Yahoo Patents Dynamic Page Generator 282
Here is the abstract of their patent: United States Patent 5,983,227 (Nov. 9, 1999)
Dynamic page generator
Abstract
A custom page server is provided with user preferences organized into templates stored in compact data structures and the live data used to fill the templates stored local to the page server which is handing user requests for custom pages. One process is executed on the page server for every request. The process is provided a user template for the user making the request, where the user template is either generated from user preferences or retrieved from a cache of recently used user templates. Each user process is provided access to a large region of shared memory which contains all of the live data needed to fill any user template. Typically, the pages served are news pages, giving the user a custom selection of stock quotes, news headlines, sports scores, weather, and the like. With the live data stored in a local, shared memory, any custom page can be built within the page server, eliminating the need to make requests from other servers for portions of the live data. While the shared memory might include RAM (random access memory) and disk storage, in many computer systems, it is faster to store all the live data in RAM.
Re:Even better.... (Score:1)
Re:Standard module (Score:1)
--"oh dear" said god, "i hadn't thought of that" and vanished in a puff of logic--
Re:new /. topic (Score:1)
Even worse... (Score:1)
It looks like the usual scam - there's enough prior art to sink this if it was ever fought but they're hoping people will find it cheaper to pay the $80,000 protection money they're asking than the legal fees to fight it. The letter their lawyers sent listed several large companies that are being sued and asserted that many other companies have already paid for licenses.
I think the whole industry is starting to be challenged by those lusers. Outside of suing the US Patent Office for negligence, I think we need something like John Walker's PATO [fourmilab.com], where software companies could pool their resources to defend against these leeches.
Re:Long way to go in IP (Score:1)
but I am getting some good answers (like Ed Aus')
to my questions. Just how the hell[1] do you
patent a gene? I've got about a bunch(tm) in my
body. Am I infringing on someone's patent?
It seems to me that the human genome project
id discovering what we're all made of. I cannot
see how this is patentable. We've been around
for a few hundred thousand years. Is this not
prior art? If any one has any links to how
this is being justified I'd love to see them.
[1] pardon my french
My Patent (Score:1)
Any method, process, set of instructions which produces directy or indirectly results in any new or original patents.
This way I can claim royalties on every patent out there.
(Please Moderate me as "lame".)
Re:Uh. Definitely prior art. (Score:1)
True. I believe Volkswagen (I know someone did this, may not have been VW) patented the seat belt, but let everyone else use it free of charge. If this the the route Yahoo wants to take with this patent, then by all means let them, and hail them as the protectors of this technology.
They'd have to be really stupid to try and patent something like this with the intention of mass lawsuits, IMHO... but who said big businesses were intelligent?
Some of us wrote/compiled an essay on the subject (Score:2)
revolution (Score:1)
Yes, I realize that this idea needs work because it is not 'realistic'. Is there a way to make this suggestion realistic?
I say: demonstrate it ! (Score:1)
the patent request should be *invalidated* if someone else can prove (documenting the matter)that the process isn't a real innovation, having discovered/experimented/used it *before*.
Isn't it a moral issue?
Think about Marconi VS Bell.
Think about Micro$oft too, the "freedom to innovate"
* You could be the next one! *
Encheferizer to the rescue! (Score:1)
Use the Encheferizer [scran.ac.uk] to get a totally unique, non-obvious solution to your problem! Look how it saved my latest web application:
LinkResult More Coupons...Clear patent violation Mure-a CuoopunsBork! Bork! Bork!Looking good for my *own* patent
different from high performance databases - how? (Score:2)
Encheferizer to the rescue! (Score:1)
Use the Encheferizer [scran.ac.uk] to get a totally unique, non-obvious solution to your problem! Look how it saved my latest web application:
Link:More Coupons
Result: A Clear patent violation
Link:Mure-a Cuoopuns ...
Bork! Bork! Bork!
Result: A wholly unique, non-obvious application of technology! Looking good for my *own* patent
Check out what barrapunto uses (Score:1)
-----------
Who's organizing our side? (Score:2)
When I hear about some new attempt to force the church into the state, or to decrease protections against arbitrary search and seizure, I know the ACLU (of which I am a card-carrying member) will coordinate efforts against it.
There is widespread agreement that software patents are evil. But who's binding and guiding the outrage? The only name that keeps coming up is the LPF, but there doesn't seem to be much more there than a name - I can't even join or send money through their web site (http://lpf.ai.mit.edu [mit.edu]).
Don't look at me - I'll give money, and write letters, but my organizing and people skills are zero. Maybe that's the problem, the old canard about how organizing geeks is like herding cats.
slashdot congressmen, any lawyers here? (Score:1)
-----
Re:new /. topic (Score:1)
Speculation: (Score:2)
Seems to be reinvention of report generation (Score:1)
being updated constantly as checks clear, ATMs
are used to withdraw cash, etc. The account
display can have additional fields or pages that
appear depending on which services that customer
has (checking, savings, loans, etc.).
I don't see what is new and un-obvious about the
Yahoo patent.
League for Programming Freedom (Score:1)
Link? (Score:1)
Re:YAUSPORAS... (Score:1)
Speak to the source of the patent problem (Score:3)
-Dom
Uh. Definitely prior art. (Score:2)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Ye Gods, they ARE going to go all the way! (Score:1)
I guess Linda isn't considered prior art...? (Score:1)
I vote for slashdot.org oversite on all software patents!
:-)
Getting a patent vs. using it as a club (Score:1)
What we need to watch is whether the companies who are granted these insane patents attempt to use them as clubs against other companies, or whether they're only getting them to avoid being sued themselves. I worked at a company that held at least one fairly silly patent that could have been used against several other companies, but never was. We had it just for our own protection, and I can tell you I would have quit at the first hint of our company actually suing someone over it. But it never came up, except jokingly.
So don't get mad at Yahoo for patenting this, only get mad if they try to use it as a weapon.
That's it! Time to write our senators... (Score:1)
Who's with me?
Re:Some of us wrote/compiled an essay on the subje (Score:1)
It may be that the ideal approach to the problem is to flood the Patent Office with prior art of every conceivable sort, in a form they can quickly and easily use to test patent applications.
A possible better idea, inspired by the above, is to simply flood the Patent Office. It's relatively cheap to get a patent through the patent office if you don't care about its validity or usefulness, so it would probably be practical for the programming community to churn out a few hundred thousand junk patents per month.
Would that be enough to clog up the process ? Would it bring the patent office to their senses ?
'more' patent (Score:1)
to use fvwm-style or Xfree86-style virtual window management, but with visible bars to indicate the function.
A definite improvement over the fvwm and X feature as far as I'm concerned.
Re:Link? (Score:2)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
'broad' software patent? (Score:1)
Yahoos other Patent case (Score:1)
The other patent (one electronic shopping cart instead of lots as I understand) looks almost as bad. Maybe Yahoo are planning to use their new patent as part of their defense (anything can be patented, so patents are meaningless)
First post!!! (Score:1)
Patents like this make you wonder about
our country. Even if the patent office is
using fresh-outs stuff like this should
never squeek by. Any one with a little
smarts in the patent field have any info
on prior use?
Speaking of the McDonnell Patent... (Score:1)
Activism (Score:1)
Somewhere at a bottom of a thread someone mentioned a class-action suit against the patent office. Is there any reason why this isn't possible? Perhaps we can use the lawyer pig-dogs against themselves in order to stop this stupidity.
The fact remains that software patents are all based on a shaky legal interpretation of a late seventies patent that was a hardware/software solution. The fact also remains that the US is one of the few countries that allow software patents (I think it is only US and Japan). The final fact is that software patents are significantly delaying innovation (look into the whole RSA issue and then think of the state of "secure ecommerce").
Someone really needs to find a good, greedy lawyer and wake up the patent office to stop this madness. Alternately maybe someone can file class action suits against Yahoo et al for even daring to file the patents.
Re:Patents don't mean much. (Score:1)
--Corey
Re: Fix for s/w patents (Score:1)
Of course, patents made much more sense even 10 years ago when product development time was measured in years, not months or weeks. Rather than protecting what a company might have put it's entire existance into for five to eight years of development time, with similiar development cycles for competitors, it made some sense to protect physical inventions.
Now, with product to market leadtimes measured sometimes in hours or days, software patents, particulary those dealing with the net, don't so much protect the ideas as provide a fallback blunt instrument to bludgeon a competitor with.
Given that patents take months to review and be awarded, by the time the patent is awarded, the time frame the patent applies to has passed. A year is effectively worthless, even in Internet time, since beaurocracy doesn't even seemt to work in "real-time."
Finally, could anyone point out where on Yahoo's site they said "Patent Pending" to serve some sort of notice to the community?
We need to get in touch with our Congressmen (Score:2)
Don't send email -- Congress-people just do not take email seriously yet. (When they do read it, they send a snailmail reply back -- that gives you an idea of how they operate). Even phone calls are not as good as letters, because letters stick around when a phone call is over when you hang-up.
Congress created the USPTO, and they can modify it as needed. It is obviously not doing what it was intended to do, nor is it benefiting the people of this country.
We need to get moving, write our Senators and Representatives, and let them know what is going on. If enough people make their displeasure known, action will follow. Put the Slashdot effect to some use, and write Capitol hill.
My Patents... (Score:1)
JediLuke
Motives? (Score:2)
My Yahoo and Excite start pages already look surprisingly similar; if Yahoo believes they found competetive advantage in how they are putting them together, they may simply be trying to protect that competetive advantage using whatever means they happen to have at their disposal.
Although, quite frankly, my Excite page loads faster...
I'm not being an apologist here at all, I am also fundamentally opposed to the concept of software patents. All I'm trying to present is a guess at what might be their strategy behind it.... I will say that it makes absolute-zero sense for Yahoo, a company whose core business is still being a search engine (ok, directory, technically, but nevertheless...), to go after any number of sites they're indexing; it makes a lot more sense for them to target specific competitors building similar portals by attempting to hamstring their technical options.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
I'm gonna patent ASCII (Score:1)
I'm gonna apply for ASCII text to be my new patent. That way anyone who wants to type anything has to pay me the big $$$'s for each letter they type. Of course, there will be a sliding scale for the fee, letters used more frequently will be discounted, such as vowels and the letter "s". Unpopular letters like "x" and "q" will cost more as keeping that kind of intellectual property around has some overhead attached to it. It'll be just like Scabble!
Oh by the way, those little smiley faces "
BUWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH......I win, I win!!
-colin
"I'm not trying to insult your intelligence, you have to have some to be offended"
Re:Death of the internet (Score:1)
As for patents, remember they only last 20 years. The RSA algorithm for public-key encyption is one that is about to enter the publice domain. And as far as these absurd 'everyone's doing it, but I got the patent' patents, all it will take is a company with enough resources who wants to use the technology without paying royalties. I assure you they will be quick to bring prior art to the court's attention.
Re:Picking apart the patent (Score:1)
As for IIS, I'm quite certain that it uses threads, rather than forking (very seldom does a daemon on a MS OS fork to handle a new connection).
I'm not sure because I haven't looked at the
Re:Patent Stupidity (Score:1)
LPF is at http://lpf.ai.mit.edu (no www).
Sumner
Re:PhotoMosaic (Score:2)
- John
Can you say BS? (Score:1)
- Xabbu
Have they patented use of vi to write HTML yet? (Score:2)
Serious comments:
The more patents they grant on these sorts of processes, the less enforceable all patents become. Recent developments indicate that the USPTO is totally out of their depth when it comes to the Web.
Re:Standard module (Score:1)
Specific Prior Art has now been located (I think) (Score:1)
I have a cold today, so my virus-addled mind may be missing something here, but it would appear that this claim really amounts to a description of a data-base view on a transactions-oriented database that just happens to be executed over-the-web? Or does the claim hinge on the notion that the view was "user-generated" (also pretty weak, given current DB products)?
Presumably the idea of a database view cannot be patentable these days given a metric buttload of prior art, but is the "mere" webification of such an idea legally patentable, given the theory that it wasn't trivial to do since database-backed web sites didn't exist from day one?
If so, I note that this patent was filed on June 12, 1997, and I am therefore virtually certain it is invalid due to the specific prior art of Philip Greenspun's online version of the bookDatabase Backed Web Sites [photo.net], which originally appeared on the web before it's 1997 publication, and was republished as Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing in 1999. Chapter 10 ("Sites that are really programs") and Chapter 11 ("Sites that are really databases") being te most relevant pieces.
Really, I think Greenspun's prior art tells you exactly how to achieve the central claim of this patent, so I would be very interested to see somebody argue how the Yahoo claim holds any water at all, even in the "we webified it!" sense.
Picking apart the patent (Score:2)
a plurality of user processes, one process per user accessing the server system;
This does not appear to apply to Apache, because Apache uses a single process to handle multiple requests by different users.
Does anyone know enough about the internal workings of IIS to know if it allocates one process per user, or request? If so, then this patent claim may only be infringed on by sites using Microsoft software.
Claim 2 appears to be infringed on by all web servers that use user logons for any purpose, including slashdot, and that store any user preferences locally.
If so, then the rest of the claims are irrelevant, because it appears impossible to construct a useful web server without infringing claim 2.
Key claim is #2. Not just shared memory. (Score:3)
It is much much worse than a claim on use of shared memory. The real killer broad claim is #2, which is an attempt to claim ALL pre-compiled user-specific template pages.
Use of shared memory (#4), server-farms (#5), and cacheing (#6) are additional claims over and beyond the basic claim #2. Claim 2 applies whether these other claims are implemented or not.
The nitty-gritty of claim #1 is just a fallback position, which protects Yahoo's detailed process in the event that Yahoo's other claims are ruled too abstract. Claim #1 does not apply unless you specifically generate lists of relevant sports teams and weather reports from user postcodes. The real horror is claim #2.
Claim 2
Claim 4
The term "template program" would appear to cover any per-user pre-generated page which includes ASP or PHP or Javascript to fill in the blanks. Bespoke formats in which the user template contains just field names instead of script fragments might also be considered "programs", executable by the web-server plus appropriate module.
Very, very nasty.
The Prior-Art-O-Matic (Score:2)
But how about more focused public discussion? Tossing these up on
The mere existence of such a community-led patent debunker might make the average company a bit more careful about throwing several thousand dollars at a patent that gets invalidated in an hour or two.
Where did that
Jon (xeno*wolfenet!com)
YAUSPORAS... (Score:2)
What next? A patent for bold and italic fonts?
The way they give out patents right and left, it ought to be pretty easy to patent the concept of shared memory itself. Then sue Yahoo for patent violation!
Standard module (Score:5)
See the modperl archives for many other people using this method for caching data (templates and other stuff). I guess it could be argued that anything using a <perl> section or startup.pl in modperl is using a similar technique.
Yeek (Score:4)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Shared memory (Score:2)
No, they use disk caching. But... (Score:2)
However, good old GroupLens, the personalization server they bundle, does cache user preferences and such to memory. Of course, these aren't page components. But plenty of other systems do that.
Standard reply to patents... (Score:5)
Any idea or expression which can be thought by more than one person by sheer coincidence should never be allowed to be protected.
Expression is not an entity to be hoarded. Implementation may have its merits in the varying methods used, but the thought processes which led to those methods are ultimately responsible, and come from varying sources of inspiration which law can neither protect, enslave, or induce.
Research which truly *is* research, could be protected, certainly, as one protects the fruit of any labour (although for moral reasons, medicine, science, etc. they often shouldn't be). But clever programming tricks, methods that are already taken for granted, or legal wording of common-place procedures written and submitted for the purpose of making a buck... that's not justice, that's not even moral.
Patents fall under law, law is imposed to promote justice, and a capitalistic greedy move like this on the part of a bunch of Yahoo's does no justice to anyone.
mindslip
that means absolutely nothing (Score:3)
Suggestion /. with all the patents coming out that deal with hardware/software like this one ie shared mem, maybe it would be a good idea that when someone submits an article for a patent, they are prompted to also send the patent number, and a link to where they got this info, and all that jazz. Rather than just the abstract.
I mean really the abstract is just that 'abstract'. IT is supposed to be a 1 paragraph summary of the invention in less than 150 words.
flames > /dev/null
moderate -1Million
send flames > /dev/null
Netscape Livewire/SSJS, for one... (Score:2)
Since the version in their 3.0 webservers, it has had decent server-level object support, too. Which means, yes, data cached in memory at the master HTTP process level. A common tecnique is to populate an array element at the server level when a piece of content is first retrieved, and only hit the data source again for records that aren't present, or which have aged.
Even more fun, I'd be glad to show interested lawyers an application I architected at a past employer that's been in production use for almost 3 years now. It's a distributed custom-email delivery system that caches content data both at the server level and at a spoke client level, in RAM. The clients request and use the cached data to assemble outbound messages.
As for using OS-level shared memory for this sort of thing, I'm sure some database and high-performance filesystem vendors are having a good laugh right now.
Here's a Link (Score:5)
What about Netcenter, Themes.org and what not? (Score:2)
"We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece
Self defense pattents considered harmful. (Score:2)
So it's probably a self-defense patent. So what?
The very fact that self-defense patents are obtained and used (despite their cost) shows that the patent system has broken down.
And if the big guys have a portfolio of self-defense patents, where does that leave the little guys who can't afford them? At the mercy of every peredatory lawyer in the employ of a big guy whose product is threatened by competition from the little guy's invention.
Maybe the current administration of the company really intends to use the portfolio defensively. But gore their successors' ox and those "defensive" patent portfolios can become offensive in very short order.
Maybe the EFF needs to start collecting patents and giving free liscense to them to prevent this. Maybe have a patent fund that patent authors can donate their patents to under the condition that they are liscensed freely.
Or perhaps used against anyone who attempts to enforce bogus patents? Or who goes after a little guy at all?
Now there's an idea! A common-defense patent pool for the little guys! B-)
(It could even be self-funding, as part of the settlement when they bring their guns to bear.)
How are they gonna find you? (Score:2)
Of course - that is a real issue for the
Secondly - can they prosecute someone for using a program that contains such code, or does the patent only cover writing code to implement such a system in the first place?
Finally, can Yahoo use such a patent - originating in the US - against companies in other countries, or does the patent only cover US applications development?
Also intersting to note - Yahoo are currently being sued themselves over patent violation, Wired [wired.com] have the article.
Ingenuiusly obscure (Score:3)
As I understand it, what they're saying is that they pre-allocate a large chunk of memory per user (rather than dynamically allocate what's needed), and then fill it with whatever that user is doing.
In addition, live data is regularly polled from other servers and stuffed into shared memory, thus removing the need to access the servers at the time of request.
This would seem to give Yahoo a 2-tier caching system:
Servers --> Shared memory --> User Cache --> User
This may or may not be efficient, depending on how it's set up. It certainly means that the data from real-time data sources stops being real-time, and can be as old as the time-out on the shared memory cache.
As for being innovative, well, that is arguable. There is certainly prior art for cache heirarchies (nlanr, the makers of Squid, have an entire network of web caches, for example, and Squid is built for exactly that kind of work). Using shared memory as a caching system is a trivial derivative of traditional caching, and wouldn't pass muster on it's own.
Using a heirarchy inside a single system, to link multiple servers, is perhaps slightly more novel. I don't recall seeing that being done before.
However, the patent could be considered a non-issue. If you use a heirarchy of -dynamically allocated- cache spaces, you automatically have something that is distinct from the system described in the patent. Also, if you have an N-ary graph of caches, rather than a simple tree, you would avoid the patent by using a distinct structure.
Re:YAUSPORAS... (Score:2)
How about this? Patent the idea of linking search engines to stock information. That should easily slip past the patent office. THEN sue Yahoo. :)
Microsoft ASP engine does this and has for years (Score:5)
Death of the internet (Score:3)
What I doubt though is that it will continue to grow. We will never have a reality such as in Star Trek, or some of the worlds the Sliders go to. We will never have a world with terminals in every room of every building hooked up to the internet linking the whole world.
I say this because all these internet patents are scaring off lots of people that could be developing the websites that would make such a thing feasible. Linking the world together is nothing without the content that would be needed. Think about it, there is no more one-click shopping without a royalty be paid to Amazon, so E-commerce sites will have to do things the longer, harder way. If they do not do it the hard way they will have to develop a new concept which if history shows they will run out and patent and leave the followers in the same boat.
The bottom line is for all these internet businesses is all about the Benjamins, and the world has never benefited from greed alone. These people claim to be "innovators" of the internet, as far as I'm concerned they are all just a bunch of greedy bastards holding the world back.
new /. topic (Score:4)
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?topic=ludicrous_pa tents
but what would the logo be?
Software patents (Score:3)
This just illustrates how inappropriate patents are for software. Even if this were an original idea (and as others have pointed out, it certainly isn't), it wouldn't be worth granting a patent on it, because it would restrict competition far too much and subject developers to legal harassment. It's also merely a combination of existing ideas - filling in templates, and caching data in memory - that would be obvious to any skilled programmer.
Of course Yahoo are free to copyright the code they are using, and that makes sure that they can get a good return from their effort. But allowing companies to patent particular ideas and then sue other developers is bad news both for the software industry and for consumers.
The paper Against Software Patents [mit.edu] is slightly old, but a good introduction to why granting patent monopolies on software techniques is a bad idea.It's not too late to stop software patents being introduced in Europe - check out freepatents.org [freepatents.org] if you live in the EU.
Does Jerry know? (Score:2)
Does anyone have his email so folks can (politely) ask him about this policy? Maybe we can convince him to pledge to not use the patent, but hold it open for community use?
Patent Stupidity (Score:2)
anti USPTO T shirts. Also take a look at and join
the LPF (www.lpf.ai.mit.edu). If enough people
join it starts making a difference
Alan
Re:new /. topic (Score:2)
Patents patents and more patents (Score:3)
I suspect the patent office clerks (or whoever actually reviews and issues these things) lack the technical knowhow they require to properly evaluate (or, hell, even understand) these things and look for prior art. This unfairly allows those with $$ to take advantage of their ignorance and engage in the kind of frivolous litigation we so love here in the U.S.
To my understanding (and again, IANAL. do we have any lawyers here on Slashdot? any care to comment on the basics of patent law?) patents are basically a legal monopoly for a set time period to allow the inventor of a particular 'technique' to profit from his labor, at least in an intellectual sense. Generally speaking, this is a reasonable idea, imho. I seem to remember that the time period allotted is 7 years (someone correct me please?), and while this may be fine for real world (meatspace) inventions, that's simply aeons in computer time. It's like a 200 year patent in the real world. Perhaps we should consider some modifications to our patent system to account for the rapid pace of modern technology?
Has this type of practice always been common in patent litigation? A lot of it seems blatantly sleazy and deceptive. I've only noticed it recently, but then again, I've only been paying attention recently...
Anthony
^X^X
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
Long way to go in IP (Score:3)
Patents like that -- where there is a direct detrimental effect on people as a result (who are unable to even get a test done!) might push the patent reform to front and center. Perhaps then, we can push the absurd software patents to the forefront and try to get some good ole fashioned reform going ("Its a good ole patent lynching, mama").
The need for reform *is* coming to the consciousness of the mainstream. Lets make sure that software patents are not forgotten when that happens.
Re:First post!!! (Score:2)
Cheerio and all that sort of rubbisn, eh mate?
Re:new /. topic (Score:2)
A brain with a padlock on/through it.
One of those zombies from Night of the Living Dead.
A rubber-stamp and a pair of handcuffs.
--G
Excellent patent article on /. (Score:2)
Slashdot ran an excellent article [slashdot.org] on the basics of patent law a few weeks ago. It's reposted on Advogato [advogato.org], the new community site I'm starting for free software developers. I'm hoping to collect a solid set of patent resources at Advogato over time, among other things.
Hope this helps!
Welcome To The Precedent of Incompetence (Score:2)
Consider: Government powers explicitly derive from Constitutional assignment. Clause 8 of Article 1 grants the following:
Clause 8. The Congress shall have Power To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Promote, eh?
The patent office has expressed gross incompetence in its assignment of software patents--indeed, it may not be possible, due to the rapidly iterative nature of software development, to correctly apply standard patent methodologies to software. (As I've argued before though, lots of unwarranted patents make for a rich Patent Office and very rich Patent Attorneys! So I don't particularly believe the overworked and underclued patent examiners are being overworked or underclued accidentally.)
For whatever reason Software Patents are completely failing their Constitutional mandate, there is widespread consensus that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has long since wasted away any shred of legitimacy when it comes to the realm of software patents.
Without a legitimate claim to the constitutional powers they derive their right to regulate from, all their powers dissipate, and the software patents already assigned become null and void.
Comments? I have more to say, but I'd like to hear what you think about this.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Re:PhotoMosaic (Score:2)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
A possible workable solution? (Score:2)
However, the implementation has screwed up royally. It doesn't protect the small inventor, trying to challenge a granted patent, even if it is "obviously" wrong is expensive. They are now used as weapons, bargaining chips, and the time peroid in a fast moving industry is too long.
Many patents that get posted here for discussion on
Also it would eliminate the worst type (IMO) of patent - the submarine patent. Imagine what would happen if a new technology (eg XML) that was touted as "open" was massivly deployed, then it was discovered to be patented? Think of style sheets, and it's definitly a possibility.
--
Re:that means absolutely nothing (Score:2)
I think Yahoo has tried to scale the dynamically generated, customizable web page beyond it's current boundaries, and that is why a patent was filed. Better mousetrap, old mouse.
I'm not saying this will hold up in court, but it deserves more of a look than "bomb the patent office!"
Re:Arrrggghhhh (Score:2)
----
The GNU Patent fund... (Score:3)
Another possibility is that this fund could be used to pay the royalties in bulk for all GPL software. So, for example, somebody from GNU goes over to Unisys and offers to pay them a lump sum to permit royalty free use of the patent for all software released under the GPL.
This would have two effects:
1) It would provide a way for people developing free software from having to pay royalties on something that they might not make money off of in the first place.
2) It would encourage more people to use the GPL because they could write their software without having to pay various royalties that they might otherwise be committed to.
---
How long... (Score:2)
Moderate that UP (Score:2)
I'm sure serious discussions of this are already underway. Anyone got pointers or recommendations for these kinds of resources? I saw a link on an earlier post to a T-shirt [thinkgeek.com] designed by Alan Cox at www.thinkgeek.com which I found simply delicious
Anthony
^X^X
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
Patents don't mean much. (Score:2)
Mike Eckardt
meckardt@yahoo.nospam.com
http://www.geocities.com/meckardt
Re: (Score:2)
What I gathered (Score:2)
It's all to do with portal type sites, not templates and not just shared memory. The idea is that when a user comes into a portal site for the first time his/her preferences are loaded not into the current (CGI?) process out of the database, but into a shared memory cache. The next page they view doesn't have to fetch them from the database - just from the cache.
Seems still pretty universal - although the patent does specifically talk about user preferences in portal web sites, so anyone whining on about using shared memory in their PDP-11 application can stop now. However anyone who's developed a portal-type (and yes, this applies to slashdot) web site that caches user preferences in shared memory then this affects them. I don't believe slashdot is affected - it calls the database every time for its user preferences.
Why Not a Software Patent Blackhole List? (Score:2)
Slashdot, yesterday, carried an item about Hotmail joining the spam Black Hole list. It seems to me that one way to put an end to this patent silliness is to do the same thing: block email from known patent abusers. Block unisys.com, yahoo.com, etc.--and give the software patent enthusiasts the option of continuing to abuse the system or be able to connect to the rest of the world.
I have already blocked unisys.com from my network, due to the GIF nonsense. (Not without pain--a major client uses Unisys A-series and Clearpath servers.) I'll block yahoo.com too if it turns out that they have any dream of enforcing this.
As Arlo Guthrie once pointed out, if just one person does this they'll think he's crazy. And if two people do it they'll think they're both [well, we'll just skip what he said, since it ain't considered genteel these days]. But imagine, my friends, imagine if dozens of people, hundreds of people block domains that use software patents. Why, they'll think its a movement....
Write an HTML page that explains why you won't permit connects to Yahoo, post it, and redirect any Yahoo links to that page. The power of the boycott is the most effective weapon you have.
Re:Yeek (Score:2)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Re:Arrrggghhhh (Score:2)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Re:Huh... (Score:2)
And isn't proof of prior existence all that you need to call a patent stupid and null it? Or am I just rambling because it's so early?
More or less, but since you have to present that proof in court, you'll need a truckload of money to go with that proof.
Silly patents and TM:s How *should* it work? (Score:2)
I lost count long ago over all "This should never have been patented"-stories. Every time there are the usual replies about how evil the system is and the "what if i patent _this_"-posts.
C'mon You are supposed to be more creative than this! Can we think of a system that:
Patent Research (Score:2)
But don't they do any research in the area of the patent to find out if it is in fact a new creation?
Why can't they ask some computer body (IETF?) if this is in fact something that should be patented, or if everyone else is using it already?
And is this patent worldwide? (If it is, then surely other countries should have some say in the matter).
Patent fighting fund... (Score:3)
You bring in a few patent attorneys and having a standing arrangement that they give a price tag for the battle and when they get that much money in the coffers, they can go out and start taking down the patent. If not enough money is collected after a given period of time, then the money would not be charged to the credit card and the patent would go on its merry way.
Thoughts?
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Re:Patent = New and original idea (Score:2)
This I got from esp@cenet [espacenet.com], which holds a searchable database of the last two years of patent applications from several countries.
Patent Office policy (Score:2)
I remember reading somewhere that a patent-office official had publicly admitted that they couldn't keep up with the flood of applications and were as a matter of policy allowing dubious patents through in the hope that the courts would sort things out. Whether the admission was real or just a figment of my imagination, this is clearly what the patent office is doing.
Patents are supposed to be (a) innovative, and (b) non-obvious, among other criteria. This patent is obviously neither, and there are enough other companies with enough legal muscle to ensure that it's never enforced, so I don't think it's much to worry about. The danger comes when a patent is granted on something obscure and the only people who care are little guys who don't have the resources to fight it successfully in court by themselves.
This brings me to my other point: patent fights. It's very common nowadays to respond to an accusation of infringement by pulling out a few of your own. "Oh yeah? Well, you're infringing our patents X, Y, and Z. Are you sure you want to take this to court?" That is what's really behind a lot of the "preemptive patenting" to which several other posters have referred. One of the tools of the high-tech business is developing a patent portfolio not so those patents can actually be used to club others over the head, but to avoid being clubbed oneself. Companies have been bought just to pad patent portfolios. It's sick, I know. I'm not defending the practice, just reporting it.
Re: Fix for s/w patents (Score:2)