SBC Patents Links, Dynamic Pages 452
Oculus Habent writes "Robert Cringley has an article on a patent that SBC aquired. Patented in 1996 is the concept of linking to dynamic content with a static element of a page. First approaching museumtour.com, a small site, and asking them to obtain a revenue-based license, SBC appears to be trying to set precedent. He goes on to note that SBC is not a villian for doing this - it is after all a valid patent, and that what is needed now is prior art."
Ridiculous (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Ridiculous (Score:4, Funny)
*rushes off to patent the concept of links to other pages on either the right or left side of a page*
Re:Ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
No less ridiculous... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ridiculous (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Ridiculous (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Ridiculous (Score:4, Funny)
Prior use (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Prior use (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Prior use (Score:3, Informative)
Tim's original idea for a 'home page' was more like a bookmarks file, a page of links to stuff that the user found useful. The idea was that people could share them as a way to share access to content - this was a pre-Google, pre-Yahoo world.
Over time the links started to dwindle and the biography got larger so now we have these home pages where the assumption is that people are actually interested in you and your collection of pictures of 17th century windmills.
When was the patent issued? (Score:5, Interesting)
Like the infamous one click shopping of Amazon, the reason they could enforce it was they applied for the patent before everyone started doing it. If the application date is before the prior art, the art isn't prior.
I don't know the particulars, but keep that in mind when searching for prior art. And did they purchase the patent from someone else?
Re:When was the patent issued? (Score:5, Informative)
From the article:
This column is about U.S. patent 5,933,841, which was granted to the old Ameritech phone company in 1999, and is now owned by Ameritech's acquirer,SBC Communications...patent exists and was applied for on May 17, 1996.
Prior Art: Apple's Hypercard (Score:3, Informative)
What we really need now (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What we really need now (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What we really need now (Score:4, Insightful)
Quietly sitting on stupid patents until everyone is in violation sucks, but isn't exactly a precise description of the problem with patent law. Until we have one, you should be more interested in what's wrong than how to implement patent reform.
Re:What we really need now (Score:5, Interesting)
Alright, here goes.
1. Hire patent investigators who are qualified to appraise the value of patents. The original patent clerks were supposed to be "skilled in their profession." Require a Master's Degree in the field they work (ECE, CS, etc) or equivalent experience. Pay patent clerks enough that people with Master's Degrees will apply. Make it so that patent clerks have no incentive to actually grant a patent. The default case should be "think about it more" and after that "deny until it's further clarified."
2. If you file a patent and while it's under investigation (as this takes a while), you discover other people using technology which might infringe, you should be required to send them notification formally stating what you feel might infringe on your IP, and exactly what remedies you desire should your patent be granted.
3. Patents should work like Trademarks: if they are unenforced, they lose their enforcability. You should be required to file for redress IMMEDIATELY upon hearing that somebody uses technology which may violate your IP. No submarining patents. No going after 100 small fish instead of actually filing a lawsuit against IBM or somebody who might have the power to take you out. You want your IP, you must defend it vigilently.
4. Patent terms for technical innovations last 20 years. In today's fast-changing society, this is far too long. Software patents should last no more than 4 years, hardware for no more than 10. A 20-year patent on the WWW filed in 1990 would set it back until 2010 for public use!
5. Patenting business practices is just fucking stupid. Disallow this.
Re:What we really need now (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What we really need now (Score:4, Informative)
The other day on NPR they had a story about immigrant businesses in California being extorted by "consumer rights" groups citing "health violations". The threat was that if they didn't pay $1000 they would be taken to court over these "health violations". These legal threats would be mailed out en masse to 200-300 businesses. Being small businesses they could not afford the thousands of dollars it would take to defend such threats so the obvious choice is to give in. $1000 x 300 = $300,000 for little more than sending out a letter.
SBC's move is the same. They put the hook out in the water and see if they get a bite and if they do the letters start going out in bulk. Think about how many small businesses on the web us SBC's supposed IP? The main difference between this situation and the one in CA is that SBC is a large established company with a stable of lawyers. In CA the extortionists are unheard of consumer rights groups with no addresses and maybe one or two lawyers. The CA groups have found a lucrative enterprise - how much more so lucrative will it be for SBC?
Re:What we really need now (Score:5, Informative)
However, looking at the letter sent to museumtour [museumtour.com], it looks like they patented frames in which one frame has navigational information. So no one had frames before 1996?
Re:What we really need now (Score:5, Insightful)
Like other commentors said - part of the patent reform would be getting the patent officers to do a proper job. Too much is getting past them and they are leaving it to an already overflowing court system. This leaves big businesses more room to extort via threat of lawsuit. There should also be a mechanism put in place for the public as a whole to submit prior art findings and help facilitate the patent offices job. People are more than willing lately to put a little effort in to get things done right. The patent office is a government facility after all why shouldn't the people be involved in how it oporates?
Re:What we really need now (Score:3)
IMHO that's the last thing we need. What we really need is to get rid of the whole nonsense of software patents.
Re:What we really need now (Score:3, Interesting)
If we look at HTML the FRAMESET/FRAME construct has become part of the HTML 4.0 [w3.org] specification in 1998. Officially both HTML 2.0 [w3.org] ('95) and HTML 3.2 [w3.org] ('97) did not support frames. I think however this has been done because both IE and Netscape did support frames for a while at that time.
It's obvious that similar concepts and implementations of what they patented have been done before [tvhistory.tv]...
Re:What we really need now (Score:5, Informative)
Having formerly been a undercapitalized ISP back then (1993-1996), I remember several customer projects that had links to dynamic content, including:
Omaha Steaks [omahasteaks.com], who was an early merchandiser on the net
and
the Applied Information Management Institute [omaha.org], who had written their own code to front-end an Oracle database complete with company and job listing information. (I remember the Sparc servers rather well sitting in the equipment room and listening to their IT people talk about how the code and project worked). Click on CareerLink button and it would take you to a page of career areas, and click on the career area and it'd pull up dynamic pages of content all driven by the back-end database.
This was all pre-May 1996, since my involvement with the company began winding down over summer 1996.
*scoove*
What we really need now.... (Score:3, Insightful)
There should be some way to make the corporate patent pool a negative asset. Pity you can't just browse through all the patents a company owns and file preemptive lawsuits against them requesting that the court bar them from ever attempting to enforce their frivolous patents. Or file restraint of trade suits against the patent office itself. Bleh.
Re:What we really need now (Score:3, Insightful)
So, what's the point of doing anything at all? Some business-suited ass-sniffing dick-smoker probably has a patent on it, regardless of what you're trying to do. And, if you have any success at all, they'll come for you with their claws sharpened because they're too stupid to actually DO anything themselves. Worst of all, the rat-bastards have bought up a bunch of polititians, so you can bet they're going to try to make all patents eternal (i.e. terms of greater than 50 years), which means forget about ever inventing anything. Voila! America is no longer an innovative or interesting country, and we have to buy everything interesting from overseas. I'M PRETTY SURE THE FOUNDING FATHERS DIDN'T SEE THIS ONE COMING.
Patent reform can be handled very simply: go back to only allowing patents for physical processes, and require a working prototype for each patent application.
'Course, I'm not bitter or anything...
SBC Patent (Score:2, Insightful)
Is this a FP? My first.
What the fuck (Score:4, Funny)
Nope. (Score:5, Insightful)
> He goes on to note that SBC is not a villian for doing this - it is after all a valid patent, and that what is needed now is prior art.
No, what's needed now is IP law that promotes innovation rather than blood-sucking.
Software Patents = Invalid. Period. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Software Patents = Invalid. Period. (Score:3, Interesting)
Argued October 14, 1980.
Decided March 3, 1981.
Judges and who nominated them.
For
Renquist -- Nixon
Burger -- Nixon
White -- Kennedy
Stewart -- Eisenhower
Powell -- Nixon
Against
Stevens -- Ford
Blackmun -- Nixon
Marshall -- Johnson
Brennen -- Eisenhower
Nice jab at the Reagan administration, but wrong as alway lib. He was in office a whole 2 months when the opinion was given. Why didn't that lib White dissent? Why didn't all the repulican nominated justices agree? This is hardly political.
Re:Nope. (Score:5, Insightful)
I also beg to differ with this sentiment. Even if I accepted the suggestion that the mere fact that something is legal makes it okay to do, the tell-tale here is their decision to go after some little nobody to establish precedent. Hey, the economy is tough, let's find someone least able to defend themselves and try to squeeze some value out of our bogus intellectual property. "Blood-sucking" is not too strong of a term, though it may be an insult to ticks and vampire bats to put them in the same class as these parasitic scum.
Ok, time to start writing somebody (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Gee (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, here [museumtour.com] is the letter itself and here [museumtour.com] is the obscene pricing scale for using navigation bars. I'm having a hard time thinking of a site that DOESN'T use a unified navigation interface...
That's a good point, and also possibly a defense?? (Score:3, Interesting)
So if there are thousands of different people on the internet who came up with the same invention, would that not make the patent invalid as it would be a natural conclusion of any competent person?
Conversely, if they argue that it's a device produced by only a small number of entities, but USED by many, wouldn't the sites not be liable since they are only comsumers? It would be like Company X suing *ME* because I bought a product from Company Y that's infringing on X's patent.
IANAL, of course.
I win (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I win (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft beat you to it.
Beat this!!! I am the winner!! (Score:2)
Now I will never go out of business!!!! I can sue anyone that makes anything (or that tries to patent anything because they are using my patent to patent their item or idea
Re:Beat this!!! I am the winner!! (Score:4, Funny)
Pissing contest over? :-)
Re:I win (Score:2)
Phoey, just you wait until my patent on the electron is no longer just "pending"...
Prior ARt!! (Score:5, Informative)
Bluestone formely owned by HP coded a vendor website for NSA 1995 that used the same linking mechanisms!!
PHP (Score:5, Interesting)
Conceived in 1994, first public version in 1995.
This is assinine (Score:5, Insightful)
that way you don't need to specify "buttons" of "frames".
I think that web pages should be treated as just a novel way to replace a library, and tell these wanna be patent millionaires to take a hike to the nearest cliff.
Information is information - doesn't matter if it's in a book, newspaper, or a bunch of pixles on a screen.
Prior art (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Prior art (Score:3, Insightful)
That would have been 1983?
2 patents... (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft ? (Score:2, Interesting)
DataBinding anyone ? afaik worked on ie3+ (1995) i believe, linked static content on the page with dynamic server data, enabling updates to be performed in realtime without refreshing the interface
Been There Done That (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Been There Done That (Score:5, Insightful)
Wired had an article [wired.com] last year about British Telephone's lawsuit against Prodigy for violating their patent on hyperlinks. So who really owns this patent?
No, they tried to patent the very concept of hyperlinking (they failed). This patent is an attempt to patent a particular kind of link. So the prior art needed is more specific. Others on the page seem to have some good examples, but a reference, for example, to "Hypercard" is not enough until you discuss the specific elements of the prior that match up to the earlier patent.
SBC learned its lessons well (Score:3, Interesting)
They learned to file suits on stuff where there most likely is prior art.
The first articles I saw claimed it was frames they'd patented. Netscape 2 had frame support in '95.
They learned to file the first suit against someone without deep pockets
BT filed suit against Prodigy. Prodigy was owned by SBC, who probably had deeper pockets than BT. SBC is filing against Museumtour. Who ever heard of them before this suit?
Why limit prior art to web sites? (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing I don't understand about this (probably because IANAPL) is why the prior art search has to be limited to web applications. It seems as though the patent covers a pretty common user interface element. And slapping words like "over a computer network" on the end shouldn't be enough to differentiate (though, didn't some company get a patent for dutch auctions on the web?).
So what I'm saying is, isn't something like the "bold" button in Microsoft Word prior art for this. Or, if we want to get more related, can't we look for prior art in the CD-ROM applications that were common in the early nineties? They had user interfaces very similar to web sites.
Re:Why limit prior art to web sites? (Score:5, Interesting)
X has been around since the late 70s (IIRC!) so it shouldn't be too hard to stuffle this case of patent madness...
-Mark
Patent titles: "Structure Document Browser" (Score:5, Insightful)
However, claim 13 of '574 starts with "a browser for navigating a document". A website is not a browser. It is a document. In fact, the title of both patent '841 and patent '574 is "structure document browser", not "structured document" or "structured document browsing".
Acrobat Reader's outline view (where it continues to be displayed on the side) to be might infringe. Powerpoint might infringe (browsing the presentation with a list of the slides on the side). Web browsers might infringe because it will render documents with this functionality. However, I do not see how one can objectively construe a website (a set of (possibly dynamic) text files with loose definitions of layout and navigation) to be a "browser", unles the website navigation is writtin in Java (thereby perhaps making it a "browser").
Contact Info (Score:5, Informative)
Harlie D. Frost
President
SBC Intellectual Property
6500 River Place Boulevard
Building III, 1st Floor
Austin, TX 78730
(512) 231-7000
Time's up (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Time's up (Score:5, Informative)
They're not villians... (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea that this is corporate greed rights all wrongs is really getting old. The catch all justification of our times. Where is this going to end?
Re:They're not villians... (Score:3, Informative)
He's just speaking softly and asking everyone out there to find the big sticks necessary to beat this patent down.
Re:They're not villians... (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably when publically traded companies aren't at risk of being sued by shareholders who want a return on their investment. It's a little hard to justify ignoring a potential money making asset when you can be slapped with a lawsuit for doing so.
Prior art? (Score:3, Insightful)
If that can't be found in "normal" web, probably some results can be found in google groups.
Villianous? (Score:5, Funny)
Nevertheless, when the dog starts humping people's legs, we cut his balls off. SBC will need similar treatment to stop their anti-social behaviour.
Gopher / xman are earlier works (Score:5, Interesting)
Links to dynamicly changing pages. So it existed before the web.
I am also pretty sure that I made an assignment with hyperlinks around 1988 at university. Think it was a help system.
manx / xman is actually prior work. Represents a list of links in one windows, and when you press it, it will compile the corresponding man page and display it in the same or another frame.
This is way older than 1988.
Deja Vu, all over again (Score:3, Funny)
How on earth do they propose to collect on this? Shut down millions and millions of web sites? I'm getting this imagine of a corporate exec or lawyer rampaging around his office "You wanna mess with me?! I can shut down the INTERNET! Bwahahahahah!!"
Is this the latest in dodgy business models after the dot com crash - profit margin by lawyer?
Not A Villian? (Score:5, Insightful)
It was also legal to dupe elderly people out of their savings every year with fake sweepstakes prizes, but it was never ethical to do so.
Patent Pages (Score:3, Insightful)
- http://www.litmanlaw.com/info/ip.htm
gives the outline for what a patent can include, as follows: new or improved machine, article of manufacture, chemical composition, process, computer software or business method, or even an e-commerce business model or enabling technology for the Internet. Where does this fall? It's design, which isn't in a strict sense any of the above.What is wrong with people? (Score:3, Insightful)
Prior art here is very easy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Both Yahoo! [yahoo.com] and Amazon [amazon.com] (at the very least) were doing this in 1995, well before May 1996. Proving prior art on this patent is trivial.
Trust me on this one: (Score:3, Insightful)
http://sbc.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com]
GORP? (Score:3, Informative)
Anyway, Great Outdoor Recreation Pages [gorp.com] is a fairly old site, and while wayback only goes back to November 1996 [archive.org], I think it may be older.
I like the way that everything is phrased... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is obvious. You knock over a small site to set a precedent, and then you go after someone with some real money. Build up your cash to knock over some real players out there.
This is its best moment in the article:
To its credit, SBC Intellectual Property was very polite in its approach to Museumtour, pointing out the existence of the patent, citing specifically how it believed Museumtour is in violation and offering to sell the company a license based on some percentage of gross sales.
I specifically love how they say they initially came in and asked nicely for a gross percentage of sales... it reminds me how the mafia is so polite, explaining how that you could avoid an "financial incident" by "licensing out protection" from said "financial incident" say, from, somebody you just met. Capiche?
If they really want to do this right, they need a fat man in a fedora and wingtips saying this to them in a raspy voice:
"Ya know, not saying that it is going to happen, but if it did happen it might cause you to lose some money there, pal. You better just license with us on your gross earnings, cuz, well, you never know. We live in strange times."
Yes, the article is right. They are very polite.
Until they attack you.
In other news... (Score:3, Funny)
In what CEO Bill Gates called "an unfortunate but necessary step to protect our intellectual property from theft and exploitation by competitors," the Microsoft Corporation patented the numbers one and zero Monday.
The Reg has a prior art reference, sort of (Score:5, Informative)
As I read what SBC has in one of the patents, they claim the use of frame tags to make a static menubar frame that controls a dynamic target frame is covered...
Funny thing is, the frame and frameset tags were sort of designed for that...
I would liken this to patenting the notion of paragraphs when typewriters came out with carriage return keys.
bbs? (Score:3, Interesting)
It can be stopped... (Score:3, Insightful)
The actual fees (starting at $570 annually for a company with a revenue of $100,000) aren't really all that large, though. My website [banarnar.com] would probably only have to pay $14 a year! But I do understand how this whole patent nonsense is spiraling out of control.
We can either work hard to prove prior art, or we can work hard to get the IP system restructured. Or we can just shell out the money and be done with it...
That does it. (Score:5, Funny)
Prior art (Score:5, Interesting)
SBC *is* the villan (Score:3, Insightful)
But SBC is the villan. Who cares if they have a patent or not?!
If the some Nazi benefitted off from the murder of a few million Jews -- can he be faulted? After all, that Nazi had the law on his side! (/. tip: Always bring up Nazis to prove your point -- it works wonders.)
Morality is based on the Golden Rule. SBC's actions fail this. They used an overworked, clueless patent office to get a patent on a common, obvious process. And now they're attempting to profit from it by picking on a little guy. They not be villans under the laws of capitalism, but that doesn't mean they're not villans.
Suspicious Timing.... (Score:5, Informative)
Prior art? I find it awefully strange that Navigator 2.0 was released in the fall of 1995, introducing frames to the HTML worl, and months later some corporation is trying to patent one of the primary purposes of this innovation. From the Netscape website:
If you read the legal letter they sent, it seems this is precisely what they think they're patent covers. I'm beginning to get to the point where I think we need to enact criminal penalties for this type of obvious scum-mongering.
Proving frames (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the best comment I've seen so far, but it doesn't really prove prior art. The page you refer to [netscape.com] is dated 1999. As with many innovations, the presence of an enabling mechanism does not necessarily indicate prior art.
Can you prove that frames were intended for use as contemplated by the patent, i.e. a consistent user interface across a document or site? Not from that article. Remember too that not only frames are at issue here -- a navigation bar using tables or divisions would appear to be covered by the patent as well.
While it is blatently obvious with hindsight that frames can be used in this manner, some Googling around will show that a huge amount of web design material at the time references a document called "Ameritech Web Page User Interface Standards and Design Guidelines" by Detweiler, M.C. and Omanson, R.C. (1996), on the matter of creating a consistent user interface by using frames. If that doesn't ring a bell, Ameritech was the original holder of the patent, and recently acquired by SBC.
Reading the patent provides some more insight too: they contemplate a document with embedded codes indicating document sections, that conforms to a predefined structure. Read this way, the patent does not partain to HMTL frames, because HTML is a hypertext linked collection of documents, not a single document. A navbar or frame moving the view to named references within a single document, however, would clearly violate the patent.
So is the patent valid? Well, that involves proving prior art; not just that frames existed, but that they were used for the purpose of navigation, both in a single document and between documents. Any evidence of tables to do the same thing would also be useful. Also crutial is having an incontestible source -- printed information is best, a reputable online news source or journal is the next best thing.
w3.org records Edelstein's Sep 1995 proposal to include frames in the HTML specification [w3.org], but the example page he sites is no longer available.
The Netscape Navigator 2.0 announcement [netscape.com] contains "Frames, a new page presentation capability that enables the display of multiple, independently scrollable panels on a single screen, each with its own distinct Internet address. They also enable a region of the screen to be frozen in place as the user scrolls through information on a page". Tantalising, but it doesn't mention using the frozen region for navigation.
Most promising are the Mozilla 2.0 release notes [netscape.com]. Two of the example links are broken, while third doesn't work in my browser, although the pages appear to be there. It clearly demonstrates the use of a navigation frame to select different pages in a site, and view them in a "dynamic" frame. That said, the navigation frame itself is not entirely static (it scrolls, but does not change), and there is no navigation inside a single document from the frame.
There is a lot of effort required to find proper evidence of prior art that will hold up in court. The Wayback Machine [archive.org] would provide great evidence, if only we can find it.
Whos next??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Our only hope is that the big dogs back the little guy.
Links to the actual patents (Score:5, Informative)
The letter to museumstore [museumtour.com] specifically lists claim 13 of the later patent. Here is claim 13:
13. A browser for navigating a document comprising a plurality of sections, the browser comprising:
a display window displaying a document; and
a user interface comprising a plurality of selectors automatically configured to correspond to a respective plurality of sections of the document regardless of what section of the document is being displayed in the display window;
wherein the plurality of selectors are not part of the document displayed in the display window of the browser and continue to be displayed after one of the plurality of selectors is selected.
The thing is, the claim covers a browser. Museumstore doesn't make a browser. IE, Netscape, Mozilla, etc. are browsers. I'd have to look more closely at the patent to see what they mean by "browser."
How to read a claim, was:Links to the actual pat. (Score:5, Informative)
You have to break up the claim into single features. In this claim, features are:
1. a browser for navigating a document
1.1. comprising a plurality of sections
2. The browser comprising
2.1. a display window
And so on. To infringe this claim, your "device" has to have ALL the features, if it lacks a single feature, it is no infringing the patent.
On the other hand, something that is "prior art" needs to have all this features, too. The only exemption from this: If the additional feature is "obvious", whatever this means.
The US Patent Office website violate this patent.. (Score:5, Funny)
This Sept 95 software is prior art (Score:5, Informative)
Although the primary way this functionality is implemented today is through frames, the SBC application appears to pre-date frames appearing in Navigator. Remember, they had up to 1 year from the time of their work in order to apply for the patent in the first place. This pre-frames software [webhistory.org], released in September of 1995 but well known far before that, shows all of the features claimed in the SBC patent, through use of LINK and GROUP tags. This should be all that's needed to invalidate the SBC patent, which was applied for in May of 1996.
No Villains? What? (Score:5, Funny)
What? Not hard to blame them for patenting some twiddling thing and then charging other people for those people's creations? They're fucking assholes. What's sad and absurd is that it never occurs to anyone just how sleazy, reprehensible and disgusting practices like this are.
We don't need prior art. We need firebombs.
Prior Art (Score:4, Interesting)
OK, it is not related to a web page but this kind of ergonomy was already in either Atari/TOS and Apple MacOS...
(if the page is seen as the screen and the omnipresent-though-changing elements are seen as the menu bar)
I guess there is some sort of plagia, here.
Prior Art needs to predate May 1995 not 1996 (Score:5, Interesting)
If the only prior art that can be found is from early '96, we will have to relocate all our websites to Europe, which will really show how US IP laws protect American business
No villains, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that they're bad guys. They're just prosecuting a questionable patent claim against tiny players. I'm still reading the claim, but my first reaction -- and please remember that IANAPL (thank God) -- is that the patent applies to SGML or structured language browsers that have buttons mapped to specific parts of structured documents. In the claim summary:
(Emphasis added)So, it seems that webpages, which are themselves documents that contain "links [that] may take the user to other documents or to locations within the same document," seem to be specifically disclaimed by the patent authors.
Furthermore, from a functional perspective, the purpose of the invention is to allow people to "browse[e] documents according to their structure instead of their contents," whereas a frameset navigation layout either uses links to documents or anchor tags within documents.
This seems to be a case where the problem addressed by the patent solved itself, and now the patent owners want to squeeze money from a better, but irrelevant, mousetrap (to hack a metaphor to death). Perhaps one of the lurking patent lawyers would care to discuss this further?
This is sad... (Score:3, Insightful)
1) If you do not enforce a patent against a certain infringement within two years, you lose the right to enforce it. If you don't LEARN about it until that point, well, tough.
2) Current User-Interface patents and similar software patents are released into the public domain two years after application, and new ones will be denied patent protection. Between junk like Amazon's 1-Click and this mess, we need to stop this type of patent.
3) In liu of this, a new type of UI/Software algorithm protection needs to be established with reasonably high entry guidelines - industry/community review, intense prior art search, reasonable announcement, significant achievement, etc. These would not have a preset term - this would be decided on with the application, with NO recommendation by the person applying. This would prevent 'hyperlink' patents but would secure important developments, like the predictive text input system on slashdot a month or two ago and other INNOVATIONS.
It's nice to call for patent reform, but you need to say what you want. The numbers and specifics are arbitrary, but you get the idea.
Tell your congresscritter that you want patent reform and then they'll probably *lengthen* the terms.
Prior Art (Score:4, Interesting)
Sun??
AOL??
Anyhow, couple those with Apple's HyperCard patents and there's PLENTY of prior art out there. Maybe, just maybe, if we could get Sun & AOL fighting with SBC over who owns what, the sharks might eat each OTHER instead of the small fry.
How else could it be done? (Score:5, Insightful)
HOW ELSE COULD IT BE DONE?!?
What other way could you link to dynamic content? You could use a "dynamic link", but if it was a dynamically generated link then it would itself qualify as dynamic content! So how did you link to that? Must've been (eventually) from a static link, whether on a page or in your browser preferences.
All dynamic content is traceable to some static link. It's not a new idea, it's a necessary condition!
This is not a "valid patent". Every dynamic page which existed prior to this patent was prior art.
I Got Your (1994) Prior Art...Right Here (Score:4, Informative)
Prior art? No problem. (Score:3, Informative)
I thought it was pretty cool, too. We used 3D buttons to look like a car stereo, with a green LED-style readout at the top telling you which section you were in. Anyone remember this one?
(No, it doesn't show up in the Wayback Machine, which only goes to 1996 anyway)
Prior art - 3270 terminals? (Score:3, Interesting)
Bull. (Score:3, Interesting)
OIC. So if something is "legal" then you're not a villain for doing it. So like if it's legal to shove Jews into gas chambers then it's ok to do it and if somebody hauls you in for a trial years later, you can just bleat out. "But I was just doing my job..." and that makes everything ok. Bullshit.
BTW, if you're wondering...I use this example for all cases when people justify their actions by saying "well it's leeeegaaallll so it's ok", not just for patents.
TONS OF PRIOR ART (Score:3, Insightful)
AOL was doing this shit back in the 1980's FOR GOD'S SAKE! Everything they had was dynamic content accessed via static buttons, including documents.
How about every single HyperCard stack ever made? A stack is a document. Did these idiots ever try clicking on any of the buttons in a stack?
FROM WHERE THE FUCK DO WE GET THESE GODDAMNED RETARDS?!?!?
Does the patent cover the content? (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually not a bad idea (Score:3, Funny)
Re:f*** SBC Ameritech (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a federal law prohibiting telephone solicitors from calling cellular phones to sell products or services. Check out US Code, Title 47, Chapter 5, Section 227(b)(1):
Also note paragraph 3:
Looks like SBC Ameritech owes you at least $500...of course it'd probably cost you $10,000 in attorney fees before you saw a dime (unless you feel like buying a few reams of legal-size paper for the paperwork you'll need to file with your oh-so-friendly local civil servant), not to mention the lost wages from having to take days off from work to show up in court, etc. etc.