looks like a patent troll, sounds like a patent troll, smells like a patent troll. They're not going to be able to claim damages for lost profits. The only difference between these people and a typical dedicated patent troll IP firm is that they don't employ their own lawyers and they make some shitty, unrelated product that really has no relevance to this case.

Re:

[Duhavid (677874)]

Sure you can... Breaking the work up over multiple machines
has got to be about as obvious as can be.

Soon they will be suing the people who came up with RPC,
because it breaks the same patent.

Re:We need a solution to the madness

[Duhavid (677874)]

"Reality is that there's a lot of things that are "obvious" in hindsight ""

Dividing the search up among multiple machines if one
machine is not enough is pretty obvious. And not just
in hindsight.

"but who gets to say so?"

I see the problem, but I don't think we should allow that
as an excuse for such things.

Re:University with Patents?

[drhamad (868567)]

Most major universities control massive patent/IP portfolios... see the CalTech or BU for major examples. Universities are corporations, nothing more or less. The research done there is assigned to the corporation/school.

Re:

[darkmeridian (119044)]

WARF (Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation) is a huge patent-holder in the biotechnical arts. You can't do anything interesting in the field nowadays without hitting a WARF patent. Not saying that they're a patent troll, just saying they try to patent everything they might have innvented.

Re:

[The-Pheon (65392)]

Actually it is a WARF subsidiary now called WiCell. Nonprofit licenses for research are extremely cheap, a couple hundred dollars. Commercializing the research is another story.

Re:

[rhombic (140326)]

Universities are corporations, nothing more or less.

Except Uni's are completely free to ignore everyone else's patents in the course of their research, have access to all scientific software at much much cheaper "academic" rates, and can pay grad students slave wages ($15,000 per year for a 3000 hour work week is well below the Federal minimum wage). So while they behave in many ways like corporations, they have a number of government-issued advantages in the competition. Who'd have thunk it, the government

Re:

[CopaceticOpus (965603)]

Universities are corporations, nothing more or less.

Right. As usual on Slashdot, everything must be black and white. It's not as if universities could seek to profit from their inventions, AND educate people and give back to society. Also, since making a profit makes you evil, they are obviously not trying to use the money to improve their programs and stretch their limited budgets.

Re:

[kjj (32549)]

Even if it was true that all research at public schools must be made available to the public, this school is not a public school at all, it is a private school. Which means that most of the funding for the schools operation comes from tuition and donations by the alumni, not state or federal aid. Some private schools reject all state and federal funding because they do not which to be bound by rules concerning things like how they administer the school, choice of curriculum or what criteria they use for a

Re:

[superwiz (655733)]

Most students doing research are paid by the university. At least, almost all graduate students in sciences are. Plus they are using university's facilities.

Research Grants

[sjbe (173966)]

Isn't it the students that are paying for the research, and often times DOING the research which allows for these discoveries to begin with?

Generally speaking no, students do not pay for much/most research, at least not directly. There are of course lots of exceptions but research is typically paid for by grants (government and/or corporate) or various wealthy benefactors. A surprisingly large part of being a successful university researcher is being able to bring in the money to conduct your research. C

Re:

[MontyApollo (849862)]

Most patent suits are filed in East Texas. It's the in thing to do.

Re:

[Curze (1166985)]

I am a recent former student, and my experience is quite opposite of yours. Prof Baclawski, besides having the added benefit of speaking English natively, was an excellent teacher both for myself and the handful of others in my class that I spoke with regularly. He usually referenced "back in the day" stories, but in a humorous way that lead into the subject at hand, and I ended up learning more than most in that class. Also rediculously apparent was his apathy for monetary compensation, he just wanted to t