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."

Can you blame them?

[WildBeast]

They have an opportunity to earn money thanks to stupid patent laws and they try to take advantage of it.

Over and over again...

[kawika]

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?

I'm thinking the USPTO could create a database of pending patents on their web site that have passed initial muster with the investigator and are likely to be approved. Interested parties could go and post links about prior art (or earlier filed but still pending patents) for the patent investigator to review.

Patent wording....

[GiorgioG]

A method and system for interactively responding to queries from a remotely located user includes a computer server system configured to receiving an instant message query or request from the user over the Internet. The query or request is interpreted and appropriate action is taken, such as accessing a local or remote data resource and formulating an answer to the user's query. The answer is formatted as appropriate and returned to the user as an instant message or via another route specified by the user. A method and system of providing authenticated access to a given web page via instant messaging is also disclosed.

I'm this is way too vague. Aside from all the IRC bots in existance, What about "Ask Jeeves"? We can certainly dispute whether a web browser/site is an 'instant messaging' server. If I "ask" jeeves for something and it returns my query, then is it not prior art?

As long as they're rewarded...

[Dark Paladin]

Ever see a kid in elementary school who steals the lunch money of other kids? Then see that same kid after one of his victims breaks his nose? He's not so keen on stealing money anymore; the cost has become too high.

The same thing exists here with all of these silly software/genetic patents that the Patent Office, accepted by people with the brainpower of rancid jello. For now, they can do it, and it's a proven technique - patent something that already exists, then collect from businesses who know it will cost more to fight than to simply pay.

Sooner or later, one of two things will happen. A) Someone will patent something that others really, really care about, and you'll see an Enron/Worldcom level knee-jerk response (Damn! We must make a law to stop this), or B) they'll finally tackle somebody with enough deep pockets and pissed off attitude to crush a company like this, and set a major legal precident.

Either way, I figure I'll keep coding my stuff, and to hell with people who steal the future.

The real problem

[pmancini]

Isn't the real problem in that the way patents are applied for the office in unable to make proper examinaitions of each claim? Does this problem with patenting happen in other fields? Last week I was on an 1842 Steam Locomotive and noticed that the butterfly hindged doors on the coal feed was granted patent #3. I thought to myself; here is something that is of a simple design, clearly useful in the confined space of the cab and probably made someone extremely rich.

So what can we do to help prevent obvious and useless patenting?

Re:So what?

[91degrees]

Trouble is, someone has to challenge. Have you any idea how expensive it is to overturn a patent claim? Most companies find it cheaper and easier to settle out of court. It's a short sighted attitude, but how often to companies take the long view and act for the good of society?

Re:Can you blame them?

[Pxtl]

Hmmm - I wonder if I can sue the US patent office for lost funds in a lawsuit to combat this. Can the US patent office be sued for lost legal fees from carelessly handed-out patents? If so, that might force them to be more careful with throwing those things around.

Press Inquiry to ActiveBuddy

[program21]

This is the full text of an inquiry I have sent to ActiveBuddy via their Press Inquiries area.
-------------
I'm writing you in regards to your recent patent grant for interactive agent technology. In an article at Internet News (http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/ 1446781), Tim Kay is quoted as saying "We invented interactive agents. Anybody using his or her own tools (to make bots) is obviously using our technology without paying us to license the server, for example."
I am inquiring as to what research as to prior art was done before submitting a patent request, as the same Internet News article quotes several developers as knowing of 'bots' whose code is freely available and has been since before ActiveBuddy was even a company. Specifically named is the Perl module Net::AIM, timestamped in CPAN as having been originally published on 18-Aug-1999, well prior to your patent application filed on August 22, 2000. The original code of the Net::AIM module, and included with the package at the time, included code for an 'interactive agent', albeit not as complex as the technology your company uses today.

The first line of the patent summary reads as follows: "A method and system for interactively responding to queries from a remotely located user includes a computer server system configured to receiving an instant message query or request from the user over the Internet." This is the very definition of a bot, which is not new technology. A common type of IRC known as Eggdrop, which meets the description offered by the description offered in the patent, has been around since late 1993 (http://www.eggdrops.net/eggdrophistory.html).

My question to you is, what findings did you uncover when researching for this patent, and given the fact that numerous examples of prior art can be shown, do you believe the patent will be enforcable, and if so, how?
-------------
I would very much like hear what sort of spin they put on this.

Peek Into European Patent Examining Cancelled

[tiedyejeremy]

I'd certainly like to know European Patent Examiner John Savage's [slashdot.org] opinion on this US patent craziness!

The real problem - quotas

[Erwos]

My girlfriend's brother (whom I am also good friends with) recently started working at the US Patent Office. I can now tell you all, without a doubt, what the problem is. It's not stupid people - I know her brother is really a very intelligent guy (electrical engineer with mba and good GPA). It's _quotas_!

Yes, that's right. You have to approve or reject x number of patents every two weeks (where x is something like 5, I think) or be fired. So, if you've got a few time-consuming ones at first, you're under a lot of pressure to just do _something_ with the last couple of them, especially if time is about to run out. I would not be surprised at all if some patents were not investigated as thoroughly as they should be (read: not at all) in the interests of the reviewer not being fired. That is perhaps what happened here: quick check to make sure no patent doing the same thing has been issued, and then approval without doing any outside research.

So, really, the problem is not really US patent law. It's the fact that the USPO is understaffed and overworked and cannot adequately review patent submissions. I hope that gives a better perspective on the issue rather than "the US(PO) sucks and is staffed by idiots".

-Erwos

Re:prior art posted here?

[Mr_Silver]

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.

I don't know about that but i wrote one using the eliza perl module and made it connect to an ewtoo talker well known for having a lot of over-sexed 14 year olds on there.

The page and code is here [ewtoo.org]. You can read the log directly here [ewtoo.org].

It is rather amusing.

Stealing treasure from the dragon

[Have Blue]

Isn't AOL going to get a bit riled over this? Surely a patent on bots designed to connect to their network could be at least challenged as infringing on their IP. And AOL is not a good enemy for an unpopular start-up to have.

MORE Prior Art

[bfrog]

In 1997, a co-worker ported Liza to Macintosh and plugged it into the chat window of CU-SeeMe mac. I'm happy to supply more details to any who'd like them. Email me at [e-mail].

Somebody's been reading Gates...

[Mitchell Mebane]

Remember the Bill Gates quote from Lessig's OSCON speech?

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete stand-still today.

The solution... is patenting as much as we can... A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors."

I dare to think they'd make this stuff illegal, except for the fact that it is hard to write an exact definition of when somebody goes overboard.

Re:Prior art (by about a decade)

[batessr]

And for some more prior check out the history of Zephyr at CMU. I remeber when I went there in the early 1990's, zephyr instances had been sent up that would have a bot listen to them and send replys back. For example, I remeber one you could zephyr a word to and it would look it up in the dctionary and zephyr you back the meaning. Zephyr was an IM system and used kerberos authentication, so I believe these old zephyr bots make for some pretty convincing prior art.

For Great Justice!

[AlaskanUnderachiever]

ZERO WING
Probably the greatest waste of my entire summer. I never really understood what it was about (other than blowing aliens up) but it was grand fun trying to understand the manual.

Like many Sega-Genesis import games, ZW suffered from what could be kindly called KungFu Movie Syndrome in which the translation is done by bored graduate students who never actually studied the language in question and were paid in beer. Which was consumed during translation.

Re:Have to say it...

[the bluebrain]

I would guess that these people are focussed on what they do. They don't ask the question "is what we are doing similar to something someone else has done before, or perhaps even pretty much identical", instead they're saying "what we're doing is better than sliced bread. We are the definition of bleeding edge. What do we have to do to patent this stuff? I wanna buy an island.".

I would also guess that even their hard core hacks would share this delusion - when asked by the money guys whether what they were doing was patentable, they would go "Sure. Of course. I mean, there's some older stuff out there, but it's kiddie play in comparison. For all intents and purposes, we invented this."

OK - I'm just giving them the benefit of doubt. Delusional with a side order of intentionally selectively blind and a sprinkling of dismissive - not *necessarily* unethical. Just probably.