Charlie Northrup's One-Man Patent Grab Continues 282
FirstEdition writes "Will this never end! Linux Business & Technology writes that Charlie Northrup, the guy in New Jersey whose prior art on what looks to be Web services dates back to 1994 and appears to trump anybody else's IP, has gotten another patent. Of course, he has transferred the IP to a spin off company populated mostly by lawyers. More details here."
Hmm... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hmm... (Score:2)
Even if my case- the pesimistic one- is right, he still missed the boat by nine years. He just obfuscated his patent enough to make it inobvious that he just described a very standard system that's been widely used for a really, really long time...
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hmm... (Score:2)
I really hope the thing doesn't stand up in court, but you never know...
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Informative)
He didn't really wait nine years. He filed a patent in December 1994. The patent was issued in December 1998, meaning that's how long the patent office spent examining the application. Just before the patent issued, he filed what is known as a contunuation [yale.edu] patent application. Basically, he covered one aspect of the invention in the first patent, and another aspect in this patent.
Even so there is nothing in Web Services that was not previously invented in CORBA or previous systems. I published the idea of using the Web for machine/machine interaction in 1993, I don't hink I was the first, Tim probably discussed it in 1992 at Annecy. Try to remember what we were doing there folks, controlling real time physics experiments.
The language of this patent, 'brokers' etc is all from CORBA.
Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
This had an additional advantage that the protection of your invention could be extended, since protection used to be granted untill 17 years after the issue of the patent (commonly used for submarine patents like the Lemelson heritage).
With the amendments of USC 35 (US patent law), h
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Informative)
There is. 35 U.S.C. 102(b) [findlaw.com]:
actually.... (Score:3, Informative)
examiner produces prior art A, which was filed before applicants invention. the applicant replies with a sworn affidavit saying we
Re:actually.... (Score:4, Informative)
That's okay... (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe we'll get lucky, and he'll pull a SCO, and try to sue IBM. I'm rather certain that IBM will find something that they have prior art on, or something that his patent depends on, that IBM can pull out and have fun with...
Re:That's okay...Circular defense. (Score:2, Insightful)
But see that kind of thing is what makes the whole system worse. Defensive patents ( which in themselves maybe shouldn't have been granted ) also bog down the system, as well as the original one. The whole system needs change so that people don't have to take out such defensive meas
Re:That's okay...Circular defense. (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM did significant development of computer theory. They've probably contributed more than any other company combined. Granted, they have screwed up at times, and screwed up royally, but they don't appear to be running around smashing others with only lawyer-based divisions, a'la Rambus. They're also contributing back into something that I use on a daily basis as my primary computer platform, even when they didn't invent UNIX. Right now, IBM is a community player, and while that could change in theory at any moment, they're more my friend than this freak who is trying to demonstrate a patent on hypertext transfer protocol...
Re:That's okay...Circular defense-II (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That's okay...Circular defense. (Score:2)
Re:That's okay...Circular defense. (Score:4, Informative)
I just finished reading Practical Cryptography [macfergus.com]by Niels Ferguson and Bruce Schneier, and in the back there is a brief chapter about software patents. These comments are in a crypto book, but are addressed to software patents in general.
Among the choice comments are:
- Our current patent system is completely out of control. At best, patents are a necessary evil. At worst, they are an entirely legal form of fraud and blackmail.
- We think that the IT industry would be better off without patents than with patents.
- [t]he current system is simply not working.
- The patent system won't be fixed, because there is simply no political gain to be made in this aread.
All this is, as most people agree, true, but Schneier and Ferguson seem to think that it's something that we have to live with. Money talks, they say, and "There is, of course, onne group of people that consistently benefits from the patent system: the lawyers. No prizes for guessing which professional group claims that the current system is workable, or even good."Sad, but there you go.
BTW, the book is truly outstanding, and fills a huge gap in the literature of crypto: watch this space...
What makes you so sure IBM would be a mistook? (Score:3, Insightful)
What makes you so sure this would blow up in his face? Pan-IP has taught us weasels of this sort go after small fish until they have sufficient war-chest, not to mention a slew of precedent, to throw in IBM's face. I case you haven't been paying attention, our favorite whipping boy
What is it, actually? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's quite likely I'm not understanding this correctly. What, in actually legible text, has he just patented?
And what laws are there that would permit him to retroactively sue anybody who was already using something like that?
Re:What is it, actually? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a wonderfully good question.
A CS professor can write a book full of algorithms, and a second year CS major can read the book and tell whether a random piece of code uses an algorithm from the book. Why can't a professional software engineer read a patent application and understand what will infringe and what will not?
I think the balance between protecting the patent owner and protecting the public requires a plain English (at the very least, something that a CS major can read) reform to patenting.
Re:What is it, actually? (Score:2)
Re:What is it, actually? (Score:2)
simple. because a piece of code has a specific structure, even if you change the names of the vars and such. a "code fingerprint" if you will, that is more difficult to remove than it is to reinvent the same piece of
Re:What is it, actually? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it isn't. Their job is to phrase the patent in a precise language, closed to individual interpretation. There should be little doubt whether a particular work infringes on a patent or not. The fact that just about every patent case requires a lawsuit to clarify benefits no one except the lawyer.
the accepted strategy is to make the application as broad as possible, expecting to lose on some points, but protecting the invention as thoroughly as possible.
The intent of the patent system, however, is not only to protect the inventor. In this case, I think the following reforms should happen:
Note how neither reform hurts an honest inventor. In fact, there are two benefits:
Re:What is it, actually? (Score:3, Insightful)
Many patented algorithms aren't all that complicated either. GIF, LZW, RSA, and JPEG are all well explained in various books. Idiocies like one-click are so trivial you'll probably never find it in a book, yet the patent is probably completely unreadable.
What we need is a way to cheaply rule out most patents, and concentrate on the few that we might infringe on a particular project. Note that today, people mostly just ignore pa
not much (Score:2)
Based on the claims, I don't think it's very general, either. To the extent that it is general in ways that would lead to modern-day infringement, it is clearly going to be vulerable to prior art. Network-based bindery formalisms haven't changed since the 80s.
Well, he does have a point. (Hear me out) (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Well, he does have a point. (Hear me out) (Score:4, Insightful)
And it's not always clear what the patent is actually for. It sounds like IRC, Apache, SlashDot, or all of the above; anybody have any guesses? It's such a basic, fundamental thing (as far as I can tell, reading through that 100-page-ish pile of gibberish) that it's a root part of the Internet- and if it is IRC or basic message board protocol, it's very provable that it existed long, long before '94.
I'm pretty sure he only pushed the patent through with either a few well-placed bribes, or more likely well-placed obfuscation so nobody can figure out what the hell he just patented.
Hopefully, if it's the latter, that trend will continue so he can't defend it either.
Re:Well, he does have a point. (Hear me out) (Score:2)
and yes, I have been there.
Re:Well, he does have a point. (Hear me out) (Score:5, Interesting)
You, a programmer, create a wonderful technology. Realizing its potential, you obtain a US patent on it. But then once the patent comes through, you file it in a drawer and forget about it. You go back to your day job. In the mean time, smart and more motivated people have recreated something like what you made, and are busy taking over the world with it. After they have succeeded, you come out of your hole and say "Hey! I came up with that first! I want money!"
You would have every right to expect people to desire your slow and untimely demise for such moronic behavior.
Re:Well, he does have a point. (Hear me out) (Score:3, Informative)
IT is just an idea. IT is about ideas and realizing them, like realizing a story. IT has no reasonable limitations, etc. Hence IT should be protected by copyright, but not patents.
Patents suck and Greenspan says almost the same. Consider the following quote:
Indeed, the nature of intellectual property is importantly different from physical property. In particular, one individual's use of an idea does not make that idea unavailable to others for their own, simultaneous use. Furthermore, n
No, Mod parent down (Score:5, Interesting)
In the computer science arena? I think not. I base this on several ideas:
1) Software algorithms are essentially expressions of mathematical formula (in a broad sense). This is inherently not patentable. Its the equivalent of copyrighting a prime number because it took you a long time to calculate that is was prime.
2) Based on 20+ years of software development, I've not seen any new algorithm. Every program is cribbed from some other program. As far as I can tell (and I'm not being facetious), nobody starts a program from a blank editor. Each program, or generation of programs, is in improvement. Allow minor improvements to an algorithm to be the basis of a family of patents is likeChevy patenting the automobile because the new Corvette goes faster than the last Corvette.
Lets look at some practical implications of patents:
1) If you consider my previous point to be true, then a small inventor can't benefit from Software patents because large corporations can always show prior art to virtually any software algorithm. You, as "Joe Inventor" don't have the resources to do this type of research so as a practical matter, software patents aren't useful to the mythical lone inventor.
2) In practice, software patents have been used exlusively by large corporations as leverage with other large corporations in arguments over control of markets.
I think the software industry was more vibrant and innovative prior to the "invention" of software patents. So if the intent of software patents has been to foster innovation, it has failed miserably at that goal and on the basis of that alone should be scrapped.
Finally to address your main point about hard work justifying a reward, consider the case of the man who makes a model of NYC entirely out of toothpicks and spends his entire life doing it. Impressive? Hell yea. Is he entitled to some sort of compensation? I don't think so. Hard work and effort is not equal to money.
Any company (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Any company (Score:5, Funny)
uhh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:uhh (Score:5, Funny)
The worst part about these kinds of stories is the avalanche of posts making bad jokes ("I'm going to patent air! I'm going to patent the alphabet!"),
Don't worry. I hold the patent on making jokes about patenting things that can't be patented, and will be contacting the aforementioned parties shortly.
WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:WTF? (Score:2)
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:WTF? (Score:2)
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Interesting)
That "someone" needs a boatload of cash, as well as good prior art.
What I learned while trying to get a patent, and what the slashdot crowd needs to grok, is that Patents Are Business Tools! The determination of what is novel, unobvious, and what advances the arts and sciences is legal, and not subject to what those "skilled in the art" think. Rather, legal definitions and arguments are the high ground, and must be
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Informative)
Bzzt!!
Title 35, Section 103(a) of the U.S. code explicitly says:
What those "skilled in the art" think is centrally important because it is they to whom the subject matter as amended by the patent is obvious or not.
If the opinion of those "skilled in the art" does not matter when even the law itself essentially says it does then the patent process is so fundamentally broken that it cannot be fixed.
Re:WTF?-Guilty? Not I. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see.
"Whacking competitors is a business tool" and "Life isn't fair. Deal with it."
That was fun.
"Industrial espionage is a business tool" and "Life isn't fair. Deal with it."
Better, better.
"Insurance fraud is a business tool" and "Life isn't fair. Deal with it."
Nice.
"Defrauding investors and employees is a business tool" and "Life isn't fair. Deal with it.".
Whoo Hoo.
"Dumping toxic waste illegally is a business tool" and "Life isn't fair. Deal with it."
Yum.
You know? Life is so much easier when one doesn't have a conscious. Thanks dude.
Things Change (Score:3, Insightful)
Note how things seem to change abruptly when things get bad enough.
Remember when the Standard Oil Company had a stranglehold on anything to do with petr
hmmm..... (Score:2, Funny)
I'm just going to ignore him (Score:4, Funny)
-B
Our boy Charlie (Score:4, Interesting)
Sounds like our boy Charlie read a book on communications or network theory, understood about half of it, and threw all the words he remembered into a few densely worded and confusing paragraphs.
And then he patented it.
It's kind of fun to watch Chuck's patent exploits, since he has no chance of ever winning one of his pesky lawsuits. Of course, it can be kind of annoying for the other parties involved.
Re:Our boy Charlie (Score:3, Interesting)
He has a pretty decent chance with that many laywers to throw at it and if they are smart and not too greedy, they will do what every single other similar patent recipient has done- go after small shops that can't afford to defend against a patent. Then use that money to finance further lawsuits. Very profitable and very effective.
I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sooner or later, someone's going to point out that all this excess patenting is going to stifle rather than encourage invention and innovation. I mean, why bother developing an idea from first thought to reality if some suit somewhere who's never spent more than a few minutes on a distantly- (if at all) related product or service can shut you down before you get off the ground and/or demand crippling royalties from you for the fruits of your labour?
In the case of the USPTO, the lunatics truly are running the asylum.
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)
The individual patented the 'web' before the web was even heard of outside of universities. There might be prior art but that is another argument.
The USPTO had no reason not to grant this patent as of yet. What I find annoying is that the guy sat on it for nine years but AFAIK never put forth the effort to create the web. Basically he had an idea, patented it then filed it away. Meanwhile someone else had the same idea and used it
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not to nitpick, but shouldn't we expect a little common sense from the people that we pay with our tax dollars? I mean come on, the whole "ignorance is bliss/we are overworked" excuse is really beginning to wear a little thin.
From the article:
Claim charts??!!
rm -rf USPTO
kill -9 patent_squatter
--K.
incorrect (Score:3, Informative)
I repeat again, patent examiners are NOT paid by your tax dollars, the USPTO is one of 2 fully fee funded organizations in the government (the other is part of the FAA), so patent examiners are paid by the applicants in effect, in fact currently 500 million of the USPTO's revenue is
Re:I wonder... (Score:2)
He patented it all the way back in 1944 [theatlantic.com] you say?
Re:I wonder... (Score:4, Insightful)
What about 1991: Archie for file searching, WAIS for document searching, or all the public sites you could telnet into? Weren't those services? Or 1992: Gopher as a not too distant predecessor of http(d) and Veronica a year later as a menu service for Gopher pages. The 1+ million hosts on the Internet by late 1992 were not just at universities. How can all the servers that were running out there not qualify, at least in part, as prior art for 'Web Services'. Even NTP was around in 1992 - that's purely an automated web service - a client application getting data from a server application and doing something with the response in an automated fashion. I'm sure a good long browsing session through the RFC's would yield enough prior are to kill this patent.
Re:I wonder... (Score:2)
It has been pointed out, many times.
.sig
Despite claims to the contrary, government is more interested in the money they make from patents then in promoting science and the useful arts.
Prevent politicians profiting from the patent process, and they'd stop passing laws to promote them.
-- this is not a
Re:I wonder... (Score:2)
Hell, if you can patent the wheel [bbc.co.uk], then why not?
Once you "own" the rights to the patent process, you might be in a position to fix it!
(As a bonus, I found this article [harvard-magazine.com] that puts forth the idea of creating " public-domain information preserves" for things like medical and other fundamental concepts that really need to be public in order to be beneficial.)
=Smidge=
Can you say CORBA? (Score:5, Insightful)
woo hoo (Score:5, Funny)
Woo hoo! Lawyer fight! I can't wait to watch this on court TV. I wonder which side will get Johnny Cochran
Re:woo hoo (Score:4, Funny)
Of course there's always the usual signing problems and draft day trades...
Re:woo hoo (Score:3, Funny)
Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, you must now decided whether to reverse the decision for my client Chef. I know he seems guilty, but ladies and gentlemen... (pulling down a diagram of Chewbacca) This is Chewbacca. Now think about that for one moment -- that does not make sense. Why am I talking about Chewbacca when a man's life is on the line? Why? I'll tell you why: I don't know.
It does not make sense. If Chewbacca does not make sense, you must acqu
Re:woo hoo (Score:3, Interesting)
41 feet of paper!
Re:woo hoo (Score:2)
At first glance, that did't seem to be all that much. After all, a standard page is 11 inches tall, so 41 feet is only around 45 pages end to end. It wasn't until reading the article you linked that I realized they were talking about a 41' stack of paper... Wow.
Ah, the legal system... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ah, the legal system... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ah, the legal system... (Score:2)
If voting could change anything, it would be outlawed.
Bad things travel in pairs. (Score:2, Interesting)
Well as the saying goes. "Behind every greedy lawyer, is a greedy client." Another variant is "Behind every greedy lobbyist, is a greedy organization." If our legal system is a Frankenstein, then who's the mad doctor?
Re:Bad things travel in pairs. (Score:2)
Re:Ah, the legal system... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ah, the legal system... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you are just starting to believe that lawyers are a parasite feeding off American business, you haven't been sued yet. Wait until the profits start rolling in and they begin to smell the blood in the water.
The main reason I got out of business was I was sick of having to sit in court and spend money so a nickle and dime lawyer could try to extract money
Re:Ah, the legal system... (Score:2, Informative)
I think the word you're looking for is "government".
HTH
Re:Ah, the legal system... (Score:2)
Well, who do you think writes all the laws? There doesn't seem to be any easy way out of this fox-n-henhouse situation either. What are you going to do? Vote your Aunt Edna who works the cash register at Piggly Wiggly into Congress? When some really sticky wicket comes up about the impact of regulation X on labor policy Y with respect to industry Z, and the legal implications thereof, who is Edna going to call?
So, you say, we could just scrap such convoluted laws. OK. Which ones. Do you want to be
Re:Ah, the legal system... (Score:2)
Basically... If you have a big pile of crap, the best way to "fix things" is to throw out the whole pile and start over. With a bathtub the size of the Pacific Ocean, there's not much hope of finding a living baby in there...
The Problem is... (Score:4, Insightful)
OK, this guy got the patent, and yes, someone probably has prior art, and the courts will probably throw it out as long as the President doesn't interfere with the judicial system to help this guy [microsoft.com]. But there's still a problem: Who want's to be the first poor SOB to have to defend himself in a lawsuit? I'm sure this guy isn't stupid enough to make his "liscensing fee" more expensive than defending one's self in a courtroom, which means he can use those firms who choose the cheaper option of paying the liscense, to legitimize his claims against those who do fight.
Me? I say to hell with Iraq, we need a regime change at the USPTO!
Re:The Problem is... (Score:2)
When you are convinced that business is motivated stickily by profit you might be tempted to believe this is viable. It isn't, because despite what so many appear to believe, business people are often motivated by pride. When some schmoo comes along and claims that you owe him something when you know damn well you don't, it's not hard to start overlooking costs and call the bluff. I
Patent whore bastards must die. (Score:3)
This being said, the best we can hope for is for some real thought to finally be put into patent reform, because frankly, a patent like this, that holds only the most general idea with no implementation and no specifics should, by any real standard, be illegal. I mean, I could patent the idea of "some sort of material transference with no interaction between point a and b" and corner the market on Teleportation, and be just as valid as this guy.
Will we ever get the hint? (Score:2)
Hello?! Why do we still not have our own keiretsu for things like this? This problem wouldn't be that hard to solve.
(Plus, we'd have a real excuse to wear cyberpunk clothing.)
A good idea to stop that (Score:3, Interesting)
so he would have defend that stuff by himself
Re:A good idea to stop that (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be about the worst thing that could happen because individual inventors (except thouse who were rich) would have no power.
Imagine the following situation. You invent a chemical compound in your garage. Let's say its a new form of rubber that never wears out. Great! Now you can start making tires. Except you can't. Unless you have millions of dollars to build a tire factory. Fine. Sell the patent to Goodyear. Can't. It's been outlawed. Well, at least you can prevent Goodyear from using the rubber, right? No. Goodyear takes your formula, you try to sue, but you can't afford to pay the lawyers, so the lawsuit ends before it begins.
Does IBM care about stupid patents anyway? (Score:2)
Whoever ends up with the largest patent portfolios is going to win, anyone else is going to need to pay these winners to use the patented infrastructure.
So I would not be wa
No need to point out the obvious, changes needed (Score:3, Interesting)
We do need to rehash prior art. The companies populated by lawyers are fully aware that their patents likely have prior. Give them some credit.
The first folks they will chase down are mom and pop shops. If they've been keeping up with their industry best practices they won't send out too many notices at once as they will realize they will risk having the group band together, at which point they may be able to defend themselves.
What small org has the $100,000 - $200,000 to see this kind of thing all the way through to conclusion against a group of aggressive lawyers. Who has the time to manage the lawsuit?
They could charge $250 and I promise you, despite all the raving of prior art on slashdot, the VAST majority of folks, myself probably included will pay, even if we KNOW it is totally bogus.
Our only hope is they go after a small company that is actually owned by a big bad company who has enough lawyers of their own to bludgen them into submission.
Or that we get the IP laws changed so that folks like this stand a much smaller chance of success.
Or that a rich benefactor be willing to put $1 million or so into a fund designed to have a "chilling effect" on their operations. I would volunteer to run such a fund.
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Plain stupid (Score:5, Informative)
Interprocess: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) RFC 793 September 1981.
Intraprocess: main memory ENIAC 1946.
..and so on. This is plain nonsense and any competent lawyer will win the case against this atent. Not even OJ Simpson's pals can play this practical joke on a federal court.
looks like he just pattented IP... (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course this could be said of SDLC, HDLC, X.25, but all of these tended to specify what hardware infrastructure would be used at some point or another. Once the OSI model was created, as well as people implementing IP on various platforms, the cat was out of the bag. All of this was happening prior to 1990, so dating it at 1994, or 2003 (as appears to be the case with the article in question) means that there is sufficient prior art to eliminate the effectiveness of this pattent.
-Rusty
Re:looks like he just pattented IP... (Score:2)
How about something simple like xmodem over an x.25 and dial-up network, like Compuserve.
Wait! I've got a patent! (Score:4, Funny)
It flouts the constitutional spirit of patents,its head spins round and round,spits up pea soup and cries f**k me!f**k me!f**k me!
realistic skin and two openings(somewhat indistinguishable from each other)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
20 years is way to long (Score:4, Insightful)
From the USPTO site [uspto.gov]:
For over 200 years, the basic role of the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has remained the same: to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing for limited times to inventors the exclusive right to their respective discoveries.
As much as I agree that this is a laudable goal, I think it's obvious from this case and others that in today's high-paced climate, patents often serve to do exactly the opposite.
The truth of the matter is that after 20 years, modern technology is most likely so far behind the curve that it's useless or, at best, so developed that no right-minded business is willing to spend anything on it's continued development. Thus, patents such as these no longer serve to give a small advantage to inventors and protect fledgling technology. Rather, they tend to provide a means for the Chucks of the world to significantly inhibit development for the entire useful life of the technology. This isn't the industrial age anymore; to think that 20 years still represents a "limited time" is both ignorant and counterproductive.Re:20 years is way to long (Score:3, Insightful)
Categorization? (Score:2)
The difficulties would be in defining the categories- and then making heads or tails of the patent to figure out where it is.
Re:20 years is way to long (Score:3, Interesting)
Easy prior art - Sun's ONC-RPCs (Score:3, Insightful)
RPC uses XDR to marshal data, Web Services uses XML.
RPC uses TLI as the transport mechanism, WS uses HTTP.
RPC uses
RPC uses portmapper to advertise services, WS uses UDDI.
It's not very much different, and as long as this guy didn't explicitly define XML, I don't see how his patent is valid.
Why, oh why, don't they think long-term (Score:4, Interesting)
It's cheaper in the short-term to just give in to these assholes, but if everyone always fought every garbage patent, it would put them out of business.
And that would be cheaper in the long run.
Patenting the open app layer? (Score:3, Insightful)
Doesn't the OSI model predate all of his patents?
Nobody needs to sue this guy.. (Score:3, Insightful)
The "Costs more money to sue than settle" strategy works both ways. If no one settles, he won't have any money to sue anyone. If he does sue you, up the ante and tell him to go away or you're going to sue him back for the costs of defending the lawsuit he's about to lose.
"circular transportation facilitation device" (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, the "circular transportation facilitation device" patent has been awarded to John Keogh.
Patents are becoming very difficult to validate because of the extreme number of patents and the extreme levels of knowlege to validate patents. However, this situation plays directly into the hands of the big corporations and rich lawyers squeezing out the very people that patents were set out to protect in the first place.
Large corporations love this scenario, they love to pay for patents to squeeze out the s
hey (Score:3, Funny)
What a poorly written article (Score:3, Informative)
Meanwhile, Charlie, who's got a little tiny company called Global Technologies Ltd, is productizing the IP under the code name DASCOA, short for Discovery and Connectivity Oriented Architecture, which is basically what it does using XML.
So, the IP does architecture? And that's not a "code name", it's an acronym.
The US Office of Patents and Trademarks pored over his application simply forever, comparing it to other like-minded patents.
Patents have minds? Perhaps she means applications submitted by like-minded applicants. One last then I'm done. Can you say "run on sentence"? I knew you could.
It's all about the automated discovery and connection of Web services though the word "Web" was never used in the filing since the Web didn't exist back then outside of research circles but 518 describes how to connect to a service using TCP/IP so it doesn't matter, it anticipates Web services.
Doesn't this rag have editors? I wrote a product review for Java Developer's Journal, also put out by Sys-Con Media, and the editor there came back with changes, then they shipped me a pdf proof to review. Apparently LB&T isn't so rigorous.
PLATO Prior Art (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh well.The world would be a different place if Universities had been into patenting cool ideas instead of just writing papers about them and then having the commercial sector use the technology.
Article not quite correct (Score:4, Informative)
Mmm, no. No patent would have to be filed, just prior art proven. (Although a previous patent that this one infringes on would be a good proof of prior art.)
Large Corporations (Score:4, Insightful)
Again, prior art. (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Netbios/SMB in the mid 1980's covers most of his protocol discovery network claims (OSI).It also refutes any of his service provider claims if you think of the central fileserver as the provider of services (which I think qualifies).
2) Purchasing items was done through compuserve over dialup long before this patent. I still have my 1985 (5.25 floppies) Compuserve kit to prove so.
I didn't read the whole patent. I didn't see what, if any, physical medium was claimed (the damn double speak gives me a headache). If someone wants to give me an itemized claim, I can probably refute most the rest. There is no physical difference from a LAN/MAN/WAN from the internet. Only the protocol has changed.
Bob Metcalf should be consulted to refute more than I can.
Enjoy,
Prior Art: DARPA (was/is/was ARPA) funded research (Score:3, Informative)
I also worked on the short documentary that was filmed during the course of the project and which was shown ultimately to a Congressional committee, IIRC.
Maybe someone somewhere will find the existence of this old research and its public publications of use...
Need penalities for abuse. (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically, the current U.S. patent system has descended into a registry system. Filing and having a patent accepted is having put on file "I invented X on date Y" It's just not possible for them to check applications thuroughly enough. They would have to employ someone "skilled" in every art.
If you combine this with the ability to loose by default in the US legal system, you get some very nasty effects. Take this example:
Step one:
I try to patent the mouse. I have odds that this patent will slip through and be accepted. If it does not I just try some other technology.
Step two:
I use my new patent to file lawsuits against small companies for small amounts of money. It would cost them more to get my patent thrown out that to settle.
Currently, the practice above isn't even illegal. It's a blatant abuse of the system but there is no provision to punish anyone for abusing it. People who pull the kind of shit should go to laid. Their patent application was a lie.
If I pretended to own a piece of property I had no real rights to, and charged people money to park there, I would be guilty of fraud. The same should be true for IP.