Microsoft Tries to Patent the Internet Again

sebFlyte writes "In what is described as yet another example of how patents can kill or inhibit standards, a patent has come to light that was granted to Microsoft in the year 2000 that looks surprisingly similar to IPv6 (the next-gen IP standard that is starting, slowly, to be taken up in some parts of the world). And several Microsoft engineers, named on the patent just happenned to be part of the IPv6 group for the IETF..."

Rambus did it first!

[Anonymous Coward]

They tried to steal DRAM, I guess Microsoft figured that it was worth a try for the Internet.

Let them!

[thundercatslair]

If they actually recived it, what could they do with it? I know next to nothing about patents, but I can't think they could do anything with it.

umm.. they're trying to secure all IPv6 software,

[peculiarmethod]

12. A computer-readable medium having computer-executable instructions for performing the steps recited in claim 1.

if I read this correctly, and I doubt I do (I hope I don't), they are trying to secure even CDs, floppies, usb cards.. anything that contains code that allows the negotiation of an ip address for the network running the IPv6 'like' protocol. whaaaa??!

Unfortunate Precedent: Rambus & JEDEC

[Nova Express]

I would like to say that this has no chance of suceeding, but unfotunately there's already one example of a company (Rambus) having their people attending a standards committee (JEDEC) in public while working to patent the same technologies in private. And they almost got away with it. [perkinscoie.com]

Re:There needs to be a penalty...

[bani]

prison terms sounds better.

Re:We win

[John Seminal]

Dude, that is all large gluttonous corporations. Their leaders suffer from avarice. The problem is, at some point, it is no longer about a company providing people with a service, it is about one man, or a small group, that gets very greedy. It is what happened to Enron, Arthur Anderson Consulting, World Com, and what is happening in boardrooms all across the USA. It is where competition stops producing new products, or lowering price, but where corporations get so big they use every resource they have to kill the competition.

BTW, didn't the courts order MS to be broken into 2 divisions, the OS division and the applications division? I thought that was going to be the solution.

Re:What were they thinking?

[Ankh]

When people get involved in developing a spec, and at the same time patent things that are necessary to implement that spec ("essential", as the patent lawyers say), and then submerge, wait until the spec is widely adopted, and then announce their patent, this is sometimes called a submarine patent attack.

It's partly to prevent these that we (W3C [w3.org]) have our patent policy, which requires all participants to sign an agreement saying (more or less) they agree to let people implement the spec without paying royalties, even if they own patents that would otherwise apply.

It's all a big mess -- and patents also don't fit well with the GPL, of course, and neither does our patent policy, although FSF participated and we did the best we could: the problem is that you might want to take, say, an HTTP server, and re-use the network code for some other server. But if someone has a patent on servers, to which they have granted royalty free use for HTTP only, you may now have to pay them a royalty for the code.

Patents are intended to encourage innovation by ensuring inventors get royalties. Unfortunately the current system seems to have some disadvantages.

Note: I have no idea whether the slashdot story is correct in this instance about this patent, nor, if the patent is essential to implementing IPv6, whether Microsoft plans to enforce royalties or forbid implementations.

Liam

After I take over the world [somehow]

[Random832]

step 1: write lame slashdot comments about how the world should be run
step 2: ...
step 3: as listed below:
Software patents will only last eighteen months.
Only novel ideas will be patentable. Pointer comparison IsNot novel.
Any attempt to claim something that was being done before the patent was made public is patent infringement, will automatically invalidate the entire patent in question.
Any attempt to popularize a patent without disclosing the fact that it is patented, with the intention of collecting royalties later, will also result in automatic revocation.

Re:Chill out

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounded like he, like most politicians, was trying to take credit for it.

Maybe so, but it was well-deserved credit. Even Vint Cerf, widely considered one of the Internet's main creators (if not its "father") said so:

http://www.politechbot.com/p-01394.html/ [politechbot.com]

Interesting link

[ChatHuant]

After reading TFA I read the actual patent (well, what I could get from the legalese). And, from my (admittedly limited) understanding of IPv6, I couldn't see the issue. So I went to check the fine links in the FA.

Surprise, the name of the guy that came up with the original complaint sounded familiar.

So I did a Google on it, and found the article [forbes.com] I remembered (he's mentioned somewhere close to the end).

Looks to me like a lot of FUD.

Re:Unfortunate Precedent: Rambus & JEDEC

[Antique Geekmeister]

Their later standard is still patent encumbered. They're also now claiming all the SPF users as SenderID users, which is blatantly false. Looking at the SPF archives, it's fun to watch Meng try and make Microsoft sound like they were ever reasonable. It's like a battered child, making excuses for their molesting parent and pretend that the violations were their own fault while their friends, teachers, and social workers say "report them and get out of that house!"

Re:What were they thinking?

[Anonymous Coward]

When people get involved in developing a spec...this is sometimes called a submarine patent attack.

I'm literally sick from this one. I was at the IPv6 summit in 1998 and 1999. I talked with Microsoft's people, who were apologetic for having such poor implimentation in their IP stack for IPv6. They explained that while Microsoft Research folks were believers in IPv6, Microsoft proper didn't think it had many merits and refused to back it. Their stack crashed repeatedly (while Linux, Cisco and BSD folks had no problems playing well on the IPv6 network operational at the summits).

And now these followers are taking credit for the work of countless great people? Pretending to have actually invented it all? WTF???

I'm going to rip out Microsoft servers at work and treat them for what they are: intellectual property parasites. Nothing but thieves. I've laughed at the "worlds best marketers of mediocre software" jokes, but now it's personal. Those jokers admitted they were behind in 98-99. At Telluride in 99, they were embarrassed at how far behind Microsoft was in the protocol.

If you work for Microsoft, pay attention! Your company increasingly comes acrossed as nothing but a poseur in the technology community. Many of us have put up with MCSE pretenders. But now it's personal. Hang your head low, Microsoft grunt. Your credentials are a black mark in these circles.

Re:What were they thinking?

[bleckywelcky]

Anyone think this sounds familiar to the whole Rambus deal? Where Rambus was trying to push RDRAM to be the next standard ... while secretly patenting it behind everyone's backs. I knew an engineer/manager who worked for Rambus during that period. Once he figured out what was going on and that upper management wouldn't change their minds about being dicks, he quit.

not so much IPv6 as IPv4 link-local addressing

[keithmoore]

Reading the patent claims this doesn't look so much like IPv6 (and certainly not a fundemental part of IPv6 - it resembles IPv6 stateless address autoconfiguration, but only vaguely). What it looks like is IPv4 linklocal addressing, which has shipped in both MacOS and Windows for several years, and is a draft that is either just about to be approved or has already been approved as a standard. See draft-ietf-zeroconf-ipv4-linklocal-17.txt [ietf.org] The really unfortunate thing is that linklocal addresses are quite useful on isolated networks, but are really harmful to applications unless they're turned off when a computer has a "real" address assigned by manual configuration or DHCP. And from a quick reading the patent would appear to apply to any implementation that turns off linklocal addresses under such conditions.

Re:What were they thinking?

[dossen]

On ethernet it gets even better, since RFC 2464 (page 3) [ietf.org] defines a way to derive a globally unique interface identifier from the MAC adress. The great thing about Ipv6, implicit in your post, is that multiple adresses on the same interface and in the same network works a lot better than with IPv4. That combined with the larger adressspace allows much more flexibility to put organisational and geographical structures into the routing topology (I seem to recall that the suggested prefix size for organisations/customers of ISPs is /48, leaving 16 bits of prefix to be used internally by that "user").

Re:has done neither, yet.

[TheRaven64]

In the UK, and (I believe) the EU, filing a patent must be the first disclosure of anything that is patented*. You can not submit something to a standards body, for example, and then later try to patent it. In fact, you can not tell anyone without an NDA if you expect to patent it later. The US system, on the other hand, allows you to file a patent some time after disclosure - an approach which is wide open to potential abuse.

* Note that reciprocal treaties with the US provide a loophole for this.

Re:What were they thinking?

[FireFury03]

Those jokers admitted they were behind in 98-99

They're still behind now - none of the standard windows services support v6 yet and there appears to be no way (under XPSP2) of manually configuring the IP address.

Compared to my Linux boxes, which have all but a few stubborn services running on IPv6. (I currently have to use v4 for Asterisk, Portmap and CUPS... which is stunningly bad given that CUPS is a new system but doesn't do IPv6 at all.)

Re:Microsoft Tries to Patent the Internet Again

[zotz]

"I bet if government ran the phone companies and telecom, we could get service for pennies on the dollar."

Don't be naive. You would lose your bet. In my country (The Bahamas) the government owns and runs the telco, electric, water & sewerage, airline, tv station, and radio stations. All monopolies for most of my life. Things are easing up a bit lately.

I hear figures that more than 20% of the workforce in the country is government employed. This has large economic effects sure, but also large political effects for a democracy.

Until the last year, the telco rate for a long distance call to Miami (roughly 185 miles from where I live) was 99 cents a minute. The electricity is constantly going out. In the summer, they load shed so you can expect a several hour plus outage on a regular basis. It is illegal (as far as I know) to go off grid and generate your own power if the power company can supply you (however poorly.)

If you have better that this, you don't want what we have.

Don't get me wrong, life is good here anyway. It is just sad that it could easily be so much better.

What I think you should want for a start is for your government to ensure no monopoly or cartel type foolishness. Then to properly oversee any markets where they are not fully free. (This probably covers more markets than most of us realise or think.) As to whether this proper oversite is possible, who knows. Anyone have and actual current or past examples?

all the best,

drew

http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php? collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=JohnConst antakisdrewRobertsRainwaterBlues [archive.org]

Re:This is different

[Raunch]

worse than that. Among non-geeks internet is that blue "e" icon that launches explorer.

I was told yesterday (by a woman who was reporting issues on a site that I develop for) that her browser is "Yahoo".

Basing you definitions of things like whtat internet means on non-geek circles is like, well (to bring this whole thing full circle) basing your definition of reality on what GB says.