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Patents

Altavista's Planned Patent Lawsuits 180

Posted by CmdrTaco from the oh-thats-just-peachy dept.
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?
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Altavista's Planned Patent Lawsuits More

Altavista's Planned Patent Lawsuits

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  • These are not new (the three requirements you list, I mean--there are new rules, but those requirements have been there all along) so I wouldn't hold my breath for any great improvement in the quality of patent examinations due to these "new rules."
  • Slashdot shows Compaq banner ads. Compaq owns Altavista. Therefore, Slashdot is supporting Altavista.
    Umm...thanks for playing, but Compaq sold Altavista long ago to some company nobody had ever heard of called CMGI.
  • This is just classic. Didn't CompuServe or Unisys try to pull something like this with GIF? I know there are several other examples of companies doing this as a last gasp.

    Look, let's be honest. The ONLY reason this is happening is because CMGI can't make a dime anymore. They are a failed business. That's why all of their dot boms are closing down. Their stock has tanked. So, how do they make money? Sue everyone under the sun for using "thier" technology. Yeah. Good luck.

    And you wonder why CMGI is a regular on fuckedcompany.com [fuckedcompany.com].
  • Ah, good. Thanks for explaining that. But then I often see press releases that must be based on the (ridiculously over broad) abstract. Of course, one reason for these press releases is to attract investors, and the broader the claim the better, but isn't this skirting on fraud?
  • the _claims_ define the invention, not the abstract.

    Yabbut the claims are too long for a Slash comment. Hence the link (ugly URL and all).

    You could go get the claims yourself and summarize them for us, instead of just complaining about being ignored.

  • By the way -- my experience in using A-V for searches indicates that any narrowly defined patents they have probably cover algorithms no one would want to imitate.

  • Re:Vote with your robots.txt (Score:3)

    by q000921 ( 235076 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2001 @01:56PM (#500924)
    If you have to rely on AltaVista for people to find your site, you're already in trouble.
  • The problem is not all software patents are bad. There are some very good software patents that were very diserving (the recently expired RSA patent comes to mind). Although that patent was annoying to the open source security movement, that is not reason enough to make it a stupid patent. THe problem isn't allowing the patent office to grant these kinds of patents, the problem is the people passing these are the same people passing drug and industrial ones.
  • I'm sure this will be moderated down, but here goes anyway.

    I find it funny that the first time I saw this article on the front page of dear old / ., that the accompanying banner add was for the Alta Vista search engine 3.0. It is funny how technologies break sometimes.

    My university had a similar gaf. Some students were shot up at a local party by some unhappy gang members/thugs and the story was carried on the web page of the local Fox affiliate. Unfortunately, the banner ad (sporting the new university advertising slogan about being everything to everybody) was displayed above a headline that went something like One Killed, and 4 Injured in University Shooting.

    Stuff like this will continue until technology and people get smarter. Come to think of it, this holds true for the software patent issue as well.

    my .02

  • What concerns me most about this is the effect it could have on exellent free search engines programs like ht:://dig [htdig.org] and swish.

    Given that using one of the big search engines to index content or buying the egine for your own site has become a market niche, it isn't hard to imagine AVs next target being the elimination of free products using their <sarcasm>oh so unique and never before thought of search techniques</sarcasm>

  • > Last I checked, there were many many search engines.

    And that is why everyone is up in arms on slashdot - because we want to keep it like this.

    On the other hand, many search engines are disappearing anyway or taking their data from a single data source like altavista or inktomi.

    Also, the simple application of database technology or a perl hash to create an index would hardly qualify as patentable.

  • Wow! What can you expect from a company that lists it's stock price on it's Home Page [cmgi.com]

    Greed in the extreme. <Sarcasm>Gotta Love It.</Sarcasm>

    Soo.. These are the ones responsible for making altavista go down the tubes in a hurry? I used to be an exclusive user of AltaVista, back when Digital had it. I slowly drifted from using it, as it became more of a lame portal than a decent search engine.

    Now, I use Google exclusively. After hearing this, it makes me glad I do.

    ---

  • Why yes, banning the AltaVista spider will make their database so much less accurate than it is already. After all, AltaVista is the premier search engine on the web! The content is always up to date, and the accuracy of results returned is superb, and never affected by anything so crass as bushells of money!

    Seriously, I'll doubtless do this, although I doubt AV will notice unless big sites start doing it. More to the point, patents can do you good - AV could survive as a patent holding company, with no actual products but a swag of lawyers. Look at Rambus.

  • Ve vere just following orders!

    Seriously, the moral vacuum into which people persuade themselves they step in corporate life is an absurdity.

  • Well, isn't this the nature of enterprise itself? If you couldn't save time and resources using these services, then it wouldn't be profitable. These people are in it for pay, AHEM, JUST LIKE WE ALL ARE. People that provide unique services that are useful deserve it... after all you pay them (in one way or another) whether it is money or eyes on an ad, to be there and enjoy the effort of others. Besides, what is the true enforcement of all of this? This environment is a free-for-all, and if they lock down one little corner of it, one of you clever little bastards out there will find a whole new way to do it in say, about, THREE DAYS. And screw the lawyers.... Lawyers are a bunch of semi-smart (not truly intelligent) people that couldn't decide what they wanted to do in college, but knew that they wanted to be professionals. Don't ever fear those bastards. They will always be chasing coattails. To paraphrase Dune: "Those that can destroy it, control it." They can't even reformat it. F' those guys. They will never be at the front, never be competition. They haven't stopped a damn thing for a nanosecond on the net, haven't removed innovation for their own personal gain, HAVEN'T ACCOMPLISHED EVEN ONE MAJOR GOAL THAT THEIR NEFARIOUS BOSSES HAVE SET OUT FOR THEM TO TAKE FROM OTHERS. They haven't a chance to do any damage at all. All I ask is that you look into the idea of fair compensation. They want to rule the roost, jack customers and squash competition? Then they are really looking in to a streetfight they can't win, because they don't have the knowledge of even one of you brilliant little bastards. SO KEEP YOUR HEAD UP AND WIN.

  • They hold the patent for a WWW search engine!!!! (Score:4)

    by Alomex ( 148003 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2001 @09:37AM (#500933) Homepage
    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

  • 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...

  • 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.
  • Sure, why not, never heard of the .gif copyright? Compuserve has been attributed with owning the copyright on Graphic Interchange Format and Unisys, LZW compression. Not long ago Unisys was pursuing software makers who incorporated GIF (and inherently LZW) into their packages without license from Unisys. AFAIK they are still on this track.
    British Telecom (BT) believes they hold the patent on the Hyperlink (although filmed evidence from the sixties suggests they were not the first to discover this idea), but they're still trying to collect on it.
    It's all stupid, greedy and wrong, but you gotta elect leaders and hold them accountable to cleaning this mess up and barring more of it from happening.

    --

  • suck it.
    Although they already do I guess. Av used to be my se of choice. that is until they where portalized.

    Oh well. I guess it was bound to happen.
  • Since when did these guys own the patent on indexing a database? The soul reason they have a patent seems to be based on indexing a database that is stored in more than one location. How the hell can location make an idea unique enough to be granted a patent?

    I could take every patent in existance, find some way of making it take place across a network, and I'd be granted a new patent.

    I've stated in many times before. Just because something that used to take place on one machine, now takes place on a network doesn't mean it can be re-patented.
  • Please see my reply to your other comment. Compaw doesn't own Altavista, they used to.

    I do have to agree with you about the hipocracy, it's the same type of thing as how we don't really get any "doubleclick are bad, mmmkay" stories since Slashdot started using them. Similar to the "web-bug" stories. All the stories are trolls, saying what the slashdot hordes want to hear to try and get the most eyes looking at banners to make more money for VA Linux. Well if their results are anything to go buy, we're going to see a lot more of it...

  • Re:Coming soon... (Score:4)

    by Sodium Attack ( 194559 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2001 @08:00AM (#500940)
    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.

  • CMGI's entire business model has fallen apart...well in fact, they never really had one. CMGI's entire business strategy was predicated on two early investments: Yahoo and Lycos. After these paid out, CMGI had nothing to bank on.

    Alta Vista is never going public - I think Wetherell accepts this now, so he is looking for alternate revenues from this product. Look to see more suspicious revenue models from CMGI - most of their other incubated companies are dead or very near dead, and CMGI itself is in very serious trouble.

  • I meant compaq not compaw. Damn fingers.

  • DEATH to holding companies! (Score:4)

    by swordgeek ( 112599 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2001 @08:02AM (#500943) Journal
    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.

  • That is US05864863. Also check out US06021409, which is the continuation.
    The first Claim from that really is a troll:
    I claim:
    1. A system for indexing stored information, comprising: a processor configured to parse the stored information into indexable words, each indexable word representing a portion of the stored information [and (ii)] or an attribute of one or more portions of the stored information;
    and
    a memory configured to store index entries, each index entry including a word entry representing a unique one of the indexable words and one or more location entries, each of the one or more location entries indicating a respective location of the unique one of the indexable words within the stored information.

    Again, I find it fascinating *spock eyebrow* how patents are issued by the patent office without giving a clue what part of the patent actually is considered the smart part.

    Obviously, looking at the fact that they have about 40 pages, which is a lot even for a bloated patent application, they don't patent search engines, but an implementation with several features of it; unfortunately, it is completely unclear whether the patented thing is in the sum of all features, or whether reproducing just a single feature or even claim 1 would be a violation.

    It seems that the whole purpose of the law in society is to set up laws so as to give people something to harry other people, regardless of reason. I guess that system works fine, because if people don't like something, they can sue, even if for a different reason. This system ws invented ages past: Just accusing someone of using Voodoo(TM) or Witchcraft(TM) against you and bringing him to a kind of court for that works too.

    Of course, again slashdot is falling for a troll. This post should be up once Altavista is actually suing, not when the CEO is just boasting about the company. Imagine all those freaks blocking scooter on their routers for no reason.


  • I used to work for CMGI, and I know Dave
    Wetherell personally. He's a bald-headed coot.
    This patent idiocy is exactly the kind of crap
    I expect from a person like him
  • Could they get damages assessed for use after the patent was granted but before they were notified of infringment? Isn't the responsibility of any possible infringing party to monitor and know what patents have been issued to avoid infringement? Just as one is legally responsible for knowing every law ("ignorance of the law is no excuse")?

    Doesn't sound logical, but law is not necessarily logical.

  • Comment removed (Score:5)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2001 @04:46PM (#500947)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • If Digital wanted purely "defensive" protection, it would have been sufficient to file disclosures; that would have been a lot cheaper, too. Patents are never purely "defensive".

    However, they may have filed them in order to have bargaining chips in case other companies claimed infringement against other patents. That's not purely defensive, but it's still different from going out and sueing other people.

  • Ok, it's Wednesday and I was up too late last night, my eyes are red and I broke another suspension part on my car taking a hairpin at 40 mph. But this, this makes up for it. Ginger, the much ballyhooed invention, patented by Dean Kamen, bigger than the world wide web, is finally revealed. Look here to see this wonderful invention in action. [idleworm.com] Forget a new stablizer bolt for the turbo, I want one of these babies for my morning commute. Once they get the kinks out, of course.

    --

  • While the AltaVista search engine isn't bad, it's clearly losing against Google. Now, those who can't win in the market, by delivering a superior product, go out and start patent lawsuits against their competitors. Many other companies have done that, and the short-term interests of venture vultures like CMGI are driving this process.

    Perhaps you can express your displeasure by not letting them index your web site (robots.txt) and not using them for searches.

  • CMGI has a legally enforceable duty to its shareholders to maximize its value, and to maintain and protect the value of its corporate assets.

    Two more words: "corporate goodwill." It's a balancing act, but goodwill goes on the balance sheet too.

  • Hum... I first heard this second-hand from the company attorneys at the Institute for Systems Biology, then saw it repeated in the news. However, a search of the USPTO database for, e.g., "DNA" and "pet food" mostly returned reasonable results (e.g. recombinant enzymes for degrading sugars in feed products).

    Since I haven't been able to find such examples, I can only assume that either 1. the patents have been filed but not yet granted or 2. I've been trolled.

  • amazon patents (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Seem to recall that amazon also have a great idea called "thumbnailed gallery".. A brand new revolutionary techonology/idea where big pictures are represented in a gallery with small sized pictures..

  • 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.

    They seem to think they've got the whole field covered by their patents. Take this quote:

    [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.

    Guess it might not matter if you use different methods if they have a broad enough patent.

    Patents make companies look good on paper and feel good at heart.

    Corporations with a heart? Bwahahahahaha! Good one!

    To do otherwise is to cast an umbra on the very ideals of property that bind our society together.

    Whatever. The right thing to do would be to kick the management of the PTO out of the building and put people with a freaking clue in their places. Then stop letting the PTO be a source of revenue for the government. In fact, it should be given its own funding to allow it to hire competent examiners at competitive wages. This is just for starters. There's a whole laundry list of reforms that the PTO is desperately in need of. Until we get them done, we'll always have to deal with these kinds of garbage patents.

  • Besides, the themes are pretty cute. I like Google's interface - Altavista's just too crowded. |)

  • I don't see how anyone could get an indexing related patent. Indexing has been around since before computers.

    So by your logic, Eli Whitney should have been denied a patent for an invention which automated a manual process that already existed (removing cotton seeds)?

    but even then I think the Romans, Greek, Egyptians, et. al. also had forms of indexing

    They probably did. They also probably removed cotton seeds by hand.

    I'm not saying the AltaVista patent (or software patents in general) should be valid, just that your argument is invalid.


    ---------
  • Okay, so now they have figured out that you can't sell everything they can think of on the internet.

    So instead, they patent everything they can think of, and file lawsuits.

    I have to go find some law firms I can invest in now...
  • And speaking of search engines, long ago CMGI also bought the pioneering Lycos and took it public, making tons of money for still more geeks. They took an underperforming asset and polished it into something valuable, and geeks benefited.

    CMGI at one point owned a fair portion of Lycos stock, but they never "owned" the company. As for "underperforming", at the time CMGI took stock in Lycos and Yahoo, both were doubling page views every month. How do you get "underperforming" out of that? And let me assure you that the yprovided absolutely no management guidance to Yahoo. They simply bought the stock when it was low and sold it when it was high.

  • "It won't be long before we (individually) can all be sued into a state of indenture for violating patents.." on our genes, which are being issued right now. How many (thousands of) patents are going through right now on gene sequences that *you* are currently using in your own genetic code? Bad lifeform!! Stop using that gene!
  • Well, it's obvious: CMGI cares about CMGI *a lot*, mainly about its share price. Funny enough, a higher valuation for AltaVista would improve that metric a lot

    So, why not sue a few hapless competitors based on trivial patents? Perhaps this will somehow trick investors into thinking AV is doing something profitable and/or the perverse US legal system will actually *make* them profitable...

  • Sue the entire Internet? Require every Internet user to pay an "AltaVista" tax? Cut off all noncompliant sites from search queries? Or perhaps even more nefarious acts?

    Ugh. Ever since Compaq started holding the reins of Altavista, they have become more megalomaniacal by the minute.

  • Don't they have to have a history of trying to protect their patent in order to have the right to "go after" offenders now?

    Nope, you're confusing trademark law with patent law. Patents are routinely enforced in this manner. In fact, there is a type of patent known as a "submarine patent" which is much more devious than even this scheme. Basically the patent is kept pending for as long as possible through various legal tricks so that many companies begin infringing on it before they can even know it exists. Then when it finally passes it catches everyone completely by surprise when the patent owner starts suing everyone and their dogs. These have been largely eliminated now I believe due to new regulations that mandate that patents be revealed after 18 months (IIRC) regardless of whether they have been approved or not.

    but I am truly angered that they wait for it to become common place before trying to enforce it. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

    Actually it was smart, smart, smart of them to do in order to maximise their gains. It's just our patent laws and PTO management that are stupid, stupid, stupid.

  • 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.
  • Altavista wasn't the first search engine (unless it wasn't public for a few years). I remember using the World Wide Web Worm, and WebSpider back in 1994.

    If the patent came out in 2000, in what year was it claimed? Surely those search engines are older?
  • I'm not clear on the technical details of the patents, but how do you patent something like indexing? Is the code patented, or is anything that indexes in violation. And this goes for the rest of their patents.

    And how would they enforce these patents? And is the scope for their patents only for the web? the 'net? All media?

  • Yeah, who do they think they are, BT?
  • Some of the real brains are probably still working at the DEC...er..Compaq research labs!

  • I don't know which actually was developed first, but I used webcrawler long before I used altavista.
  • Add a useragent testing to your webpage. if it detects Altavista's "scooter", send it a message, "FSCK OFF, CMGI".
  • I believe that InfoSeek was actually the first commercially-produced Internet search engine..? I had a ``premiere'' account with them that cost about $10/mo. to buy access into their more detailed search database.

    As far as I know, the only reason they stopped offering the premiere service was because of the newly-created free services such as AltaVista.

    This was somewhere around 1994. I don't remember seeing AltaVista until 1995 or so.
  • Yup. Unisys (I think) owned the patent and was going to try and charge for every GIF out there. Forced the creation of PNG- basically the same but without the proprietary algorithm.

    Oh well.
  • At one time Altavista bought a tool that made a map of the "nodes" or whatever of a search and let you filter on the nodes to refine the search. This was really cool althought it was not perfect. Someone at Altavista soon realized that this map took up space that could be used for banner ads, so the whole feature was flushed down the toilet. Altavista could sue itself- they would be sure to win.

  • (Off the "AltaVista" topic, but still about IP...)

    Unisys (I think) owned the patent and was going to try and charge for every GIF out there.

    Specifically, I believe it was a patent on the compression algorithm used - technically, you can use GIF's without worrying about patent issues if you either have them uncompressed or use some other compression method. Problem there is that uncompressed GIF's are naturally huge, and I suspect it would take forever to get all the gif-reading programs (browsers, etc.) to implement the "alternate compression".

    Of course, that's what .png's are for. If mng [libmng.com] ever catches on (Mozilla/Netscape 6+ and Konqueror already support it, and I suspect if Gnome's browser doesn't already, it will very soon), we'll finally have a replacement for animated GIF's, too.

    The big question on my mind, though, is:
    Unisys' patent runs out next year, as I recall. When it does, will everybody run back to .GIF and animated .GIF, or can .PNG and .MNG catch on and take over anyway?


    A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.

  • Holy Goatsex, Batman! (Score:5)

    by Bonker ( 243350 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2001 @08:08AM (#500987)
    "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 (Score:3)

    by dattaway ( 3088 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2001 @08:15AM (#500992) Homepage Journal
    Time to ipchain deny the dec.com spiders from sites if they want to play selfish games.
  • Could they get damages assessed for use after the patent was granted but before they were notified of infringment? Isn't the responsibility of any possible infringing party to monitor and know what patents have been issued to avoid infringement? Just as one is legally responsible for knowing every law ("ignorance of the law is no excuse")?

    Exactly right.

    Doesn't sound logical, but law is not necessarily logical.

    Well put. Too often science/engineering/tech types try to understand law by divining the general principles, and extrapolating what the specific laws ought to be from those general principles. But while this approach works well in science, it does not apply to law.

  • Two things: the slipshod search for prior art and the bizarre definition of prior art (if it wasn't published it didn't exist.)

    On the first I will wholeheartedly agree with you. As to the second, pray tell me how patent examiners are supposed to find this unpublished prior art? Perhaps you expect them to be clairvoyant, so they know that Frederick Q. Warzelheimer actually invented the very thing described in the patent 15 years ago, but kept it in his basement and never told anyone? (The privacy zealots here would have a fit!)

  • However, they may have filed them in order to have bargaining chips in case other companies claimed infringement against other patents. That's not purely defensive, but it's still different from going out and sueing other people.

    This is what I meant by defensive use. They use them to keep other companies off their backs.

  • Lawsuits as a business strategy (Score:3)

    by xgray ( 96047 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2001 @08:17AM (#501002) Homepage
    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.
  • User-Agent: Scooter
    Disallow: *

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

  • It is a very obvious technique, but the thing that pisses me off about these types of "lawsuites" (as law is a loose term to begin with the term lawsuites covers everything now from real law to Fluffy the poodle got a bad haircut and it depressed her type of cases) is that nobody sues until aboslutely everybody is using the technology.

    Don't they have to have a history of trying to protect their patent in order to have the right to "go after" offenders now? There is no way in hell that these morons could have had their heads buried in the sand so far that they just now realized that other people are using this technique. I think the patenting technique is highly questionable. And the idea that a patent can stay good for so long when it comes to Internet ideas is just ludicrous.

    Now, if the patent was for something truly novel and wonderful and amazing (in other words, non-obvious) instead of something that any group of morons with two computers and a database would dream up on a bad day, then I could see it. But a patent on something so bloody obvious that hasn't been enforced until it is completely common is just stupid.

    I may have been annoyed if they went after the first few other search engines to use this technique, but I am truly angered that they wait for it to become common place before trying to enforce it. Stupid, stupid, stupid. And the nice thing is that the patent office and the law are on the side of the stupid. Grrrr.

  • if I have to take it on the chin to show AV, that's what I'll do

    Versus the slacktivism approach: "I don't like it, so I'll whine about it on Slashdot, but if it's actually going to COST me anything to do anything about it, I won't."

    Of course, I'm waiting to see whether the lawsuits materialize, and if they do, whether they're nuisance suits based on absurdly broad patents. It is possible they're patenting a relatively small innovation and people should be paying them a licensing fee, after all.

  • It doesn't matter if Webcrawler indexed pages long before the patent was issued if they never described the technology in public.

    Good point. However Webcrawler was a project from the University of Washington which was very public about their aims and methods, as academia usually is.

  • 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 don't think they have a monopoly on this, do they? Last time I checked one could go down to the county courthouse or look in the newspaper to see the results of court cases. Many opinions in federal cases have even been linked from /. for all to read. Lexis may have a copyright on the format in which they provide this information, but a sufficiently-organized and motivated national team of internet court reporters could probably provide an equivalent service.

  • What the hell, that's completely against the 30 year spirit of the Internet - It's always been a work together for the common good, not stealing the work of others.

    Nobody should be paying anybody for the rights to implement similar services on the Internet. What if Tim Berners-Lee started demanding money for using his invention - The web itself. What if Vinton Cerf started charging money for using all the things he invented - TCP/IP, etc?

    We are the ones who built this world, these companies are here only by our leave, and they should certainly obey the traditions of our world or get back out of it. The rule of the Internet has always been "If you get something, give something else back". These CGMI type companies are just thinking they can rape and pillage with no thought of the long term effects.

    I just added them to my robots.txt. Fuckheads.

  • THe problem isn't allowing the patent office to grant these kinds of patents, the problem is the people passing these are the same people passing drug and industrial ones.

    Bunk! The USPTO examination staff is divided into hundreds of art groups and subgroups. To get to work in one of an art group, an examiner must have specialized training for those classifications of art areas examined by that group.

    An index to the extensive USPTO classification system can be found here [uspto.gov]

    While it was not always so (there was a time when USPTO did not have software examiners on staff), the PTO does, and has for some time, had software examiners who pass primarily and virtually exclusively on patent in that art area.
  • I wouldn't get too worried about this development. CMGI, IdeaLab, ICG, etc. are all on the ropes. There business models were predicated on the notion that the market can absorb vast numbers of new businesses being hatched every month. We now know this is unrealistic.

    None of these holding companies has a single offering that the larger market is interested in. Outside of Alta Vista, CMGI doesn't have one product of interest. These holding companies are fading fast.

  • Unlimited Liability (Score:3)

    by Hairy1 ( 180056 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2001 @08:31AM (#501032) Homepage

    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 :-)

  • See...once a patent is granted, they apply it retroactively to the time of filing!

    Why? Logic dictates that no one could possibly have been using it before they filed for a patent, right?

    Well, of course someone was, because they didn't actually make it up. What sucks is that any one who wants to prove different has to demonstrate this to invalidate the patent. If you can come up with a description of this phenomenon (ie, indexing or prior search engines, in this instancee) which was *published* before the patent was *filed*, then that counts as "existing in the prior art" and the patent is invalid.

    That's the real problem, is that the patent clerks don't always know all the time just exactly how to check for something considered to be "prior art." The information has to be "out there" and the right people have to see it for ridiculous patents like this to be overturned.

  • CMGI has a legally enforceable duty to its shareholders to maximize its value, and to maintain and protect the value of its corporate assets. If they did not do so, they would be liable to their shareholders, both as a company and the directors individually. To expect a company not to pursue patent infringement claims is naive in the extreme.
    --

  • Re:Unlimited Liability (Score:3)

    by Sodium Attack ( 194559 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2001 @08:53AM (#501035)
    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 (Score:4)

    by Speare ( 84249 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2001 @08:34AM (#501036) Homepage Journal

    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!"

  • But remember that CMGI is just one, and possibly not even a very good one.

    What about Sony? Virgin? They do produce things, but at the top level they're moving towards holding company status as well.

    Besides, it's hard to kill a company that big, even if they are nothing but smoke and mirrors and hot air.

  • As I always say (to be roundly ignored on each of these threads) is that the _claims_ define the invention, not the abstract. You can't sue someone for practicing the abstract--only what's in the claims. And because you typically amend the claims and legally _cannot_ amend the abstract, the abstract is typically much, much broader than the claimed invention.

  • Re:Spidering and Indexing (Score:4)

    by Lumpish Scholar ( 17107 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2001 @08:59AM (#501044) Homepage Journal
    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?
  • In the federal register 01/05/01 new 'rules' came out regarding the patent examination procedure and the way that examiners must determine utility. Utility is one of the big three you need to get a patent:

    they are (1) The item is novel (2) the item is ' non-obvious to someone skilled in the art' and (3) it must posess "utility" -- or the designed must show it is useful.

  • How long does it take for patents to be 'good'? (Score:3)

    by Chuck Flynn ( 265247 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2001 @07:43AM (#501048)
    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.
  • It's kinda hard to take this bit of news seriously when I'm staring at an ad for Altavista 3.0.. "fast and improved".. :)

    ~Marshall


    -------------------
  • This is getting absolutely ridiculous. As if a coke-snorting ignoramus of a president wasn't enough, we also have to put up with the general incompetency of other major branches of the government. The problem with this "e-conomy" is that the current system of government does not understand the specifics of science and computing. Granted, if I handed the case to my mother she would most likely give out patents like this one (and Amazon.com's One-Click Shopping®), but the point is that both are ignorant towards how ridiculous this seems to someone in the field, and how it will change the market as a whole. I can only imagine what ludicrous restrictive patents were handed out in fields that I don't know much about....

  • The original altavista (Score:5)

    by weave ( 48069 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2001 @07:45AM (#501055) Journal
    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 (Score:3)

    by avdp ( 22065 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2001 @08:38AM (#501061)
    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.
  • OK, so they want to play an intellectual property game... How about me going over there and demand that they remove my intellectual property from their index? I mean, I got a bit of content out there, I bet they have copied it wholesale and added it to the index, without my permission, and that surely has to infringe on my copyright or something like that. Hell, I'll sue! ;-) If everybody had been playing the same games, the net wouldn't be useful for anybody.
  • I tried to find a story or a parable that would be funny, and would fit this situation. Sadly, none is quite right.

    The situation reminds me of bullies at a playground. It used to be that all the kids would play there, but now the bullies want it for themselves. It elvolves into things like gangs, and the regular folks go away.

    Unfortunately, I can't think of anything to make that seem funny

    All these lawsuits remind me children fighting over something screaming "mine!", "mine!", "mine!". At it never was theirs in the first place. And they will all cry and blame the other guy when they break it.

    Ubersoft [ubersoft.net] seems less of a satire, and this sequence (about ten strips) in Sinfest [sinfest.net] seems strangely appropriate.

  • Payment model isn't the same, though. (Score:4)

    by sammy baby ( 14909 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2001 @09:05AM (#501068) Journal

    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.

  • Didn't altavista do it first?

    Not at all. Lycos and Open Text were there first. If memory doesn't fail me, Lycos by about a year, Open Text by about six months....

  • Why complain? Because it's a very obvious idea that is similar to things that were around long before.

    Anyone who used archie to find things on ftp sites, would naturally assume that there should be some kind of equivalent for the web.
    ---

  • Overcoming the problems with patents (Score:5)

    by Morgaine ( 4316 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2001 @09:13AM (#501072)
    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.
  • Wetherell: If you index a distributed set of databases--what the Internet is--and even within intranets, corporations, that's one of the patents.

    Finally, we know the true identity of the inventor of the Internet! It turns out to be AltaVista. After all, they patented that which "the Internet is."

    Maybe this is another case that will come down to defining what "is" is...

    On a more serious note, he also said: "They were the first to spider and index the Web."

    Does anyone know if this is true? That seems unlikely that no one tried to index the Web before they did.
    ________________

  • Quoth Wetherell: "They happen to own 38 patents, many of which we think are fundamental in the search area. They were the first to spider and index the Web."

    Well, I led what was approximately the *4th* attempt to spider and index the web, the Open Text Index (R.I.P.); efforts that I know of that predated us were WWWW, Lycos, and the original Infoseek.

    There were a couple others that came along between our launch and the arrival of Altavista. Sheesh.

    Lycos holds another vaporpatent on spidering, BTW. They were waaaaaaaaaaaay before Altavista, too.

  • I especially like this one: "Adding new entry to web page table upon receiving web page including link to another web page not having corresponding entry in web page table"

    Come on, now. Unless this actually just protects a very specific method of following the link (so you can avoid infringement just by using any other method), it won't stand a court challenge even if the average IQ of judge and jury is 80.

  • Re:

    ``proprietary search technology in the areas of identifying and eliminating duplicate pages in an index''

    So ``sort | uniq'' will be a patent violation?

    (Well, I certainly hope there's more to it than that!)

    What we need is a Proxmire-type (of ``Golden Fleece Award'' fame) senator to publicize these ridiculous patents. Perhaps when the general public starts finding these patents as ludicrous as we do, these corporations might start feeling embarassed (when people start laughing at them, Jay Leno makes jokes about silly patents on the Tonight Show, etc.) and positive things might start happening at the USPTO.

    One can only hope...



    --

  • Eli Whitney did not take out a patent on removing cotton seeds by machine. He took out a patent on a particular machine for removing cotton seeds. It did not prevent others from inventing a better machine -- although if patent laws had been enforceable at that time, he would have been able to act against machines that used parts of his design.

    Alta Vista's press releases are worded to give the impression that they have 38 patents on indexing by computer. I certainly don't want to read all 38, and IANAL, but since there were computerized literature indexes in the 1970's and patents only run 17 or 20 years, I suspect that any valid patents they have (after considering prior art or obviousness) are just on certain techniques for indexing by computer.
  • I worked for Digital from '90 through 94 and was, via informal channels, in contact with a lot of US DEcies, some in engineering.

    I remember a specific guy, let's call him Dan K, who communicated in '93 that he was working on an unbelievable, revolutionary thing that will change the world, but he couldn't tell us what. It was obvious however, that Dan was virtually exploding from excitement.

    The thing he was working on turned out to be the World Wide Web.

    I'm impressed up to this day, by the brilliance and quality of some of the folks working for DEC at that time. And no! Bob Palmer was sure as hell not one of them.

  • Did Digital ever try to enforce them? Perhaps they did it as a defensive measure.

  • Compaq ads? There have been some ads for Altavista running on Slashdot lately.
    On a related note, GMGI is the majority owner of Altavista (not Compaq).

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