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Location-Based Search Was Patented In 1999
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Jun 12, 2007 04:41 PM
from the can-you-spell-champerty dept.
from the can-you-spell-champerty dept.
greenbird writes "Another patent fiasco has begun. Wired reports that a patent on location-based Internet searches was filed in 1996 and granted in 1999 (patent is here). A patent troll company name Geomas acquired the patent and has filed suit against Verizon in none other than Marshall, Texas. They claim this is the first in what will be a long line of lawsuits. Geomas has amassed a $20M war chest in venture capital to use for getting rich off of a clearly obvious idea."
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Go Geomas! (Score:5, Funny)
Obvious? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Obvious? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but some things that are not obvious become obvious once a suitable infrastructure is put in place. So even if they did think of the idea before it was technologically possible to implement...the idea would have been thought of anyway once the Internet approached its modern state.
At a bare minimum, a patent application should require a functional prototype. Stating "A device capable of faster than light travel" is not the same thing as inventing a device capable of faster than light travel, so why should the mere description of the technology be sufficient to patent it?
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
According to the rules, the patent application should contain enough information for someone skilled in the art to build the device or whatever it is that is patented.
One of the nice things of the patent system is that an inventor can freely talk to investors in order to build the prototype without risking that the idea is stolen and commercially exploited by someone else.
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Re:Obvious? (Score:4, Funny)
Building a strip club?
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Re:Obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Obvious? (Score:4, Insightful)
True. The reason is that only the citizens of countries with strong economies can afford to use enough money for entertainment to make the entertainment industry rich enough to bribe the politicians.
Strong IP laws are one of the results of strong economy and the large and rich corporations it tends to produce, not a cause for it. Weak IP laws allow economy to develop rapidly since new inventions can be used by anyone; once the economy reaches the natural level for the current technology level and growth stops (or slows to match the rate of technological advancement), the established players start setting up barriers of entry to get a larger share of the now-stagnant market, since there's no new growth to be had.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You are confusing the isssue of whether or not it was done in plain view of "consumer" with whether or not it's been done.
They Forgot One! (Score:5, Funny)
15. The system of claim 1, wherein said geographical search area is
Laugh now, but thousands of years from now when you're looking for an all night Denny's around Omicron Percei 8, the system that you use will end up paying me patent royalties!
Provence (Score:3, Informative)
Re:They Forgot One! (Score:4, Insightful)
You also have to remember, that it is not simply the claims that matter, but rather the disclosure of the actual subject matter in the patent that work. I can claim to cure cancer, but if my disclosed method is to throw ketchup packets at the cancer patient, then somebody else who actually cures cancer will have nothing to fear from my patent even if the claims are the same. If Verizon is using a technique that is substantially different from what is disclosed (or 'taught') by this patent, then it has nothing to fear, simply 'claiming' a technology is necessary but not sufficient to show infringement.
To those of you including the story poster who cavalierly call this "obvious", you have to remember that it is not the fact that it might be obvious today it was what was obvious in 1996.... so before you say "Google already does this!" Just remember these guys had the idea and applied for the patent in 1996... 2 years before Google even freakin' existed. Finding obviousness requires a careful reading of the patent and the prior art. It reminds me of a story about some digital photography patents that Kodak got in the late 1980's that some moron on this site called 'obvious' because his camera (from 2006) had the same features that were in the patent.....
As for the trolls who own the patent now, they can suck it, but at the same time, if the actual disclosures that are actually described in this patent are being used by Verizon, they should pay. If you were the lone inventor and some big company came and took your idea and never paid you for it, you'd probably want to be paid too.
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Hmm. (Score:3, Insightful)
Obvious now, but was it obvious in 1996 when they filed for it? The problem is that this sector advances so damn fast that it's hard to even tell sometimes.
Of course, holding the patent in their back pocket then arising like a submarine is a despicable action, one which I think should invalidate a patent. I think if you patent something you should be required to at least attempt to make a business off it instead of suing the shit out of people who have more balls than you.
Now is when I'd like to say... (Score:5, Interesting)
Show of hands on the proposal?
*For those who say 90 days is too short, let me preemptively reply that if you are so involved in a particular industry that you can patent something in that field, you damned well ought to notice when someone announces or commercially uses that idea _in your field_ within three months. Otherwise, you really are just a troll.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
2. Make a good keyword searchable database for patents with an RSS feed for all the various categories so developers can remain up-to-date on the truly novel ideas that are being registered (as they all will be now, see step 1)
3. Encourage developers to remain abreast of the patents in the field, when they expire and how much they can lic
Slashdot exercise: prove it was an "obvious idea" (Score:4, Interesting)
To invalidate it as obvious, you have to find one or more documents/patents or example of a system that contain all of the elements of the claim (or enough sources that show that it was obvious to combine).
Remember, you have to be able to find documents that existed on or before the date of filing Jan 31, 1996.
Frankly, it would probably be easier to show that the disclosure was not enabling. But, let's have at it.
Re:Slashdot exercise: prove it was an "obvious ide (Score:3, Insightful)
a database of information organized into a hierarchy of geographical areas wherein entries corresponding to each one of said hierarchy of geographical areas is further organized into topics;
EX: every point is a specific lat and longitude.
DB has 2 indexes latitude and longitude.
Select * from loc where (lat loc_lat - 10) and (lon loc_long - 10)
EX2: Database of information organized into topics that are further organized into a hier
Re:Slashdot exercise: prove it was an "obvious ide (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yellow Pages (Score:5, Insightful)
Prior art: Phone book? (Score:3, Insightful)
Say it again: "No software patents".
obviousness of problems vs. solutions (Score:4, Insightful)
You do not get a patent on a problem or an idea. You get a patent on a solution to a problem, an implementation of an idea.
"Location-based search" is an idea. "A machine that can trap/kill mice" is an idea. "A sturdy container made from cardboard" is an idea. "Heating water to create steam to power the motion of a vehicle" is an idea shading towards an implementation. The intention of patents was not to patent the idea. Yes, ideas are often clever, creative, novel, or "innovative": "nobody ever thought of doing that before". But that means very little; somebody has to think of it the first time. In the grand scheme of thing, ideas are cheap, and not what patents are supposed to protect (in the interests of encouraging).
You are supposed to patent an implementation of an idea: a detailed, specific approach to solving the problem. The solution is not supposed to be "obvious to a skilled practitioner", but there is no enforcement of this in the patent system, which is where many valid grumbles about patents arise.
I don't know anything about cardboard box patents, but there are some obvious constraints on the problem. You'd probably like to be able to tile the plane with the unfolded shape, so you can cut them out of a larger run of the material. You'd like to be able to fold the thing up into something along the lines of a box (a rectangular parallelpiped)--boxes pack well for shipping. You need overlapping flaps to allow sealing it.
Given those constraints, there are probably only a few basic plausible methods for a design for making a cardboard box that's efficient and effective. Given so few plausible designs, somebody who invents one and patents it is not significantly helping or advancing science (because the constrained solution space is so small, any skilled practioner could invent one of the few possible solutions). Actual advances are what patents are intended to encourage, but (at least as I've characterized the problem) I doubt anything like that happened in the basic design of cardboard boxes. (I also know nothing about what, if anything, got patented. This is just trying to offer an analogy.)
This happens constantly in software; most of the time the idea is the only novelty, and the patent is either interpreted as covering all possible solutions to the idea (making alternative implementations irrelevant), or it patents the obviously best solution (if you're going to draw a cursor in a manner that's reversible, XOR is the most effective algorithm; there were apple ][ / Atari 800 games that drew sprites the same way--but the patent only covered uses of the algorithm for drawing cursors on windowed workstations). Someone long ago patented the idea of a networked game with sound and was semi-recently extorting game companies with it; the patent was old enough that the most viable candidate for prior art fell through, because although people used a port on the old Commodore Pet computer to create a networked game, and used the same port to drive a simple sound output, nobody ever did both at the same time (I guess it only had the one port); and without prior art, nobody involved in the patent system accepts that the idea that combining the two is obvious, or at least that the two or three obvious ways of implementing game-sound-in-networked-game are, indeed, obvious. Or (more accurately, I expect) they've abandoned all pretense of 'obviousness' as meaning anything other than 'prior art'.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:erm, isn't that fairly common? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because most people arent stupid patent trolls?
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Re:Obvious When? (Score:5, Interesting)
Really obvious. Blindingly, mind-numbingly, stupefactifyingly obvious.
I was writing geographically-based search functions (in a non-web context) in 1998. They were just another feature of the search applications we wrote. The products I was supporting had been in use since 1994.
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