Google and Others Sued For Automating Email

Dotnaught sends us to InformationWeek for news of the latest lawsuit by Polaris IP, which holds a patent on the idea of responding automatically to emails. The company has no products. It brought suit in the Eastern District in Texas, as many patent trolls do — though the article informs us that that venue has been getting less friendly of late to IP interests, and has actually invalidated some patents. The six companies being sued are AOL, Amazon, Borders, Google, IAC, and Yahoo. All previous suits based on this patent have been settled.

Procmail v1.0 released in 1991

Subject says it all. Procmail v1.0 was released in 1991. That's a little earlier than 1997...

Re:Procmail v1.0 released in 1991

The patent isn't just email filtering, it also covers emailing the sender a canned response (from a repository) based on the content of the message. I'm sure procmail can do that, but unless they procmail included an example of doing just that, it's not prior art. I'm sure prior art does exist, though -- when usenet was king, moderated newsgroups did something similar.

Re:Procmail v1.0 released in 1991

>> it also covers emailing the sender a canned response (from a repository) based on the content of the message

This sounds an *awful* lot like what pretty much *every* mailing list manager has been doing for at least 15 years. This includes Procmail's SmartList, MajorDomo, and the
venerable BITNET LISTSERV which I was using in the mid-to-late 1980's. Anything
hooked up to -owner filtered the mail for administrivia and often sent mail
back in response to an admin request.

Re:Procmail v1.0 released in 1991

No guessing needed - it always has been > 0! 9/11/2001 is a constant and equals approximately 4.09e-4.

Re:Procmail v1.0 released in 1991

Checking my svk tree (converted from cvs), I notice that in 1994 the "man procmailex" manpage included with the procmail distro already contains a dynamic E-mail-me-the-file-I-ask-for example.

Which isn't what this patent is about. This patent is about running a message through a text classification algorithm to determine what kind of message it's likely to be, pulling a canned response from a database if it matches a known category and sending that response, otherwise flagging it for human attention. Did the example do all of these things? If not, it isn't useful prior art.

Checking the same svk tree, I see that SmartList was included in the procmail distro prior to 1994, and SmartList *did* (and does) do all of those things. It contains a fairly elaborate weighted parsing system which tries to respond with canned replies in response to natural language requests, albeit in the domain of mailinglist and file transfer operations.

Re:Procmail v1.0 released in 1991

Absolutely - Procmail covers so many bases in terms of "automated stuff that can be done with email" that it's hard to see how it wouldn't be prior art for just about any patent issues in this area.

On a broader topic, I can see the day when law firms engaged to provide legal defences against software patent claims start to employ older geeks specifically to identify prior art solutions. It's gotta be cheaper to keep a bunch of us around on some sort of "professional retainer" basis than to engage paralegals to trawl through old patent documents (and I'd "Procmail" probably wouldn't come up in a patent document search anyway) - many of us who've been around for a while would've thought "Procmail" before we'd finished reading this summary.

vacation(1) released in 1983

man vacation

[snip]

AUTHOR
              vacation is Copyright (c) 1983 by Eric P. Allman, University of Berkeley, California, and Copyright (c) 1993 by Harald Milz
              ([e-mail]). Tiny patches 1998 by Mark Seuffert ([e-mail]).
              Now maintained by Sean Rima ([e-mail])

Re:vacation(1) released in 1983

Please respond with "unsubscribe" in the message body to be removed from this news aggregator.

Can you be more specific?

That's abstract the patent. If you think that vacation meets even that then you're an idiot.

Can you be more specific on exactly where he is an "idiot"?

A method for automatically interpreting an electronic message...

So far, so good.

...including the steps of (a) receiving the electronic message from a source;...

Yes.

...(b) interpreting the electronic message using a rule base and case base knowledge engine;...

Yes. If recipient == X then do Y.

...and (c) classifying the electronic message as at least one of (i) being able to be responded to automatically;...

Not only "classifying" but also responding.

Seems like he was right and you were wrong.

WOW!

"Six major Internet companies have been sued for using computers to process their e-mail."

As opposed have PEOPLE sort ELECTRONIC data?

Seriously, I'm glad to see someone hop on this in such a timely manner, because if Polaris IP doesn't nip this in the bud now, automated email response could become widespread in no time!!

jesus - sendmail IS prior art / concept

message received.
sendmail looks up in it's address base and either a) forwards to appropriate mailbox or b) replies with undeliverable.
further details within the rule base may determine whether additional copies need to be forwarded to other mailboxes, or further responses are necessary.
integration with things like spamlists, virus scanners all add to the *automated* handling of e-mail based on rules.

just because they are adding additional automation to the last leg in the e-mail journey doesn't mean that the mail was already processed, scanned, had rules applied and copies made/forwarded by the server before the client ever saw the message.

Obvious patent - apply server rule processing to email client.... BFD.

Procmail

http://www.procmail.org/procmail.HISTORY.html [procmail.org]

This file contains a summary of changes made in various versions of procmail up to and including the current release. It is derived from the HISTORY file that is included in source distributions. For information on downloading the current release please see the Procmail homepage.
Only the last entry is complete, the others might have been condensed.

1990/12/07: v1.00
1990/12/12: v1.01
1991/02/04: v1.02
1991/02/13: v1.10
1991/02/21: v1.20
1991/02/22: v1.21
1991/03/01: v1.30
1991/03/15: v1.35

Usually patents that seem stupid aren't quite ...

... but I did skim the first half or so of the claims, and this is one of the most-thoroughly-and-obviously-covered-by-prior-art patents I have ever seen.

I'm sure that *well* before procmail there were products and academic papers covering exactly this subject matter in detail. How a patent like this ever passes the laugh test, I don't know.

Others precede it

IIRC, Majordomo and GNU Mailman predate this patent by at least six years. In fact, the current mailman-users mailing list's earliest archive is May 1998, so work would probably had to begun far before that. A little research proved that LISTSERV predates all of them, actually. From Wikipedia:

LISTSERV is the first electronic mailing list software application, originally developed in 1984 by Ira Fuchs, Daniel Oberst, and Ricky Hernandez for the BITNET computer network.

Re:Others precede it

99% of the people who post a reply have never filed a patent in their life. Yes, they're idiots.

The problem with idiots is that they are usually too stupid to recognise their own idiocy.

In my experience it is idiots that file patents believing their trivial, worthless idea actually merits one. Smart people are more likely to realise that what while they may have been pretty clever coming up with a particular thing, that doesn't mean it's so innovative it merits the protection of a statutory monopoly, and are less likely (for a variety of social reasons that I am sure are beyond you) to pretend otherwise in order to cheat the system.

Based on the abstract, LISTSERV would seem to be prior art. As I recall LISTSERV could indeed respond to commands in the content of messages, forwarding messages lacking valid commands to the list operator. Even if LISTSERV and Majordomo do not implement all of the claims, they would certainly provide part of the evidentiary basis for invalidating the patent on grounds of obviousness.

Going through the claim, many of the claims are obviously just plain silly. Take as an example claim 5 which is for "The method of claim 4, wherein the sub-categories include product service subject matter and product sales subject matter". That adds nothing even remotely capable of being described as an inventive step to claim 4 and so it necessarily stands or falls together with claim 4.

Even if there is some implementation that is much more involved and complex than the descriptions in the patent, the patent has to be interpreted standing alone, not in the context of an external implementation, and in that context the stuff that's there involves no innovation, let alone invention, and lacks anything even slightly complex.

I am not going to go through all 66 claims since the first 20 or so are so silly as to make it not worth my time examining all of them in detail. Suffice it to say, Amy Rice and Julie Hsu (the "inventors") are indeed idiots if they think there's anything meriting a patent here.

Majordomo

Majordomo did just what the patent says. It parsed a message, determined whether it could be automatically responded to (as in subscribe, unsubscribe, list members, help, list charter, etc) or needed to be forwarded to the list owner. Majordomo did much of the list management entirely automatically, hence it's name. They describe something entirely comprised of Majordomo's functionality. Our company was using Majordomo to manage email lists in 1995, well before this patent was filed.

Clearly their intent is an "Ask Jeeves" type service that is email based. You send a support query to an email address and the server tries to guess at what canned FAQ is most appropriate and sends it.

--Perry

Wow

1. work at the patent office.
2. award patents with the magic 8 ball procedure (pat. pend.)
3. nobody fires you for that!
4. profit!!!
5. ??? (these are coming from those being sued for infringement)

Re:Wow

And also, "Outlook Not So Good".

That thing was way ahead of its time.

Related Arcitles

Firehose:Google and Others Sued For Automating E-mail by Dotnaught (223657)

Who'da thunk it... Betrayed by one of our own...

Dueling Automated Email Replies in 1995

I had automatic reply setup on a Vax email system, and I forget the exact situation, but my auto-reply got into a duel with another auto-reply while I was at lunch. Anyhoo, 2 hours later I had some 1200 emails in my inbox, all auto-replies to another auto-reply, which was replying to my auto-reply, etc, etc, ad nauseum. Good times. (Da Da Ding-Ding Ding-Ding Ding-Ding Diiiing.)

Re:WHO?

Who the hell would settle something like this with such a well established history of "prior art"?

Someone who, when they appeared ready to fight it, was offered a settlement and patent license for a very nominal sum. Easier and cheaper to pay even a few hundred bucks and walk away than pay for lawyers and months of a lawsuit.

This is almost as stupid as one click shopping.

The whole point of using and programming computers is to automate....

Software Patents are acts of fraud against the consumer and users.

http://threeseas.net/abstraction_physics.html [threeseas.net]

I'm against the death penalty but....

Extending it to patent trolls would, I feel, certainly act as a deterrent.

And this is Texas after all....

stop settling with patent trolls

God damn it. Don't they see what happening? everytime you settle with a patent troll, you give birth to a new one. These guys will go away with the big boys would just make mince meat out of a few of them.

IETF doing this in 1984?

I can't recall the exact year, but it was around 1984 (scary, eh?). The DECsystem-2060 system running TOPS-20 at The Ohio State University Computer Science Department was connected via a network I believe was CSNET. While using that system I learned of a facility to obtain RFC documents that described things like the format of email headers ... by sending email to a specific email address. It would them email the document back. I received over 20 some RFCs that way. They came back within a couple minutes, so I doubt they had someone just sitting there answering it. I suspect this was an early IETF or ARPA facility. Maybe they have some documentation that still remains about this. Maybe it's in an RFC itself. I'll have to Google for more of this.

Not just listserv, majordomo, and vacation

let us not forget the email-to-ftp gateways that BITNET [wikipedia.org] used to have. Another example is the AutoDRM [seismo.ethz.ch] protocol used for seismic data, which dates to 1991.

prev. art: Debian Bugs tracking system

On the Debian bugs system page [debian.org] it says the first version was realeased in 94. I'm not sure how much was implemented, but in it's current form it's really very much alike the patent (what is said in the abstract anyways.

Listserv [lsoft.com] might also apply, if they had advanced mailinglist management in the beginning.

Re:I for one...

== Auto-reply:

I'm sorry, I'm on a vacation to Italy,

I might respond to your post during the week if I get a chance.

Otherwise I will respond over the weekend.

Good luck,