Amazon S3 is Patent-Pending 125
theodp writes "If your startup is counting on a copycat service to emerge for Amazon S3 disaster recovery, you might want to start thinking about a Plan C. On Thursday, the USPTO disclosed that Amazon wants a patent for its Distributed storage system with web services client interface invention, aka Amazon Simple Storage Service."
That's a great idea! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That's a great idea! (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:That's a great idea! (Score:5, Informative)
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http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_3_2 7/ai_100755224/pg_1 [findarticles.com]
Which has a pretty good debunking of the "everything that can be invented has been invented" urban legend.
Ralph
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I.e they don't just cover a solution to a problem but, all conceivable solutions within a "problem space".
Example, the patents on natural order evaluation. In a spreadsheet (or any app where one element depends on the state of other el
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Let's say the OSS community forms a non-profit, call it SPAAM (Software Patents Are a Mockery), brainstorms possible patent applications, and files them in a shotgun approach. The worst case scenario a few patents get granted (i.e., made unavailable to the multi-national for-profits) and best case some light is brought to the rediculous situatio
I hope.... (Score:4, Funny)
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Unlikely to hold up (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple combinations (Score:1, Insightful)
I personally dislike the patent system (patents last too long, have too many and are too restrictive) but the, "They just put a spring and a board together! Why anybody could have thought of that mouse trap thing," argument is wearing a little thin.
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Re:Simple combinations (Score:5, Informative)
IANAL, but given this ruling, it appears that patents like the Amazon S3 one would fail under this new ruling.
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As long as companies keep filing patents to which that argument applies, people will keep making it.
"I personally dislike murder (it's too messy, happens too often, and is usually painful) but the 'Killing people is wrong' argument is wearing a little thin."
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O.K., bright boy. Build something better than S3. Open Source it, if you like. But first prove to me that your solution scales to an enterprise the size of Amazon.com. That it will be cheaper and more reliable. Then we can talk.
Re:Unlikely to hold up (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'd guess that someone had already combined a web interface with something like an NFS/AFS share long before S3.
First thing that popped into my head was Webmin. Strip it down to just the FTP functionality and you're close.
Not saying that Webmin = Amazon S3 (which I haven't seen and have no experience with), just that I can't see accessing storage through a web interface as something that is patentable. Reminds me too much of other apps I've seen. I don't see how a patent like this can do anything other
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Google's GMail - remember the GDrive plugin?
MS's Outlook Web Access (yes, I know) with Public Folders - web interface, large data storage capabilities, and certainly scales.
There's just 2, and one dates back to around 1997.
So, not only is this not innovative, it's not even original. Slapping different access around the concept or doing it slightly better isn't innovative. Or are you going to argue that a titanium mousetrap is better because it's lighter an
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From a high level, there's very little difference between Web Services and Web Interfaces on top of a web protocol when it comes to whether I can store something remotely. If you don't see that, then you're part of the problem that's generating those millions of obvious patents. From a user perspective, there's little difference between the two. From an implementation scenario, there's still lit
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Now, both are also somewhat buggy and unreliable, as they are funded on shoestring budgets by national labs. But that's moot - the idea is that this has already been done.
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And surely there are older distributed SCM systems with a web client than git.
Dumb patents must die.
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Prior art, patent busted. Now the question is whether the USPO will look at that (not likely). But Autodesk and Microsoft should fight the patent (or Microsoft will ignore it just like they're ignoring the GLPv3 [slashdot.org].
patents and standards (Score:4, Interesting)
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(Be aware that if I patent invention X and claim it uses web services, that doesn't mean I patented web services. It just means that my implementation
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Great
Obvious 75 times (Score:5, Informative)
Surely someone's done a redundant db with a web services interface before? How else could they have done it than that?
Re:Obvious 75 times (Score:5, Informative)
So, yes, the independent claim #1 is very broad. It probably wouldn't hold up in a court. But since no legal precedent exists, Amazon don't know if it will or not. So they keep it as independent claim #1. If in fact prior art invalidates it, then the patent still pertains to whatever the far-more-specific dependent claims #2-#75 refer to. Presumably a very specific manner of implementing #1. Amazon actually hope to patent that specific implementation, but they write it in this notation of independent-dependent claims because that is how patents are written.
But, as I said, IANAL. So perhaps we all shouldn't speculate too much.
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It's a crazy patent world after all... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, we're doing this everyday right? I had used webservices to send and receive all sorts of objects before, text, images, passwords in plain text and stores/reads them from a storage where I use a key value to access it...
Prior art - memcached (Score:5, Informative)
I can think of some very similar products/etc, for example memcached:
http://www.danga.com/memcached/ [danga.com]
You can have multiple memcached servers servicing multiple front ends (just ask wikipedia.org!)
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Either the Patent will denied the application due to the prior art OR the Patent Office will put another compounding item on its list of wrongs it has committed, further degenerating the value of the patent system.
Software is just not of patentable subject matter, so there is alot on the list already, but to compound it only leads to bigger problems and symptoms http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=245683&cid =19755759 [slashdot.org]
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I can think of some very similar products/etc, for example memcached:
http://www.danga.com/memcached/ [danga.com]
You can have multiple memcached servers servicing multiple front ends (just ask wikipedia.org!)
Or just put an SLB in front of a bunch of web services boxen that connect to a NAS/SAN. The SLB distributes the requests across the boxen and tracks which request went where to keep sessions from breaking. Its all been in use for many years, and sounds about like their "One Click" patent:
1. combine widely used or obvious computer systems or "internets technology"
2. Patent this combination
3. ?
4. Profit!
Tm
Web services? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Web refers to the World Wide Web. It has nothing to do with other protocols such as SMTP, POP3, IMAP, NTP, NNTP, SSH, telnet, FTP, echo, finger, gopher, named,
So if you roll your own protocol to accomplish the same thing, I don't see that it would violate this patent, if it is even enforceable.
Take away the web services portion and much of this looks like enterprise wide backup software done back in the mid 1990's by companies such as IBM and Mission Critical Software. Of couse, they may have their own patents on the procedure. Maybe the use of "web services" is to distinguish Amazon's patent from theirs or from the literature on the subject.
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Other prior art may include the Microsoft research done with web services and data storage used in the Microsoft TerraServer project. Dr. Jim Gray [microsoft.com] and Microsoft h
The Twilight Patent Zone (Score:1)
Patents (Score:2)
Patenting an API - can't patent software here.
So as long as your start up isn't in the US, I don't see a problem. Stupid American software patents.
Local thinking (Score:2)
Only if you limit yourself to services provided by countries where software patents are upheld. Fortunately that's not a global situation (yet).
Example (Score:5, Interesting)
Last week me not spel patent xmainer now am 1 (Score:3, Insightful)
In Computing, Simple == Obvious. Patents should be new, useful, novel and not-obvious. http://www.bitlaw.com/patent/requirements.html [bitlaw.com]
S3 has been done before and often and like Amazon's previous patents, this one has a high "Duh" factor. But Amazon must know that. The problem with patents and laws in general is that big companies and government know they can do something wrong and get away with it for a long time. Even if it's reversed in the distant future, mission accomplished.
I dream of a day where computing systems are designed by computer scientists, not lawyers.
GPL (Score:2)
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Exactly. Basically, GPL only says that anyone you pass the software on to must also receive source code. If you're just playing with yourself, you don't have to give anyone anything.
Park Place - the Open Source S3 clone (Score:3, Informative)
Park Place is written in Ruby [ruby-lang.org] by Why [wikipedia.org].
There hasn't even been an Office Action... (Score:1)
This is merely the 18 month publication of the application. It's very likely that this isn't going to issue the way it is now. It's very typical to start with the broadest claims that seem reasonable.
It's too late now to file 3rd party materials. So, watch the application through public PAIR and once you see a notice of allowance, then start to scream. Don't worry, that'll probably won't happen, if at all, until
This is why we need to get the ideas out there (Score:2, Interesting)
Blog and tag those obvious ideas.
"copycat" is an interesting word choice (Score:3, Insightful)
Like most of the Slashdot hive-mind, I believe strongly that the patent system is broken and is in need of serious reform.
However, I do think that the concept behind patents is good: Give people with innovative new ideas a monopoly for a few years so that they might recover some of their development costs. (I'd make the time period of the patent much shorter and make a bunch of other adjustments that aren't relevant here.)
If competing services really are "copycats", they're exactly the sort of thing that patents were designed to prevent. Whether they're copycats (or if Amazon is copying other existing technology) is a more interesting question.
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Give people with innovative new ideas a monopoly for a few years so that they might recover some of their development costs.
Since the profit that can be made from a patent is almost completely independent of how much a patent might take to develop this reasoning is very weak.
We don't patent in many areas and the economy works just fine. e.g. I have the idea of opening a hardware store in a growing town. Nobody's ever thought of opening a hardware store in that town before so it's clearly completely or
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Apple and Amazon? (Score:1)
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Unfortunately, not really, unless someone wants to give me a few mill to take them on with.
Prior Art? (Score:2)
but it seems to me that to many companies are using obviousness in their claims and are trying to
patent the 'stack' of ideas, which is really obvious given that they are just using standard tools
to make a product so why make claims like this in the patent:
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No, claim 75 is a dependent claim. So basically what they are saying is "even if you think our S3 system itself isn't patentable, we want to patent the idea of using SOAP in it." So it's more analogous to patenting the double-linked list (where's that link), and in addition, patenting the use of a double-linked list in C++.
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Me too. I didn't get the job either.
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They just want to block possible startups... (Score:1)
Its a shame really... (Score:2)
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Another Bogus Patent (Score:2)
Unlike many other Slashdotters, I do believe that software should be patentable. But only truly INNOVATIVE things. This doesn't qualify.
S3 sounds a lot like SRB to me (Score:1)
I know prior art (Score:2)
Distributed storage system: dCache, http://www.dcache.org/ [dcache.org]. This allows one to configure storage as multiple commodity storage servers at one site (up to several petabytes) or distributed over several sites (as used by NorduGrid).
One of the many protocols dCache supports is SRM (Storage Resource Manager), which is a web-services (SOAP) based protocol which allows you to perform your usual copy/delete/ls. It's designed as a generic protocol whic
Instead of Amazon S3 how about we call it... (Score:1)
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Prior Art (Score:3, Interesting)
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WebDAV anyone? (Score:1)
I already have .... (Score:2)
Prior art (Score:2)
Prior art needed for only three claims (Score:1)
The claims to look at are: 1, 28 an
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There is already a clone... (Score:1)
in ruby/rails.
http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/parkplace [whytheluckystiff.net]
btw, O'Reilly book "Restful Web Services" - a good read by the way.
has quite a bit of coverage of S3.
I *was* interested in S3, and have
been mulling over how it might fit in with some requirements I have..but
honestly, finding out about this patent just killed my interest. If I want
vendor lock in on my stack I would be developing with
Amazon, get a clue
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just so used to "rails" coming after "ruby" these days....-:)
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