Altavista's Planned Patent Lawsuits

caledon wrote in to tell us a story about AltaVista planning a bunch of lawsuits to enforce patents on things like Spidering and Indexing. In the article, David Wetherell of CMGI says "If you index a distributed set of databases-what the Internet is-and even within intranets, corporations, that's one of the patents. We did a press release on this with a list of six or ten of the key areas that the patents cover." I guess patent lawsuits are their best corporate strategy since they no longer can make a good search engine. There's a few other bits in there about CMGI, but who cares about CMGI?

Re:Vote with your robots.txt

If you have to rely on AltaVista for people to find your site, you're already in trouble.

They hold the patent for a WWW search engine!!!!

I did a quick search on the patents database, and I came up with this beauty a full two years after webcrawler the first crawl and index search engine, went live. Webcrawler went live on April 1994, Lycos went live on July 20, 1994. (IANAL but notice that date of discovery is at most one year before date of filling...)

Title: Method for Parsing, indexing and searching world-wide-web pages.

"Inventor": Burrows, Michael
Applicant: Digital Equipment Corp.
Filed: August 9, 1996

A system indexes Web pages of the Internet. The pages are stored in computers distributively connected to each other by a communications network. Each page has a unique URL (universal record locator). Some of the pages can include URL links to other pages. A communication interface connected to the Internet is used for fetching a batch of Web pages from the computers in accordance with the URLs and URL links. The URLs are determined by an automated Web browser connected to the communications interface. A parser sequentially partitions the batch of specified pages into indexable words where each word represents an indexable portion of information of a specific page, or the word represents an attribute of one or more portions of the specific page. The parser sequentially assigns locations to the words as they are parsed. The locations indicates the unique occurrences of the word in the Web. The output of the parser is stored in a memory as an index. The index includes one index entry for each unique word. Each index entry also includes one or more location entries indicating where the unique word occurs in the Web. A query module parses a query into terms and operators. The operators relate the terms. A search engine uses object-oriented stream readers to sequentially read location of specified index entries, the specified index entries correspond to the terms of a query. A display module presents qualified pages located by the search engine to users of the Web. Issued: Jan 26, 1999

Altavista and patents

Hmm. Hasn't Oracle, Sybase, and a host of others been indexing distributed databases since the mid-eighties? I seems to recall configuring clustered indexing on database clusters... Hmm. ;)

For that matter, NeXT's (now Apple's) Enterprise Object Framework (an OO->RDBMS mapping system) creates object caches of database contents, and these caches can span multiple databases on multiple machines, which fits the language.

Can you say "Prior Art?" I knew that you could...

Re:How long does it take for patents to be 'good'?

We are complaining about a patent on spidering because spidering is bloody obvious. It's a breadth first search - get a page, index it, and store the links in it at the end of the queue. Continue. It's first year CS stuff at best. Patenting this is absolutely ridiculous. That's why we complain.

Re:Coming soon...

Since Bush Sr. gave the U.S.P.T.O. unlimited power ten years ago

WTF are you talking about? Let's see, what do /.ers most love to hate about USPTO? Business method patents, software patents (both of those granted by courts, not by any direct action of the executive or congressional branches), and poor examinations (unrelated to alleged "unlimited power".)

I know a bit about the history of the USPTO (granted, not everything), so I'd be interested to know what you're talking about.

DEATH to holding companies!

This goes beyond mere stupid patents.

Holding companies like CGMI are the biggest failing of the free market economy in my opinion. Think for a second about what they are. A company that does nothing but make money by buying other companies. The produce nothing, create nothing, increase the value of nothing. They are nothing but money-sucking leeches in the very worst sense.

Unlike a company that actually produces something, it's almost impossible to boycott holding companies. If one of their companies doesn't get you, another one will; and the bigger they get, the harder they are to avoid.

These are the supermonopolies. The way things are going now, 90+% of the entire world's commerce will be between ten or fewer companies in a decade, and the actual consumers will be irrelevant.

TELL THEM HOW YOU FEEL!

Rather than just complain on here, I sent an e-mail off to Deidre Moore, CMGI's VP of Communications in the PR department. I told her(?) that if CMGI (Altavista's parent company) went forward with the lawsuits, I would boycott their search engine and their advertisers and would recommend that others do the same.

Will one e-mail convince them to back down? Probably not. But if enough people let them know how they feel, it might have some effect, even if that is just to limit how far they go with this ill-conceived idea.

For those so inclined, here is Ms. Moore's contact information:

PUBLIC RELATIONS
Deidre Moore
VP, Communications
[e-mail]
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]

Please be polite, businesslike, and civil in your communications to her. Threats, vulgarity, and rudeness would only detract from our messages.

Spidering and Indexing

Well,

let us look at it this way. I use Lexis.com [lexis.com] all the time. It did not produce any of its content- the content there comes from state houses, law books and newspapers. It is a pay site (boy howdy is it) but I am happy to pay this because hundreds of people worked to construct the database- assembling the data and creating its indexing and search functions, which are better than Google even for first time accuracy.

AltaVista has a right to protect the work that it put into a unique indexing system and a unique set of research that cannot be replicated. I find it ironic that it is AltaVista doing this and not one of the better search engines, because the premier services would have a better case and a better chance of winning a legal battle for the patents.

I don't think patenting is the best way to protect this work, but there isn't currently a better way.

Holy Goatsex, Batman!

"Quick, Robin!" Batman said. "To the Batmobile. That nefarious fiend, our archnemisis, Google, is at it again."

"Holy Goatsex, Batman!" Batman's young charge exclaimed, quickly minimzing his browser window. "What dastardly deed is he up to this time?"

"Well, Robin. It seems that our old enemy is engaging in the dread business of Patent Infringment!"

"No!"

"Yes, Robin. It's a shame, but some criminals think that they can just employ what ever technology they want to without paying the rightful licensing fees to the patent holders, in this case a company that Commisioner Gordon has invested heavily in."

"Those monsters!" The boy wonder agreed.

Batman looked at Robin's computer monitor again. "Hey, that wasn't Batgirl's pornographic DivX site, was it, Boy Wonder."

"Uhh... Of course not, Batman!"

The caped crusader scowled at his young charge. "You are aware that the MPEG 4 technology used in the DivX codec violates a number of intellectual property patents and encourages the theft of big-name Hollywood Movies, aren't you?"

"Yes, Batman," Robin sighed.

"Take heart, Boy Wonder. Copyright Law isn't for us to understand. 'Ours is to do and die', after all."

"Okay, Batman! Let's get started."

"Do you want to slide down the long pole first, or shall I?"

Re:The original altavista

Time to ipchain deny the dec.com spiders from sites if they want to play selfish games.

Lawsuits as a business strategy

I think i've seen this kind of thing before...

Companies with lots of patents and sagging revenues will often use lawsuits as a strategy to increase their own revenues with some court awarded damages and thin out the competition. Back in the early 1990s Texas Instruments set about on just such a strategy and failed miserably. At a point when memory prices were falling and japanese competition was heating up, they filed lawsuits against several Japanese chip manufacturers over their misuse of Jack Kilby's IC patents. In the end, TI lost their court cases and a lot of money in the process. (It was kinda ugly) So this kind of strategy is a gamble that doesn't always pay off.

I'm not sure how it will workout with internet companies like AltaVista. They may not have the funds to support a lengthy court case and the companies they are suing, probably can't afford to pay if they lose. Perhaps they're just hoping to scare some people into signing some modest licensing or partnership deals? (If war is just diplomacy by other means, are lawsuits just business deals by other means? hmmm...) Otherwise the courts may rule that, as with TI, these basic technologies are now entrenched and the patent holder simply waited too long to start trying to enfore them.

Vote with your robots.txt

User-Agent: Scooter
Disallow: *

All the patented indexes in the world don't do doodly if there's nothing in your index...

For those who will inevitably ask about prior art

A History of Search Engines [wiley.com]

Unlimited Liability

The primary problem here is that until this Patent was awarded the competing search engines weren't aware of any patent issues.

Imagine writing a application (search engine), and have it available for a year or more - after which a patent is accepted that means you owe money for a license on the previously released product?

That means anyone who writes software or a web site is up for unlimited damages. Looking up patents to ensure you don't infringe one is hard enough - but now we have to worry about patents which cause your work to infringe retrospectivly.

One must wonder how 'unique' a patent is if between submitting a patent application, and having the patent awarded the idea is discovered by several other people.

I'm almost afraid to touch the keyboard :-)

Re:Unlimited Liability

Imagine writing a application (search engine), and have it available for a year or more - after which a patent is accepted that means you owe money for a license on the previously released product?

No, it only means that you need a license if you want to continue to sell the product.

Assuming AV's patents are valid (I don't believe for a second they are) and that other search engines really are infringing on them, AV can demand that they either buy a license or stop what they're doing now, but they can't collect damages for what the search engines did before the patent was granted.

Re:Vote with your robots.txt

Riiiight.

"I'll show them! Oh, wait, that means fewer people will find my site. And click on my products / ads / whatever. And become a part of my online community. But by George, if I have to take it on the chin to show AV, that's what I'll do!"

Re:Spidering and Indexing

I use Lexis.com all the time. It did not produce any of its content- the content there comes from state houses, law books and newspapers.... hundreds of people worked to construct the database- assembling the data and creating its indexing and search functions

I have no problem with Lexis offering its content only to paying customers. I have only a slight problem with Lexis (and the equivalent print company) having a monopoly on access to what I think of as public information (outcomes of trials).

I would have a big huge freaking problem if someone tried to put together a Web site of the court results in my town, and Lexis lawyers came in and said, "You can't do that, we have a patent on making that kind of information avilable electronically! No one else on the entire Internet can do that without giving us a pound of flesh!"

Prior art, anyone? --PSRC

P.S.: The Internet World article is dated January 15th, five days after CMGI cancelled AltaVista's IPO [cnet.com]. Coincidence?

How long does it take for patents to be 'good'?

How long does it take for a patented architecture to be reimplemented by lots of competitors in order for it to be seen as a properly patented architecture? Some really good ideas languish for years before their full potential is realized, and so patenting those ideas often seems futile-- the patent will expire before it becomes worth anything. On the other hand, many really good ideas get copied immediately, in which case, patenting them must have been correct in hindsight.

There are almost as many spidering search engines out there as there, now, as there are web portals. Didn't altavista do it first? And if they did, then why are we complaining that they got it patented? There are many ways to go about indexing websites without resorting to spiders, so there are other ways of supporting other search engines -- no one's going to be forced out of business by this one.

Patents make companies look good on paper and feel good at heart. If you don't want altavista to own these patents, then the honest thing to do is to get enough capital together and buyout altavista (as well as google and others) and make one big search engine that you can run yourself and decide to manage exactly as you wish. To do otherwise is to cast an umbra on the very ideals of property that bind our society together.

The original altavista

The original Altavista search engine site was created mainly to 1) provide a useful service to the net and 2) showcase the power of the then-new Alpha processors running on Digital equipment.

Now some chump firm (CMGI CGMI CIGM whatever, who cares, there are too many acronyms in our world already...) bought it and acts like they invented it. I wonder where the real brains and team who created it all and made it happen are now?

Damn I miss the old net, before the bean-counters and lawyers got involved... :-(

Re:The original altavista

Just a clarification - since you're making it sound "Digital" were the good guys...

If you read the interview (assuming the guy knows what he is talking about) it's Digital that filed all those patents, not CGMI.

Payment model isn't the same, though.

You make the comparison between AltaVista and Lexis inappropriately. It's certainly true that both AltaVista and Lexis survive through the content created by other people, but the two pursued completely different payment models.

AltaVista provides its services for free, while Lexis charges a premium. If AltaVista decided tomorrow to stop offering its services for free, and starting a subscription program, I'd support them completely - I wouldn't actually pay for the service, but I'd have no problem with their decision.

Lexis may be the gold standard in their field, but nothing (other than the usual price of going in against the heavies) prevents others from competing with them. The problem is that AltaVista believes that nobody should be competing with them in the searching/indexing game, at least without paying unspecified - but likely rapacious - licensing fees. David Wetherell of CMGI:

[Digital was] the first to spider and index the Web. And Digital did a good job of recognizing the potential value of that intellectual property. And they were very thorough in filing broad and deep and narrow patents. And we have another 30 patents that are in application. So we believe that virtually everyone out there who indexes the Web is in violation of at least several of those key patents.

So, the patents are both broad and narrow (?). And virtually everyone who indexes the web is in violation of several.

I don't know if Digital was actually the first to develop these techniques. I don't know if the technology they use has actually been copied that closely, or the patents are sufficiently (read: ridiculously) broad enough to encompass what Google, HotBot, Lycos, and whatever all else is out there is doing. I do know that it's Bad News for the health of the Internet in general.

Overcoming the problems with patents

Damn I miss the old net, before the bean-counters and lawyers got involved... :-(

Don't worry, that time will come again once we all get so fed up with the current patent idiocy on the Internet that we decide to do something about it. There are a number of alternative solutions:

1. Shoot all patent lawyers. This would undoubtedly be the most satisfying solution (although many would object that it wouldn't be painful enough), but it's not practical simply because in unenlightened countries like ours it would be considered illegal. So scratch that.

2. Go through the political system and get the application of patent law to the Internet banned. This would require sentience on the part of politicians and justice on the part of the judiciary. So scratch that.

3. Create a new Internet cryptographically separated from the current one and available only to people that are not patent lawyers. Since patent lawyers could gain access to it only by deception, anything they say in court about patents in use on this new medium would be either inadmissable in court or else provably uninformed, so all patent action would fail.

Hmmm, damn, I guess there's only one way to go.