Paging Eliza: Patenting IM Bots

gondaba writes "The US Patent and Trademark Office has granted an all-encompassing patent to ActiveBuddy that covers every step of IM botmaking technology. According to internetnews, ActiveBuddy now plans to enforce the patent, even though the existence of prior art is well-known and documented."

Prior art (by about a decade)

[Viking Coder]

PRIOR ART [www-ai.ijs.si]

documented? i'd say.

[MORTAR_COMBAT!]

IRC.net documents advanced bots [irc.net] in 1994, let alone earlier, cruder bots which had been in use.

Bots are heavily in use in the corporate infrastructure, from auto-reply bots which answer emails based on formatting (think: subscribing to majordomo or even old NSI DNS requests), to complete bots which can answer "what color is the sand on Mars".

There's even a Wired article [wired.com] about IRC bots.

there should be stiff punishments for abusing the system like this, otherwise, what's to stop them? the only thing which gets hurt is their public image, and frankly that's not enough. I'm not talking prison terms, I'm talking stiff fines for such blatant misuse of the USPTO, to fund a future technical review board for the USPTO.

Instant Prior Art

[signe]

While I was working at AOL, someone (employee) had an IM bot running. It performed such tasks as giving out stock quotes when asked, and doing translations between a few languages. Seeing as this patent of ActiveBuddy's was filed *after* I left AOL, I'm fairly certain that they're shit outta luck.

Yeah, there weren't many IM bots out there, but there were a few. And one is all it takes.

-Todd

Send them your opinion about this.

[warpSpeed]

Tell them what you really think. Here is the contact info from thier web site. Only one email address, the rest are using cgi-forms.

Remeber to be polite!

contact form [activebuddy.com]

ActiveBuddy Press Contacts
Contact ActiveBuddy Public Relations:
[phone] x202
Email: [e-mail]
Snail Mail & Phone:

New York City Office
ActiveBuddy, Inc.
24 West 25th Street
Fifth Floor
New York, NY 10010
Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]

Sunnyvale, CA Office

ActiveBuddy, Inc.
111 West Evelyn Avenue
Suite 101
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]

Re:In a word, yes:

[aero6dof]

I was watching an interesting show on PBS - a series on ethics. This particular show was a roundtable discussion with several old-school and newer execs, regulators, and even IIRC, Alan Greenspan. Some of the retired executives who ran corporations mentioned that one of their operating tentes used to incorporate an obligation to support the social good. It even used to be taught in the leading business schools in the US. The theory was that corporations were granted a special legal status by society, and to continue to deserve that status, they not only needed to make profit, but advance some social good.

Of course, the new execs claimed that the only thing they needed to look out for is profits, and that the social good they provided was employment. I think "social good" needs to go beyond employment and apply to how and what service, product they produce.

prior art posted here?

[shren]

ActiveBuddy disputed McClelland's claims. "I am fairly confident, there were no interactive agents on IM at that point when the application was filed (August 22, 2000). I'm certainly not aware of any," said Kay, who doubles as ActiveBuddy's chief technology officer.

Didn't somebody set up an ICQ bot posing as female to flirt with people, then put the logs on the web a long time ago? I can't seem to dig it up.

Opening up application review.

[mbrubeck]

Isn't there some way that the Patent Office could open up this process so that the prior art could be waved in front of them before the patent is granted and expensive lawyers have to be called in to resolve the issue?

They did. [kuro5hin.org]

Re:Over and over again...

[Ironica]

It's already here. [uspto.gov]

Prior Art

[pudge]

I wrote aoliza_ripoff.plx [macperl.org] one week after this patent was applied for, basing it on AOLiza [fury.com] (in purpose, not code, as I didn't have the AOLiza code) which was written (or, at least, in use) a few weeks before the patent was applied for.

Then there's Net::AIM [cpan.org], which includes this text, from over a year before the patent was applied for:

# This script is a simple script that creates an aimbot
# shamelessly adapted from Net::IRC

Oops.

And yeah, I figured that AOL had to have bots running for many years on AOL chats and AIM. That's a no-brainer.

iChatBot, fairly well known IM bot since 8/11/2000

[frenetic3]

The ActiveBuddy patent was filed on 8/22/2000,

but iChatBot, a fairly well known (well, with what seems to be many hundreds of users, and able to attract the attention of losers who keep its warning level in the 90% range 24 hours a day :)) AIM bot has been existence since at least 8/11/2000, thus being before the patent filing and proof of prior art etc.

Check it out: http://www.ichatbot.com/show.php?changelog.html [ichatbot.com]

Just another example of how this patent is complete bullshit.

*sigh*.

What do you have to do to overturn a patent?

-fren

Re:Prior art (by about a decade)

[cliffjumper222]

IRC doesn't use buddy lists which is a key part of Claim #1. That also means that any chat system that doesn't use buddy lists is an AOK bypass around this patent. IANAL.

Activerse DingBot SDK, 1997-2000

[gojomo]

My company in 1998, Activerse, developed a product called the "DingBot SDK" for creating interactive IM response Bots like those ActiveBuddy claims a patent on. It worked in our own (all-Java, radically peer-to-peer, web-services-like) IM/Presence system, but featured an API specifically designed to allow multi-IM-system bots.

We demoed an early version of the product at the "Demo 98" conference, in February 1998. PCWeek ran an article [zdnet.com] about us mentioning the DingBot SDK later that month.

The Activerse press release announcing the product's general availability, in November 1998, is still available at the Internet Archive [archive.org].

ActiveBuddy was founded in March 2000. So, not only were their "IM bots" a old idea by the time they filed their patent (August 2000), a ripoff of both Activerse's offerings and more than a decade of practice on IRC networks and in MUDs/MOOs, but their very name was derivative of an existing player in the same market ("Activerse"->"ActiveBuddy") and their main product (an SDK/server) and business model (licensing) mimicked Activerse as well.

Their founder claims with a straight face "we invented interactive agents" and "I am fairly confident, there were no interactive agents on IM at that point when the application was filed. I'm certainly not aware of any." That only goes to show you have to be *studiously* ignorant and/or dishonest in order to effectively twist the flaws of the software patent system to personal advantage.

(Postscript on Activerse: It was acquired by high-flying internet conglomerate CMGI in April 1999. Though the initial aim was to expand and promote the Ding IM/bot products throughout the CMGI network of compnaies, as CMGI itself unravelled, Activerse was dismantled through a series of mostly arbitrary and faddish organizational moves which completely ignored the promise of the growing IM space.)

Re:Prior art (by about a decade)

[FigBugDeux]

here is prior art http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=2179

miranada 0.0.4, released 2000-04-26 had megahal. he chatted on icq.

Re:Opening up application review.

[yakovlev]

Because it was filed before the change in policy about opening up pending patent applications.

Re:prior art posted here?

[shren]

Right. Thanks.

Get your linkage here [fury.com]

Re:Amazing.

[PhxBlue]

Sure thing.

The original phrase came from a cheesy video game called "Zero Wing." I've never actually played it, and in fact hadn't even heard of it until the "All Your Base" thing became so popular. Gamespy [classicgaming.com] has some good information on the "All Your Base" mistranslation and on the game itself.

Re:Why is this so hard?

[Anonymous Coward]

actually pretty good

http://www3.uspto.gov/go/jars/sgs.html

you generally start up as a gs7-11 if you have industry experience

its not hard to make 80k+ after a couple years

Re:Can you blame them?

[SquarePants]

No you can't. The US government enjoys sovereign immunity. That means it cannot be sued unless there is a specific law allowing it. There is a law, the Federal Tort Claims Act ("FTCA"), that provides blanket authorization to sue the government. However, the FTCA only allows suits based on "operational" aspects of government duties. "Discretionary" decisions are not actionable. Deciding that something is patentable is clearly "discretionary". Kinda makes sense, otherwise the gov't would be sued all the time for every decision that is made.

AOLiza

[Adam Procter]

AOLiza [fury.com] seems quite similar to ActiveBuddy based on what little I know about it, and the first logged conversation in the archive is dated 8/15/00, one week before the ActiveBuddy filing. IANAL, but it seems like prior art to me.

"swearing back" affidavit and "due diligence"

[cryofan2]

In order to defeat any claims of prior art, the patent inventor may complete an affidavit swearing that he conceived of the invention before any referenced prior art (say, something you guys may dig up from 1996), and show some evidence of diligent reduction to practice since that conception, say, some papers with notes on them that has the dates from 1996 onward.

Eldred v. Ashcroft

[yerricde]

There is a law, the Federal Tort Claims Act ("FTCA"), that provides blanket authorization to sue the government. However, the FTCA only allows suits based on "operational" aspects of government duties. "Discretionary" decisions are not actionable.

Really? Then what's ACLU v. Reno? What's Eldred v. Ashcroft [eldred.cc]? (I wouldn't have so much of a problem with the Bono Act [everything2.com] that Eldred et al. seek to overturn, except that in some fields such as songwriting, there exist only a limited number of possible original works [everything2.com], and it's possible to run out of them [baen.com].)

In general, if a fellow wants to sue the government over a "discretionary" action, he sues the persons in charge of enforcing the regulation, such as the Attorney General, the head of the USPTO, the examiner who approved the patent, etc. in their official capacities. Hence, ACLU v. Janet Reno in her official capacity as AG, Eldred et al. v. John Ashcroft in his official capacity as AG.

A few words on AOLiza

[KFury]

As the creator (hack, cough, apologies to Prof Weisenbaum (sp)) or AOLiza, I've got a few opinions on ActiveBuddy's patent claim:

First, sadly, despite the fact that AOLiza was unleashed a few weeks before ActiveBuddy's patent filing, it doesn't apply as prior art, because according to patent law, if the claimant filed the patent application within one year of inventing, disclosing, or even detailing the invention in an email, it's still valid.

That isn't to say that prior art doesn't exist. I'm certain that it does, not the least of which in the AIM::BOT perl libraries which preceeded ActiveBuddy by well over a year.

Moreover, AOLiza doesn't even use the AIM::BOT libraries (although an earlier test version did). It uses the Mac version of AIM and the applescript hooks that AOL put into that application. These hooks, including calls so that other programs can grab messages, send messages, and do a myriad of other 'bot' functions, existed well over a year before ActiveBuddy's application, and were clearly designed to allow the attachment of automated scripts or bots to be used with the application.

This is important because in addition to 'get there first' and 'usefulness' the third requirement for a successful patent application is demonstrated non-obviousness. The invention has to be a novel application of technologies, not simply an evolution of existing (and possibly patented) technologies.

Clearly, when AIM for Mac had hooks specifically written to allow third-party programs to act as bots, another companys claim that actually USING those hooks, or punching holes into another part of the program to make hooks of their own, can not be seen as novel in any way.

That's my two cents, and I'd be happy to testify in court.