Multi-Channel Communication Patent Up For Sale

OTDR alerts us to the latest software patent stupidity in the news as patent number 6,418,462, "methods allowing clients to perform tasks through a sideband communication channel, in addition to the main communication channel between a client and server," snubs its nose at AJAX, ftp, and decades of prior art and goes on sale next month in San Fransisco. "Singled out are AJAX mashups including Google Maps and Gmail, and Microsoft 'Live'... Also in the frame are Amazon's S3 and EC2 and clusters from Microsoft, VMware, and Oracle. eBay's Skype, Napster, and Microsoft's Groove are also listed as potentially infringing on the patent in P2P."

Will a lawsuit spoil the sale?

If a crack team of lawyers takes legal action to get this patent invalidated, will the pending legal action depress its price?

Depressing the price is a good thing because it will discourage this kind of nonsense in the future.

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To be honest, I can't see this selling for much anyway. Surely everyone will see that it'd never hold up in court, and ignore the auction?

What would be the point in buying such a patent for 99.99% of the businesses out there when you could never use it?

Patent Link

First off, they don't quite link to the patent so on a non-slashdottable version is here [uspto.gov] or you can go straight to the full massive PDF if you want [uspto.gov] (single file if you have problems viewing above in Linux [pat2pdf.org]).

Looks pretty much like a poster child example of why the patent system is broken. Either that or the USPTO needs to start looking at revoking patents in hind sight or after professional review by many leading members of the field. So much for patent reform!

Re:Patent Link

This remind me when MS started patenting everything, like 'tabbed browsing' and 'double click'. It will never end.

I wonder if anyone ever dreamed requesting the patent for the power button: 'Nobody will ever turn something on without paying me royalties! MUHAHAHA!'

Sorry for that. :)

Too late on patenting the power switch...

Those big squarish light swtitches that take up almost the whole plate, along with their electrical outlet counterparts, and anything else in that form factor are patented by Leviton under the name "Decora". All the other styles are probably also patented.

Re:Patent Link

Is this really the patent?

My reading is that it doesn't really claim what TFA is claiming it does.

This patent seems to be patenting a process where many unrelated clients connect to a supposedly lightweight server and distributes workloads among those clients via a sideband channel. That's not my understanding of how Ajax works.

It seems to me that it suffers from the same issues that many distributed computing platforms suffer from which is that you get free CPU at the expense of a great deal of bandwidth so it's only useful for a very limited sets of workloads. In this case I can't really imagine what you'd use it for.

Good news everyone!

Hopefully some patent troll will spend mega bucks on it, then spend even more bucks on expensive lawsuits against the likes of Google, Microsoft, etc., and finally end up going the way of SCO when they get buried under the weight of prior art. The sooner one of these "IP Portfolio" companies gets well and truly burnt, the better.

Plus, as a a bonus, Slashdot gets to root for Microsoft in court for a change. Watching some of the anti-Microsoft zealots around here trying to post on *that* should be entertaining, to say the least!

Re:Good news everyone!

The problem with patent trolls is that the risk / reward profile is all wrong. The corporation structure protects the investors, and no one is criminally liable if the lawsuit fails. So, the people setting it up can decide how much liability to expose themselves to by how much they invest, but the upper bound on the lawsuit payoff is virtually unlimited. So, when deciding whether to make the investment, there simply isn't an entry on the risk / reward table below "lawsuit fails." The incentive for them not file the lawsuit has to be on par with the potential earnings in the calculation, and someone getting "well and truly burnt" won't do that -- the probability of a big win has to change, since the size of the loss is bounded. (Well, either that or find ways to make the penalties bigger.)

Time to do a prior art search

Any document that contains the words "while" or the more technical "meanwhile" should be sufficient prior art.

How about talking to someone on one phone while you are trying to get a fax to them? Remember that conversation when you would be talking someone through putting a roll of thermal paper in a hopper?

Actually, isn't this exactly how FTP works? I have a control channel and one or more data channels that are doing the heavy lifting once a transfer starts.

Then there is ISDN, which _requires_ two or more barer channels and the control channel just to join the party.

Isn't the web browser "maximum connections to one server" all about this as well?

Hell, the entire word "sideband" (outside of radio) has the "meat" of this patent as its definition...

Time for the pitchforks and torches everybody, meet me on the hill outside the castle!

haha

You fell for the old troll of believing the Slashdot summary of a patent.

For all of these stories, you need to go read the actual patent, including the claims, then you can laugh at the summary and (sometimes) the article for not doing so.

Re:haha

Yup. The actual claim 1 (the important part) is:

A method in a metacomputing, distributed network of utilizing remote client resources in the network, comprising:

        a server that implements tasks by utilizing idle resources in multiple clients;
        individual communication channels between each client and the server;
        a second, separate dedicated communication channel (sideband channel) between each client and server, through which the server distributes the tasks to the each client downstream and through which each of the clients sends the results of the task upstream to the server.

So how the HELL does this have anything to do with Ajax, FTP etc.

Another Slashdot summary to laugh at.

Probably consulting legal team

The inventor of 2 cans and a string could not be reached for comment.

Re:Probably consulting legal team

Well, I think you're forgetting the fact that he got sued into the poorhouse by the guy who invented string and cans, subsequently dying of starvation.

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Nope he's fine.

Now the guy with two cans and TWO strings, he's in trouble.

How does this relate to AJAX exactly?

Abstract of mentioned patent:

A new method of distributed computing, sideband computing, that is global, scalable and can utilize many idle CPU resources worldwide. Sideband is defined as when a user connects to some (normal) network services, a separate communication channel is opened, through which a server distributes its tasks to all the clients and collects the results later. By this method, any network server which has a lot of clients can compute very large parallel computing problems by dividing it into small individual parts and have them calculated by its clients. With little cost, the network server can act as a supercomputer.

It is laying out a way to distribute parallel processing tasks to a large number of clients, which SETI@Home thought up [berkeley.edu] a full two years prior. The only argument I can see is they seem to be saying they can do this discreetly while the client is using some other service? I don't have time to go and pick through the entire patent right now, but it seems that this nonsense has gone beyond simply being out of hand.

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Actually, I was working on a cyber cafe concept in 94 using EXACTLY this concept. The idea was to put computers into coffee houses/ice cream shops, etc. all over the world:

1. sell Internet cheap,
2. have ads on the monitors,
3. have free shopping on the system (

PVM - 1989

Forget SETI at home look at PVM. First release 1989 !!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Virtual_Machine [wikipedia.org]

Description here
http://www.netlib.org/pvm3/book/node17.html [netlib.org]

Main channel is to pvmd. "backchannel" is the process to process communication.

--
The PVM system is composed of two parts. The first part is a daemon , called pvmd3 and sometimes abbreviated pvmd , that resides on all the computers making up the virtual machine. (An example of a daemon program is the mail program that runs in the background and handles all the incoming and outgoing electronic mail on a computer.) Pvmd3 is designed so any user with a valid login can install this daemon on a machine. When a user wishes to run a PVM application, he first creates a virtual machine by starting up PVM. (Chapter 3 details how this is done.) The PVM application can then be started from a Unix prompt on any of the hosts. Multiple users can configure overlapping virtual machines, and each user can execute several PVM applications simultaneously.
--
The general paradigm for application programming with PVM is as follows. A user writes one or more sequential programs in C, C++, or Fortran 77 that contain embedded calls to the PVM library. Each program corresponds to a task making up the application. These programs are compiled for each architecture in the host pool, and the resulting object files are placed at a location accessible from machines in the host pool. To execute an application, a user typically starts one copy of one task (usually the ``master'' or ``initiating'' task) by hand from a machine within the host pool. This process subsequently starts other PVM tasks, eventually resulting in a collection of active tasks that then compute locally and exchange messages with each other to solve the problem. Note that while the above is a typical scenario, as many tasks as appropriate may be started manually. As mentioned earlier, tasks interact through explicit message passing, identifying each other with a system-assigned, opaque TID.
--

Any purpose Left?

Doesn't it destroy the purpose of a "patent" if you can sell the rights to it to someone completely uninvolved with its creation?

Rights shouldn't be a commodity!

They don't have to litigate it

The bravado here may seem surprising, but there's a good reason why the tone of these claims is so different from the tone of typical patent trolling. A typical patent troll will generally be vague about the applicability of a patent, except when discussing a case that's already been filed. Naming a dozen rather different specific technologies gives a defendant lots of ammunition to argue that the technique is obvious, due to the ubiquity admitted by the plaintiff, or to demonstrate prior art in the common technological heritage of all of them.

These claims are simply intended to drive up the value of the patent at auction, by making the big players terrified of letting anyone else get ahold of it. Were it really so valuable, the holder would litigate it themselves. The fact that they're unloading it for some sure money now is a strong indication of how weak they feel it would be in court.

A tangential question...

When will the point be reached when the US patent system becomes so encumbered for real inventors that the US will become a medium-sized (no, not small by any measure) backyard for US patent specialists? If the US patent system keeps diverging from the rest of the world companies and inventors outside the US will certainly have an edge on anything someone in the US wants to bring to the much larger global market.

The summary is wrong; but the patent is stupid.

As above, the summary isn't especially accurate. What the patent proposes is a system where anybody who connects to a webserver is asked by that server to compute a chunk of some distributed processing problem. Essentially, the concept of SETI@home or distributed.net; but allegedly bodged on top of an ordinary communication session with a web server. Trouble is, it's a bloody stupid idea. The system depends on the client system executing whatever code the server asks it to execute. There are two ways of implementing this: the hideously insecure way, and the hideously slow way. The idea that the client would execute a chunk of native code at the server's request is just crazy; riddled with possibilities for misuse and wholly unacceptable. Even if this were alright, the current ways of doing this semi-safely(java and the like) are not lightweight enough to set up, run the numbers, and bring down during a simple client/server connection session. The alternative is the hideously slow way: hack together a javascript implementation of your algorithm and use AJAX tricks to hand out the data and pull back the results. This would work; but there is a reason why people don't do scientific computing with javascript. Also, many browsers are on the lookout for scripts pulling excessive resources, and throttle or kill them to keep themselves responsive. I'm sure that somebody's javascript BLAST implementation isn't going to cause any trouble. If the patent dodges this problem by using dedicated client software then it will work just fine(for the class of very, very parallel problems); but runs into a long list of prior art. That said, I'd be amused to see an AJAXed equivalent of distributed.net or similar, just for the amusement factor; but it would be a monstrosity in performance terms.

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Most good patents are about something that everyone thinks is a stupid idea. In the competitive patent filing environment it's a good way to "file first" as people are loath to spend money on the legal fees for something that is useless. Thing is, a few

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The other question is, could the server serve the request, distribute the problem, and retrieve the results from the client in less work then it would actually take the server to solve the problem itself? If you're going to hand off a problem to the perso

Re:Starting Bid

I bid 25c. If I win, I grant a free unlimited license to everyone so long as they do not sue anyone for patent infringement. Except Microsoft. Screw 'em. And except Anonymous Cowards and users whose IDs start with 746004.

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...it is quite a task to find it as it is!