CMGI, Altavista Patent Indexing, Searching 180
Aggrazel
passes along
a FinancialTimes.com story
that would send chills down my spine if I weren't already jaded and bored by such patent nonsense. You mean suits at a
megacorp
are taking advantage of absurd U.S. intellectual property laws to stifle innovation, quash competition, and steal candy from hard-working programmers? I'm shocked, shocked!
Here's the InternetWorld interview:
"...virtually everyone out there who indexes the Web is in violation of at least several of those key patents. Q. Does that mean you'll pursue that? A. Yes, we will. Coming up in the first quarter of 2001."
Could someone please find out what patents CMGI owns?
And in related news, DeadSea notes that the search engine that powers the ODP
(dmoz.org)
has been
released,
under the
MPL.
It's rough around the edges; go thou and smooth it out. While you still can.
First to go (Score:2)
If the USPTO uses indexes to search for patents etc.
They should be the first to be sued.
This is similar to doing book reports in school (Score:1)
I'm Boycotting (Score:1)
But it really felt like the whole Amazon.Com one click shopping thing to me all over again.
The only ones that win, are the laywers. Bah.
Attention AltaVista! (Score:2)
I have patented "a method of bringing about legal action, in the form of lawsuits or otherwise, for the enforcement of patent law and recouping damages due to patent infringement." You can't sue without violating my patent. I have also patented "A method of protecting the ideas and inventions of a person or corporation for a limited time so as to encourage them to make said idea or invention available ot the public." By having patents, you have violated my patent.
Though that was sarcasm, I wonder if (in this day and age) I could couch the patent in enough lnaguage to secure patents on patents and patent lawsuits.
Re:For the nth time... (Score:2)
Um, basically, we just suck.
Jamie McCarthy
Re:Don't just sit there, do something about it ! (Score:3)
Watch AltaVista's advertising dry up. Laugh. Watch them stop with this patent nonsense.
Re:Don't just sit there, do something about it ! (Score:1)
Re:sueing "prior art" ? (Score:1)
Pulling a Unisys (Score:2)
You can't just wait until everyone in the world is using your stuff and suddenly spring on them and claim they all owe you money.
They're doing the exact same thing Unisys did [burnallgifs.org]. But doesn't Unisys have a patent on "submarine" patents?
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them? [pineight.com]
Come to Europe (Score:1)
If any lawyer went to court with a patent like this the judje would probably ask him if he was kidding him.
This is for fmaxwell's eyes only. (Score:1)
since you don't put a valid email on slashdot this is the only way
I could contact you
after reading some of your past posts (to research your plagiarizm claim)
I see that you don't care for spammers
you might find my war on spam page interesting.
then again you might think I'm a jerk
oh well
Re:I've got to admit... (Score:1)
It Gets Worse! (Score:2)
Someone has patented crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
As seen here [jerrypournelle.com] on Jerry Pournelle's website (when he moves this week to his archives, this will be here [jerrypournelle.com], but that will not be for a week or so. (sorry, but the original story is available only via pay archives at Michigan Live, unless someone finds the original news service)
Last summer, the folks at Albie's Foods here started making crust-free peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches for their customers. Just before Christmas, a executive with an Ohio food company ordered Albie's to bag 'em.
Robert V. Vickers wrote to Albie's explaining that his company, Menusaver Inc., holds the patent for crustless PBJ and plans to preserve its exclusive rights to the lunchtime staple. Now, Albie's has asked U.S. District Court in Bay City to resolve the legal jam.
Albie's, a food manufacturer and restaurant, is best known for its tasty pasties, with stores in Gaylord and Grayling. Company officials say they hope the federal sandwich case can be resolved in a jiffy.
In December 1999, the Orrville, Ohio,-based food company Menusaver obtained the patent for the "sealed crustless sandwich." The product is the invention of Len C. Kirtchman of Fergus Falls, Minn., and David Geske of Fargo, N.D., according to the patent on file with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office.
"The sandwich includes a lower bread portion, an upper bread portion, an upper filling and a lower filling between the lower and upper bread portions, a center filling sealed between the upper and lower fillings and a crimped edge along an outer perimeter of the bread portions for sealing the fillings therebetween," states Patent No. 6,004,596.
Creamy or crunchy? Strawberry or grape? The patent doesn't get that specific. But:
"The upper and lower fillings are preferably comprised of peanut butter and the center filling is comprised of at least jelly," the patent declares. "The center filling is prevented from radiating outwardly and into and through the bread portions from the surrounding peanut butter."
Albie's co-owner Regan Quaal, contacted by The Times, said he would prefer to smooth out the controversy privately and not spread it around in the press.
United States Patent 6,004,596 Sealed crustless sandwich Abstract A sealed crustless sandwich for providing a convenient sandwich without an outer crust which can be stored for long periods of time without a central filling from leaking outwardly. The sandwich includes a lower bread portion, an upper bread portion, an upper filling and a lower filling between the lower and upper bread portions, a center filling sealed between the upper and lower fillings, and a crimped edge along an outer perimeter of the bread portions for sealing the fillings therebetween. The upper and lower fillings are preferably comprised of peanut butter and the center filling is comprised of at least jelly. The center filling is prevented from radiating outwardly into and through the bread portions from the surrounding peanut butter.
Inventors: Kretchman; Len C. (Fergus Falls, MN); Geske; David (Fargo, ND) Assignee: Menusaver, Inc. (Orrville, OH) Filed: December 8, 1997
U.S. Patent Documents 3083651 3690898 3767823 3769035 3862344 4382768 5853778
Other References "50 Great Sandwiches", Carole Handslip, pp. 81-84,86,95, 1994.
The real vista is NO AltaVista... (Score:1)
it is an OBVIOUS evolutionary step for search technology to take a step to distributed systems.
with the growth rate of the web proceeding like it is, do you expect that Inktomi (or anyone else like them) will be able to achieve anything beyond 20%???
Start here: http://www.peertal.com/ .
Re:We win either way... (Score:3)
At least we know that the inventor of the internet is currently unemployed, so he should be available as an expert witness to establish prior art.
shit!!!! (Score:1)
damn
that was probaly the most usefull moderation I ever did
now it's gone
maybe someone else with mod points will fix it
well I tried
Re:Don't just sit there, do something about it ! (Score:5)
The AltaVista spider identifies itself as Scooter, so HTTP_USER_AGENT will contain Scooter. If you're using Apache with mod_rewrite, something like the following should work:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Scooter
RewriteRule . / [F]
Which will return a Forbidden page for every request.
Did this before (Score:1)
The conclusions I reached were (1) their press releases had to be grossly overstating the breadth of their patents. Someone made an interesting point about patent abstracts -- the readable part up front -- vs claims, which actually determine what is protected by the patent. Abstracts can't be amended. Claims are mended all the time, like when the examiner points out that 19 out of 20 fail the tests of prior art and obviousness...
2. To have any validity at all to their wider claims they would not only have had to buy patent rights from the first search engines (maybe they did?), but also convince a court that you get a unique and non-obvious process simply by doing something on the internet that has long been done by hand, on single computers, and on other computer networks.
3. They probably have some valid claims on particular, narrowly construed, techniques. But considering the results I've had searching with Altavista, if they can keep others from copying their exact methods it's a good thing!
Re:Altavista Patents... (Score:2)
can't we create a "patent FAQ" and avoid this stupidity every time?
sueing "prior art" ? (Score:3)
Those "merits include prior art in the form of Yahoo. One of the most likely targets
It will only get sillyer anyway. Right now a Jamaican politician has a patent on "Electronic Voting". So any country that uses computers to conduct an election will owe him money. To make that politically acceptable he set up a trust that won't give him any of the money personally but will support charitable causes. Apparently serious windfalls are expected
Re:Indexing, Searching Patent? (Score:1)
Altavista Patents... (Score:5)
US5970497: Method for indexing duplicate records of information of a database [delphion.com]
US6138113: Method for identifying near duplicate pages in a hyperlinked database [delphion.com]
US6021409: Method for parsing, indexing and searching world-wide-web pages [delphion.com]
US6128690: System for remote memory allocation in a computer having a verification table contains information identifying remote computers which are authorized to allocate memory in said computer [delphion.com]
More can be found at Delphion's Intellectual Property Network [delphion.com].
--
I've got to admit... (Score:2)
If I had a buisness that was once a leader in it's field, and suddenly I was faced with the prospect of going out of buisness, I would be sorely tempted to beat people about the head with IP to keep from putting all my employees on the street.
However, it seems like there's lots of prior art. (See : A History of Search Engines [wiley.com]) So this is probably just a corporate form of rigor mortis. Besides, doesn't everyone use Google these days?
David Wetherell (Score:1)
He even looks like "SATAN" [internetworld.com]
Jeremiah
Like BT? (Score:3)
oh no. more patent madness (Score:1)
The patent is entitled, ``Method of Reading and Writing Files on Nonerasable Storage Media,'' and describes a method of achieving ``apparent erasability.'' This enables features such as ``packet writing'' of small files, ``drive-letter access,'' the ability to drag-and-drop files, and the capability to randomly erase separate files encoded on nonerasable or rewriteable DVD and CD-R optical disks used in laser recording/retrieval systems.
HP cd writers have had a context menu and task tray app to do this for years.
Just one more reason that I live in New Zealand
----
Drink Coffee - Do Stupid Things Faster And With More Energy!
Better Link (Score:1)
The front page link doesn't work for me unless I paste it into a browser window URL field manually. They must have some weird REFERER checking. Anyway, if it's any easier to copy it from here, this is the destination URL:
http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=A rticle&cid=FT3QCDYDDIC
Re:Altavista Patents... (Score:1)
Regardless of anything else, the more noise we make about silly patents, whether or not all of that fear is justified, the more likely we are to get people thinking about changing the system. And there is certainly no shortage of truly bad patents -- and lawyers itching to enforce them. The infamous Amazon.com "One-Click Patent" is one example we all know.
On a somewhat-related note, I just came acrooss tet another example of Megacorp sending a truckload of lawyers after some little kid: Hasbro vs. Dinobot.org [brassknuckles.net]. (From the we-wish-we-had-registered-that-domain-first file.)
low quality reporting (Score:2)
You don't "pay copyrights" for patents. In fact, patents have nothing to do with copyrights, not in the US and not in Britain.
If the Financial Times "legal correspondent" can't keep the difference between patents and copyrights straight, how accurate can the rest of the reporting be?
Re:Don't just sit there, do something about it ! (Score:1)
It could be used for spammers too.
Rather than helping dmoz to improve their search (Score:1)
>go thou and smooth it out. While you still can.
I would write it from scratch than going through their source code. The whole concept is just a simple program afterall.
It's not Altavista's fault (Score:2)
The problem is the patent office. If the American tax payers could force the patent office to foot the bill for all the legal fees resulting from a trivial or down right stupid patent, then Amazon and Altavista would never have gotten these silly patents issued in the first place and everyone would be much happier.
Laws were made to be challenged to the extreme, let's pass a better better law and stop all this sutpidity.
Wasn't Lycos around way before Altavista anyway? I remember back in the time off Trumpet Winsock seeing Lycos's page say 400,000 pages indexed! and being amazed. I don't remember Altavista being a twinkle in anyone's eye back then. If they were then why didn't they have altavista.com from the git-go? My $.02
G
Re:Maybe if they had -Said- something... (Score:1)
Think I'm nuts? Got one word for ya - Rambus. Course it didn't work out quite like they hoped. THey patented all the JEDIC SDRAM stuff then tried to extort the SDRAM companies. Even boasted about it to stock analysts, how patent royalties would become a large portion of their future income (since RDRAM was sucking so bad given the price and marginal benefit) THey got a couple Japanese companies to cave, but now a few have stood up and called Rambus on it - now Rambus will spend millions trying to extort millions fromteh manufacturers. They'll lose (since the rules of JEDIC required that they not patent stuff that was developed there) and so will we since the millions spent on these BS lawsuits will raise the prices for the consumer. As usual, the only winners will be the freaking lawyers.
Re:Don't just sit there, do something about it ! (Score:1)
this is why... (Score:1)
it's greed, and it isn't good (Score:3)
Mr. Whetherell tells us so himself: He warned the company would defend its patent rights "if necessary . . . to the letter of the law.", which tells us that questions of ethical behavior or technological innovation presumably don't matter as long as there is still a legal loophole to be pursued.
The greed that has surrounded the whole VC industry over the last few years has caused people to lose fortunes, stalled important research by drawing away good people, discouraged long-term investment in research by stable companies, and made it nearly impossible to share and build on each other's research results, both in computer science and in biotechnology.
What can you do about it? There are some ideas that probably do need to get funded in a VC environment, and there are some far-out ideas that probably are well suited to that kind of funding. But for the most part, it's probably better not to do business with VCs, not to solicit funding from them, and not to work for startups. Not much good can come of companies that are fueled mostly by greed and irrational expectations. If you have a good idea, you can almost certainly find many other ways of financing it and building a business around it.
Re:For the nth time... (Score:4)
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
Re:Why blame CMGI? (Score:1)
AltaVista banner ad (Score:1)
That's all. Thank you.
more patent madness (Score:4)
--
Bad Move! Someone May Crack AV Search Engine 3.0! (Score:1)
This is surprising? (Score:1)
Indexing, Searching Patent? (Score:5)
You make a list. You check it. Twice.
Shit, Santa's got prior art on this.
-k.
It's going to be just fine... (Score:5)
But before we start marching, let's just remember that what they say they own isn't the same as what they own. Until you see the patent asserted, and consider deeply its claims, you simply don't know how bad (or how silly) all this is. Particularly in the case of web portals, where there are fierce competitors, I wouldn't be too troubled -- these guys can (and will) take care of themselves. They have portfolios too, BTW, and will be quite content to assert those as counterclaims.
The turn of the millenium has had a few sea changes for patent owners, not terribly well-covered in the media. In late December, the Federal Circuit's opinion in Festo virtually turned upside-down the strength of patents where any claim was amended, directly or indirectly. Virtually every existing patent, but particularly every existing software patent, has involved some substantial prosecution history changes. This change in the scope of the so-called "Doctrine of Equivalents" will dramatically impact upon the already narrow scope given to patent claims by the Federal Courts.
Moreover, don't forget that the more nuts the claim, the more likely it is invalid. The less nuts the claim, the less likely it has been infringed. Its a difficult process to drive the patent truck through that tunnel between enforceability and validity, and in so doing, you will discover that the patent system is fairly effectively self-healing.
The combination of Festo and these other factors suggests to me that it isn't time to take up arms. Let's wait and see what patents they wish to assert, and against whom.
My guess, no one anywhere is filing any patent claims that aren't slam-dunks in the first quarter 2001, we're all waiting to see if the Supreme Court takes up Festo again.
David Wetherell is an idiot. (Score:1)
This man should be smacked away from anything having to do with business and should be kept from fucking over any more companies.
His latest escapade? Investing $13 million (I think that was the sum) in JustBalls.com [justballs.com]. Why in the hell would anyone invest in a company that sells Balls over the internet?
David, thank you for screwing over one of the best companies I've worked for. Appreciate it.
Money, money, everywhere (Score:3)
The recent stockholders meeting was a little tense, however, with little old ladies ready to wring Dave Wetherell's neck!
The Law of Karma (not Slashdot karma) (Score:1)
And in the best of all possible worlds, perhaps the Patent Office will start considering the idea of "prior art" a little more seriously after this...
I'm getting tired of these patents (Score:1)
I'm beginning to thing that we need to thin out the herd a bit, starting with the vulture capitalists and trial lawyers.
Re:sueing "prior art" ? (Score:2)
--
Re:what makes this different (Score:1)
But the news about ODPsearch being open-sourced is new. You can skip over the rest of the story. Ignore it. Just read the part about ODP. Ahhhhhhhh, that's nice.
Jamie McCarthy
Re:What if... (Score:1)
yes but (Score:2)
Okay we don't like altavista, no adds from altavista allowed on banner now.
Hmmm and intel have been pretty dodgy lately, no adds from them either.
And you know I never liked black people and I think too many banner adds have them...
Lets just not go down the road, if the people read this story and all dislike altavista now they'll make it their own choice to ignore the add.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:oh no. more patent madness (Score:1)
Which will shortly be shut down due to patent fuckwittery.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:We win either way... (Score:1)
It's going to be interesting to see if the court will uphold patenting "-what the Internet is-"
By "What the Internet is", he refers to "a distributed set of databases", not indexing it, which is what the patent is about
This patent is really a masterpiece of shit, but your argument (even if leading to a somewhat reasonable conclusion) is flawed
Some Things To Do: (Score:5)
1) Block/Redirect by referer. That way, if you've already been indexed, you can redirect Altavista users to a page explaining Altavista's infamies and directing them to a more ethical search engine. Additionally, if you have legal firepower, you could let Altavista know that you know they're indexing your site and that you charge to let you site be indexed.
2) Please see the children of this comment [slashdot.org] for suggestions about robots.txt and blocking/redirecting by User Agent (Altavista's is called Scooter).
I think there is a Webmaster's guild somewhere. Also, perhaps the w3c could weigh in.
--
Re:Don't just sit there, do something about it ! (Score:2)
I don't remember the first time I used a search engine, but I suspect it was in the autumn of 1993.
IIRC, the search engine I used, was either the WWW Worm or WebCrawler (most likely the former at first, see below), and AltaVista came a while later as a "revolutionizing" new thing from DEC, partially to promote their Alpha 21164 processors (launched in 1995).
Search Engine Watch [searchenginewatch.com] seems to agree [searchenginewatch.com] with some of what I remember; AltaVista opening in December 1995 and WebCrawler in April 1994.
That's about where you get when it comes to prior art; the WWW wasn't much before 1993, and DEC most certainly wasn't the first player in the open. Proving prior art to most of the claims should be relatively easy, unless the patents are so specific that they only cover the things that AltaVista did and nobody else had done before (I don't quite see how that happened, the clue about AltaVista was that it was fast).
Archie beats this stuff by years (Score:3)
Archie (for those of you who weren't working on the Internet before 1995 :-) was a distributed data gathering and indexing system for anonymous FTP sites. Having taking a cursory read through CMGI's press releases & patents, I can tell you that most of that stuff followed the prior art of myself and the rest of the Archie team, from Archie versions 1 through 3.
If you want any background on this, feel free to contact me.
Alan Emtage (aemtage@mediapolis.com)
Re:I've got to admit... (Score:2)
What you really mean is "to provide some value to shareholders and venture capatalists as the company's prospects explode these leeches (shareholders & VCs) demand that they do anything to get them their money!"
Ill bet they dont give a damn about their employees.
Re:Don't just sit there, do something about it ! (Score:2)
Re:And this person patented the process where? (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5)
Re:Don't just sit there, do something about it ! (Score:2)
Who, exactly, is being wronged in this ethical travesty? Since banner ad contracts generally get worked out before stories get written, would you prefer that Slashdot not write stories that piss off their advertisers? Or should Slashdot refuse to run the ad, letting CMGi keep the money to be spent on placing it in a better-targeted location?
When all's said and done, it's CMGi who winds up getting the bad end of the deal, because they paid for poor ad placement.
Re:For the nth time... (Score:2)
------------
a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
Giving you all notice... (Score:2)
...of my patent application involving
Consider youselves warned.
--
Patent Office (Score:2)
Sack all the guys at the patent office and use it as a kindergarden....perhaps patents will have some sense then ;-)
Oh the irony of it all.... (Score:2)
Slashdot shows AV banner ad as I read this. (Score:4)
How ironic.
I wonder, can still use grep or do I have to pay some asshole who lives off the backs of others?
And this person patented the process where? (Score:3)
That's enough to build some talking points:
And you know the entertaining part? If the "indexing patent" turns out to be effective in court, search engines are liable to move web sites to offshore locations (Seahaven? :-)) where the offending patents do not apply.
Re:The Law of Karma (not Slashdot karma) (Score:3)
I wonder what AltaVista's improvements over prior indexing tools are, though. "Your Honor, our system has one key feature never before proposed in an indexing system for distributed data--namely, humongousness. Of lesser importance, but still significant, are our introduction of Searchliciousness and The Wow! Factor."
Plagiarism... (Score:2)
So, do you feel bad about it, or are you flattered that somebody will actually hunt down your posts to gain karma?
Re:We win either way... (Score:2)
Actually, Wetherell is saying the internet is a distributed set of databases, which I personally don't agree with myself.
-- iCEBaLM
Re: (Score:2)
Re:And this person patented the process where? (Score:2)
It's a software patent. Nobody could file it in any European Country!
Wordsmithing (Score:2)
Soon, and very soon, the Internet will render itself useless, when traffic exceeds its capacity and or speed requirements abandon it. At this point CMGI and all the other patent grubbers will realize their technicalities will render their patents useless. You see all of their patents will be for the "Internet," and won't apply to any new technologies. Technically speaking, that is.
----------------------
We win either way... (Score:2)
Still, I would like to watch this pursued, because:
-
If they sue for patent infringement and get shot down, it will be a victory for the Internet. However, the notion of "Intellectual Property" not being absolutely ownable is going cast a cloud of uncertainty over many IP and internet related businesses. Ultimately, this could cause a downturn in the economy.
-
If they sue and win, we can all look forward to "owning" the "Next Big Thing". As coders, our salaries are directly related to the fact that someone can "own" an idea. We merely need to organize our efforts, patent the blatantly obvious, and bilk Corporate America - then we will see a change in patent law.
Either way, we can exploit this to our advantage.Re:Don't just sit there, do something about it ! (Score:2)
For the nth time... (Score:4)
This is a really popular question, I seem to get it every time I post a story that is in any way negative about a company that has ever advertised on Slashdot.
I really have no control over it. Let me explain this to you. Our editorial and writing staff are not influenced by, nor do we influence, our staff that buys banner ads. There is a total disconnect there. They can sell ads to whoever they want, I have -- let me say this again because apparently it's such an awe-inspiringly difficult concept that few people are able to comprehend it -- I have no control over whose ads appear on a story I post.
Brace for reality: most places consider this a good thing. You know, like, not having the ad for Famous Ray's Website appear on the page facing the flattering review of Famous Ray's Website?
Like, not having the marketing department staffers come sit down in my cubicle and say "we'd like you to review Famous Ray's Website, and we think they're really good, you'll probably agree with us, we hope."
I don't know those staffers. I don't want to know those staffers. They have never done that and it doesn't come up because we don't talk to each other.
While it is a little annoying to me that some companies whose policies I disagree with *cough* DoubleClick continue to put banner ads on our webpages, I will not try to influence ad sales, because then ad sales will come try to influence me. They leave me alone; I leave them alone.
Don't like it? Tough. Think that this is an "oversight" or that this makes Slashdot or myself somehow corrupt or stupid or evil? Please go away.
(Sorry. I'm in a bad mood. I just posted a story duplicate -- except for the dmoz.org search tool, that's cool and it's new, go download it and mess with it.)
Jamie McCarthy
Re:And this person patented the process where? (Score:2)
Ahh, but most countries have treaties with each other (including the US) which makes a patent in one country as good as one in any other. The specific form it takes is if I have a patent in the US, and I want to sue you in England I can file for a patent in the UK (I need an UK patent for this to work), but the fileing date of the patent in the UK will be the filing date of the US patent, not the day I file in the UK. So I just get my UK patent if/when I need it based on my US patent.
Note that if I have a patent in the US, there isn't a requirement for the UK to accept the patent, but they are very likely to do so, and if they do it counts as if filed on the US date.
Re:And this person patented the process where? (Score:2)
Lots of examples of why software patents just doesn't make sense.
Greetings Joergen
Re: (Score:2)
Re:It's going to be just fine... (Score:3)
Domestic software patents cost between $15K to $25K apiece. I'm glad that is "nothing" to you.
The main use of patents is not to get royalties, but to shut down competitors via injunction and protect a monopoly. Injunctive relief can be obtained before a trial begins, then delay tactics further bleed the defendent.
Temporary injunctions in patent cases are extraordinarily rare, except in the clearest of cases entailing literal infringement, and then only when there exists no plausible case against validity at the time of the hearing. Statistically, the number of injunctions issued each year are insignificant.
Defending against even the sillliest patent claim takes a lot of lawyer time. You may also lose customers who are concerned about your business' future.
Granted, this is true about most any lawsuit. It is particularly true about patent cases. The other side of the poker table however -- it costs a fortune to wage a lawsuit as well.
How much money was spent litigating the Festo case? Maybe Yahoo can afford it, but can you?
No. Festo was litigated from District Court through Summary Judgment and trial, then to the Federal Circuit and the Supreme Court. It was then remanded back to the Federal Circuit for an opinion before a three-judge panel, and then once more the entire Circuit en banc. The legal fees would be ruinous in virtually any scanario.
Such is the virtue of Stare Decisis. Now that the case has been decided, you don't have to fight that battle any more -- you simply cite it to your District Court judge, who will cower and apply it routinely.
One finds interesting legalese about IP law when searching Google for "Federal Circuit opinion Festo".
Hey, if you're that good at finding things, why not go one click deeper? One finds interesting substance when actually reading the opinion. [emory.edu]
Seriously, of course the patent system (the legal system as a whole, in fact; but also the government, media and just about anything else) can be abused by an entity that cares not about the expenditure of arbitrary funds in an unrighteous cause. The point is that this is not unique to the patent system or to software patents, and that mere repetition of statements about an undifferentiated fear that an unnamed patent will be asserted against a non-profitable competitor, is just engaging in demagoguery.
You anticipate, without even seeing a single patent claim, that Google will be temporarily enjoined by the end of the first quarter and unable to raise a defense. Even without seeing a single patent claim, I doubt it, particularly in view of recent changes in the patent letter. Indeed, for precisely the reasons you raise -- the extraordinary expense of prosecuting a patent lawsuit -- I tend to doubt that the case would even be brought until Festo is addressed by the Supreme Court.
Of course, I would be interested in seeing the patent before I came to a considered, informed opinion.
So, write me again on the last day of March, and we shall see who was correct.
Re:Don't just sit there, do something about it ! (Score:2)
This is all just noise from them anyway, they may be able to bully a few companies into paying royalties but if they go to trial they will probably lose. At least if these [slashdot.org] are the patents they're talking about, because they where all filed in 1998. Search engine technology was well established before these patents where filed. I remember using Lycos in '95 or '96. Even AltaVista was around before '98. So finding prior art should not be a problem.
*slight* variation (Score:2)
Re:It Gets Worse! (Score:2)
Okay, when I started reading this, I was chuckling because of the poster's apparent creativity.
United States Patent 6,004,596 Sealed crustless sandwich>
Okay, now I'm scared. Apparently the patent [delphion.com] is quite real indeed.
A sad day for PB&J-loving kids everywhere.
--
Re:Don't just sit there, do something about it ! (Score:5)
Is there a webmaster organization with enough members to confront Alta Vista and tell them that if they persist in this action that we will charge them for every webpage that they index?
Re:what makes this different (Score:2)
sig:
Re:the implications are scarry (Score:2)
But do see if your lawyer will agree to pay himself out of the proceeds of a countersuit -- for harassment, filing frivolous suits, etc. Not that I care if your lawyer gets paid, but if he can take money away from these jerks...
robots.txt (Score:2)
It's a file you can put in your web root that (well behaved) spiders look for.
You can use it to tell spiders not to index your whole site, or certain parts of it.
Normally good for keeping bots out of places they shouldn't be, but it can be used to ban bots.
Or, you could just drop any traffic coming from *.altavista.com...
--K
Re:And this person patented the process where? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What if... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Oh the irony of it all.... (Score:3)
Most newspapers do not let the advertising department and editorial department have much contact. That is you can buy an ad that runs in the cooking section, but until the paper is printed you won't nessicarly find out that the column you are under is bashing your product. (In practice the finial copy editor would catch this and request a simple re-arrangement, but that isn't for sure) You can also buy an add under "Dear Abby", but you are not allowed to know what the column for the day is. For news stories you never know what will run on the same page as you. (Layout will try to keep ads conflicting with stories seperate, but they are not required to. The editorial and adversisers will have no knowlege of conflicts until after the paper is printed, and the layout editors have no control over content, just where the content is.
While this system isn't perfect it does tend to keep conflicts of interest down.
Web patent generation algorithm (Score:3)
1) Read fortune
2) Add the phrase "in bed" the end of the fortune.
Web patent generation algorithm:
1) Read previous patent
2) Add the phrase "on the web"
3) Mask in legalese
4) Apply for shiny new patent
(Note: This method is patent pending....
Re:sueing "prior art" ? (Score:2)
Google that will wind up in an embroiled legal battle, and neither company can claim prior art.
Kind of funny, because google themselfs have patented there method of indexing the web, which probably relies heavly on this "prior" patent for indexing the web.
in googles case i think there patent is valid, there search method really is ingenious.
-Jon
Streamripper [sourceforge.net]
Ho-Hum... (Score:2)