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Patents Your Rights Online

New Patent for Serving Ads to Newspaper Sites 48

Posted by timothy from the and-now-for-our-next-trick dept.
mshiltonj writes: "Global Network announced today that they have a new patent on 'serving ads via a computer to a network of newspaper websites.' They are actively going to enforce the patent too. I heard, but could not verify online, that they placed a print ad announcing the patent in the Wall Street journal. 'The placement of this ad is the first in several steps we intend to take in order to notify key industry participants that we have been granted this patent. We are following proper legal protocol by publicly informing members of the publishing and advertising industries who may unknowingly be in violation of our patent,' commented Mr. James Mason, President and CEO of Global Network."
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New Patent for Serving Ads to Newspaper Sites More

New Patent for Serving Ads to Newspaper Sites

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  • What? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by smoondog ( 85133 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @01:58PM (#3952513)
    What? The damn thing was filed in the year 2000 and just granted lasted month. This is very likely prior art all over the place, although IANAL.

    The patent is here [uspto.gov]

    -Sean
    • I've been doing this through my company OnePaper since 1998, both for online and print publication ads. If you are a lawyer, feel free to contact me at evan, the at symbol, onepaper.com. I'd be amused and happy to provide documentation.

      --
      Evan

    • Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by SpatchMonkey ( 300000 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @02:27PM (#3952684) Journal
      I don't know if you read the patent, but it actually describes a fairly sophisticated system for advert management.

      We're not talking a few simple lines of code to insert a random image into a webpage here. This is a well thought out automatic process of obtaining, tracking and releasing adverts to many different types of newspaper website.
      • What, do you work for the patent office?

        "This doesn't do just one thing. It does three things. Grant the patent."
  • Are they going to try and claim that any newspaper site that has advertisments on it falls under their patent? Good luck with that :)
    • No, it doesn't.

      Read the patent carefully (it's here [uspto.gov]) - you'll notice it describes a fairly involved system of advert distribution.

      Which is why the patent was granted.
      • Heres the thing... they dont seem to have doen anything particularly invovitative, their patent simply describes the requirements of building a sophisticated ad distribution server (thats a spec, not an original idea). Anyone could sit down anddefine a similar set of requirements. Then they build it. The rules for a Patent state that the solution must not be obvious to someone skilled in that art (programming web pages I assume, not newspaper publishing) at that time... The patent looks impresive, but its not...
  • (if this doesn't show) that the goddamn patent system has broken down when it comes to IP Law and current in use technology, I don't know what will...

    Sad.

  • Wow, Marketing AND Patent Abuse... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Dr. Bent ( 533421 ) <ben&int,com> on Thursday July 25, 2002 @02:13PM (#3952596) Homepage
    ...do they eat babies too?
  • There were proposals from the patent office to close down the patent office, because "everything potentially patentable had already been invented." I think that we need to go back and revisit that decision, in light of the obviously decreased usefulness of patents in promoting actual innovation.
    • That's an incredibly large generalisation to make, based on the small amount of 'bogus' patents that have been reported on this website and others.

      Out of the 30,000 patents granted per year by the US Patent Office, I think I've seen articles attacking the usefulness of no more than fifty.

      Which is, like, about 0.002% of the yearly grant of patents.

      Until you've actually gone and read a sizeable portion of these I don't think you're in any position to claim that there is an "obviously decreased usefulness of patents in promoting actual innovation".

  • Verbose (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SpatchMonkey ( 300000 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @02:23PM (#3952658) Journal
    These patents are terribly long-winded and verbose.

    They said:
    • A method of placing a plurality of online newspaper advertisements according to claim 1 further comprising the step of associating at least one packet of information which is downloaded onto an online accessing device and which causes said online accessing device to send a signal to a website displaying a derivative advertisement link if that website is subsequently accessed by said online accessing device with said derivative advertisement link.
    They meant:
    • <IMG SRC="...">
    • The key phrase is "a derivative advertisement," which means that the original ad image is modified depending on the site and page on which it is displayed. It's a more complicated than an IMG tag.

  • Common Sense (Score:4, Funny)

    by medcalf ( 68293 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @02:29PM (#3952690) Homepage
    I would patent common sense in patent awards, and could claim no prior art with some validity, but I'm afraid that the licensing revenue would be pretty damned small.

  • The pinata approach (Score:3, Insightful)

    by shaldannon ( 752 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @02:31PM (#3952704) Homepage
    I've decided that the US patent office has decided to scrap its founding principles in favor of the pinata approach: The pinata breaks, the goodies fall, and the first person to claim the most goodies wins. Doesn't matter if someone else has similar goodes, or even if there was a fight over the goodies. The person with the goodies wins.

    Same thing with patents today. Doesn't matter if there's prior art or if you stole it from a competitor or if you acquired it after the fact. Patent it, then threaten everyone you know with a lawsuit for infringement.

    At least the government has legal restrictions on what it can/can't do...Modern corporations lack both legal and moral restraint. It doesn't help either that USPTO will give a patent for anything it doesn't understand.
    • >At least the government has legal restrictions on what it can/can't do.

      Not that legal restrictions have ever stopped the government from doing anything (read the 10th Ammendment lately?)
  • if you read the text of the patent: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r =1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ft00&s1=6401075&OS=6401075&R S=6401075

    There is actually some "unique" material in there. Their system claims that it can take an ad of any given format, reformat the ad, and then automatically redistribute(redisplay) the ad in whatever format the site requires. I am not too familiar with ad systems, but this seems unique to me. Sample usage: a politician scans a flyer (the limit of their technical knowlege) and then hands it off to this company, who then can on the fly reformat it and display it on a variety of publication's sites.

    Also remember, if someone else can replicate it "clean room" style, then the patent has no effect. IE, if you lock 10 guys in a room w/out ever having seen such a system and tell them to make one, they can use that and NOT be in violation of the patent. Patent law also protects everyone from patents that are "easily recreated by people skilled in the area." Hence, if any programmer or team of programmers can reproduce this system without having seen it, you cant patent it.
    -K
    • Patent law also protects everyone from patents that are "easily recreated by people skilled in the area."

      Then why can Amazon succeed in suing B&N over 1-click purchasing?

    • > "if you lock 10 guys in a room w/out ever having seen such a system and tell them to make one, they can use that and NOT be in violation of the patent"

      Do you have a law reference supporting this ?
      Because I really don't think that it's true. It would be very easy then to infrige on a patent, just by saying "Oh, I didn't know there were a patent about it." It would be especially easy in Europe, were only the patent application is online. You have to pay to get the granted text (which could be significantly different, due to the patent officier comments).

      > "Hence, if any programmer or team of programmers can reproduce this system without having seen it, you cant patent it."

      Again, do you have a law reference supporting this ? My understanding of the law what that if it was easy to reproduce without having seen it, then the patent office won't grant it. But here, the USPO has already granted it...

    • Okay, that "clean room" stuff is bullshit. You shouldn't really talk about stuff when you don't understand it.

      Having just said that, let me expound on a subject which I don't really know too well. The famous clean room example that everyone knows is Compaq's version of IBM's PC BIOS. That didn't have anything to do with patents. IBM didn't have a patent on BIOS's. Their implementation of their BIOS was a trade secret.

      A patent actually requires you to make public the way your invention works. For that, you get a monopoly on the product for 17 years. You don't get a monopoly on your invention until someone else comes up with it independently, you get it for 17 years.
    • Reformatting the ad may be novel; but, so what? As far as I can tell, the bit about reformatting is only mentioned in the description; not in any of the patent claims. And, while the description may have interesting ideas about potential applications of the patented invention, or, say, charming stories about flashes of insight, odes to the inventor's feline muse, and brief dissertations about the meaning of life, it has nothing to do with the scope of the patent. The patent covers only the invetions described in each claim. That is all.

      Note: I just skimmed a lot of the "further comprising [...]" claims, and I hope someone will be good enough to smack me upside the head in a reply if reformatting actually is in a dependent claim somewhere. Not that that matters to the scope of the patent -- since things covered by the dependent claims are a subset those covered by the core claims anyway.

      Now, the second part: You may have patents confused with copyright. Designing a substite system in a "clean room" style (e.g. ensuring that your design isn't a derivative work of whatever design it's substituting for) doesn't violate the original design's copyright. But, patents cover all devices that fit the claims, whether or not their designers knew about the patent and/or other devices under the patent.

      Although, if the patented invention could be recreated in a clean room setting fairly easily, you might have an argument that it is obvious given the state of the art, and thus unpatentable. I'm not sure what exactly you would need to demonstrate to show obviousness, though.
  • I have the patent for brachiating oxygen. Stop BREATHING now.
  • ok, if read this article and then look at the evolution of news on the internet, specifically BLOGS (http://blogger.com), you realize how BIG this actually is.

    news is evolving to a point where INDIVIDUAL people (like DRUDGE for example) are serving news from their own homes. now... when news sites want to subscribe to articles posted by a famous BLOG newswriter, what patent will hang over this??

    you guessed it.
  • IANAL, but doesn't this mean that they're the only ones who should legally be allowed to serve banner ads to multiple sites that can vaguely be classified as newspaper sites? This one included? Can we get a lawyer out there in the /. community to translate the patent into english?
  • Um... usually it's only one newspaper per network... right? The NY Times and the Washington Post don't exist on the same network.

    Dear lord, someone blow up the USPO before they do something intelligent.
    • The NY Times and the Washington Post don't exist on the same network.

      It's called the "internet". You may have heard of it...

    • You forget many newspapers are owned by huge conglomerates that own more than one paper.

      See for example, the pile of papers [gannett.com] owned by the same company that owns USA Today

    • The New York Times and Washington Post aren't necessarily on the same network, but as children of the same parent company, nytimes.com and boston.com (and other properties owned by the NYT corp) might be.
      • What if they are effectively partner sites under the same parent, but their systems don't interact in any way -- would that be a case of infringement?
      • What if they do share systems or have systems that communicate directoy, but they're the same company? Are they not allowed to do that?
      • What about a company that has multiple user facing URL namespaces (let's say "www.springfield-times.com" and "www.shelbyville-times.com") served from the same systems and maybe even the same servers, what then?
      • Then as another person noted you have companies like Gannet offering many sites for many newspapers using the same look & feel for all of them, and these might or might not be running from the same servers or sharing among the same network or networks. What about them?

      What is a "network" in this case anyway?

      If this patent holds, it could be a thorn in the site of a lot of web sites out there.

  • This should be fairly easy to beat as it was filed in 2000. The patent cab be found here -> http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='6401075'.WKU.&OS=PN/6401075&RS=P N/6401075 [uspto.gov]

    Rather funny wsn't AOL advertising on their networks back in 95? Wouldn't it be 'obvious to someone skilled in the art' to add adds to on line newspapers since they have adds on their paper print?

    I hope they do go after all these on line advertisers. Then we could get ride of al these stupid adds on line ;-).

    I think that doubleclick as well as many others were doing this long before this patent was filed, and IMHO it is very vague.

    "inputting configuration parameters" .. uh this is done so that you can set your banner size to 480x60 and the other sizes.. hmm what I wonder what the the IAB (http://www.iab.net/ [iab.net]) think of this.

  • Dear Global Network Incorporated. I have found an error in your recent press release about your newly awarded patent. The paragraph on the Patent Office's criteria should read like this:
    The U.S. Patent Office requires that an invention meet specific criteria before a patent can be granted including:
    1. the invention must be as old as dirt and in use everywhere;
    2. the invention is completely obvious at the time of invention to a person skilled in the art to which it pertains.
    3. anyone with at least the intelligence required to prepare and consume a bowl of cereal should be able to independently reproduce the invention;
    Thank you.
  • The way I read it, this is a patent for what Double-click has been doing for 4 years.
    • This will put ads on newspaper websites.
    • It will try to make placement relevant. For example, ads for financial services would be placed on web pages from a newspaper's website's financial section, or inforamtion about a company's San Francisco store would be included with the ad that goes with a page from the San Francisco Chronicle.
    • It would centralize billing arrangements, for example, you would pay Global Networks once for advertising instead of making deals with 50 seperate newspapers.
    • It would customize the size of ads to each newspaper website's adspace specifications.
    • It would track page views and click-throughs.
    So, already Double-click does the central billing and usage tracking. Almost all ad-serving websites use one of a couple standard sizes, making resizing unnecessary. The only thing useful about this patent that has not already been in widespread use for years is the targeted content based on the site or page. (Double-click's targeted ads are based on a web surfer's use patterns).

    The specificity of newspaper websites makes this patent pretty limited. I don't see them making a lot of money off of it unless the internet advertising market rebounds and the current ad model changes significantly. Still, eographically targeted ads are something that advertisers have wanted to be able to do for a while. The nature of the internet makes it difficult. It's hard to tell where a paticular person lives. Using geographically centered sites like newspapers might be a good model for pulling off this trick.

    I wonder if this is not a way for Global Networks to bump their stock price, by advertising the fact that they have patent portfolio.
    • "Double-click's targeted ads are based on a web surfer's use patterns"

      Not so fast! When doubleclick introduced their opt-out cookie (I forget how long ago that was), I used it for a while before I blocked their ads. The ads I received during that period were obviously themed according to the site/page content. Page content based ad targetting is old.
  • A dutch judge has just ruled that online job offer companies may rip job ads from newspapers and place them online (http://www.rechtspraak.nl/uitspraak/frameset.asp? ui_id=36590 , sorry, it's in dutch). Any patent on this will surely be regarded as (excusez le mot) bull. Job ads can be considered public announcements, and definately not patentable. In a way a newspaper placing job ads already has an automated way of doing this.

    Now I just have to make a .nl based site that puts .us job ads online, and their patent is worthless.
  • Remember this? A lot of people still do it. If I "advertise" my website using a banner exchange, it will get displayed over several other websites, some of them might contain news. The more I display other people's banners, the more my own are displayed. If I provide an alt tag, I essentially changed my ad.

    Seems like it infringes a lot of points of this patent.
  • Heck with newspaper ads!

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    and billions more! Why pay for sissy patent attorneys when you can get our service for the mere cost of 10% of all royalties collected?! It's a steal and quite a deal!

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  • When the ITO patents idiocy, only idiots will work for the ITO. Oh, wait . . .

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