Company Claims Patent On Spam Filtering, Sues World 186
Posted
by
kdawson
from the guess-where dept.
from the guess-where dept.
EvilAlphonso notes news of a "Texas" IP holding company suing 36 actual companies for violating its claimed patent on spam filtering. Techdirt deconstructs the patent itself, No. 6,018,761, which seems to amount to little more than a database lookup. It was filed in 1996 and issued in 2000 (despite the lawyers' press release claiming that it "was awarded... nearly 15 years ago"). Among the companies being sued are 3Com, Apple, Google, AOL, Yahoo, J.C.Penney, IBM, Dell, Citigroup, and RIM. Not Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, or Microsoft, oddly enough.
Massively multi-target trolling (Score:5, Interesting)
The list of targets picked by that entity is pretty impressive. Even though the article accurately notes that some big names are missing, it almost reads like a Who Is Who of the industry. Sort of duck shooting, but the really big ones...
The bad news is that even such an aggressive behavior isn't the worst that can happen with patents. It's bad, and I'm aware of the fact that non-practicing entities (NPEs) can go extremely far and cause a lot of trouble just to suqeeze the maximum amount of money out of their targets. I don't mean to downplay that problem.
But: form the perspective of a company that gets attacked, an NPE is only the second-worst possibility. At the end of the day, the NPE is just in it for the money and pursues no strategic objectives beyond that. So the big companies that are the targets here (and the IT companies among them are all pro-software-patent regardless) can initially try to get rid of the patent or prove they don't infringe, and if it comes to worst, they can and will negotiate a settlement, write a check and life goes on for them.
That isn't the case when a strategic patent holder seeks to limit the functionality of a competitor's product, possibly to the extent that the competitor gets driven out of business. Exclusionary strategic use of patents is much worse than anything an NPE will ever do. [blogspot.com] It harms competition and innovation in serious ways. It looks like Apple wants to enforce some patents regardless of whatever royalty the defendant (HTC, and maybe others in the future) would be willing to pay. And there's IBM's use of patents to preserve its mainframe monopoly against such companies as TurboHercules [blogspot.com] and NEON Enterprise Software [blogspot.com].
You can do a lot of spam filtering (Score:5, Interesting)
... without looking at the headers.
1) the IP address of the originating end of the TCP connection, for lookup in a block list, is not in the headers
2) the SMTP HELO/EHLO - not in the headers
3) the envelope from and to addresses - not in the headers
4) the triplet of IP address, from and to for grey listing - not in the headers
5) the text of the body
6) the domains in any URLs in the body, for looking up in blocklists
7) the IP addresses that the domains in 6 resolve to.
The patent is very badly worded. I would claim that every header would contain some information which would be "usefiul (sic) to the recipient in understanding more about the context in which the sender sent the message".
In that case, how could any message "not contain such reference".
Is the patent just claiming to cover the headers, or the body as well. And as for the misspelling!
Things in the header that might possibly be covered might be any pre-existing "received-from" IP addresses for looking up in blacklists, X-Mailer, Mime and Content type headers.
What about "Missing Headers"? could this patent be claimed to cover looking for something which doesn't exist in the headers?
Re:Filed in 1996- Spam Filters already around (Score:3, Interesting)
Bio piracy (Score:5, Interesting)
Some Scottish hippy friend of mine alleged her charity group managed to fight the good fight against patent trolls by applying for their own patent. Back in 1997 some Texan asshats applied for a patent on basmati rice. Of course this is bio-piracy and as insane as it sounds, the patent was actually granted. Clearly the patent system was as bent as a butchers hook (it still is?). Needless to say this would have destroyed countless livelihoods in India and probably left a lot of people to starve to death. In order to raise awareness for this problem and to put huge pressure on the American government to stop allegedly taking backhanders and burying the problem under red tape the hippy group applied for a patent themselves. They decided that seen as people enjoy eating chips (British chips = french fries in the USA) they decided to apply for a patent on a way of eating chips they had invented, and that is of eating chips with salt. They proved it perfectly legal under existing US patent laws and caused enough of a shitstorm to get the press involved and damage the bureaucrats PR until the patent was un-granted.
I cannot vouch for the truth of this tale she told me but I looked it up and found some pages backing up her claims.
http://www.purefood.org/patent/frenchfries032602.cfm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basmati [wikipedia.org]
documenting it on http://en.swpat.org (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm working on documenting it here:
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/InNova_v._36_companies_(2010,_USA) [swpat.org]
Help welcome.
Re:This guy already won the lottery (Score:3, Interesting)
With our revolutionary, patented technology, you can now edit the content of your e-mail after you send it. Even if the recipient has seen the mail already: one moment it reads one way; the next, it’s totally different. The content of any mail you send is entirely in your control, at all times. Even if the recipient has deleted his copy of the message, you are able to edit it. We call this remarkable technology dynamic mail content and it's about to change your life.
Re:Take off and nuke Marshall, TX from orbit ... (Score:5, Interesting)
You forgot the biggest reason...From wikipedia:
That means that any ambulance chaser can get in on the act. Add to that the different handling of appeals for patents:
And it become a patent troll feeding frenzy.
Reference article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._District_Court_for_the_Eastern_District_of_Texas [wikipedia.org]
Re:Take off and nuke Marshall, TX from orbit ... (Score:3, Interesting)
This seems to have been a major operating theory of the patent system since the early 90's. And yet, here it still is.
The patent office has been screwed ever since Edison was in charge of screwing Tesla. Now all patents are useless or covered by national security.
When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything — you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him. - RAH