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Financial Incentive to Invalidate | 343 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
corrections thread
Authored by: designerfx on Wednesday, June 19 2013 @ 10:40 PM EDT
post corrections here

[ Reply to This | # ]

newspicks thread
Authored by: designerfx on Wednesday, June 19 2013 @ 10:54 PM EDT
newspicks posts here

[ Reply to This | # ]

off topic thread
Authored by: designerfx on Wednesday, June 19 2013 @ 10:55 PM EDT
off topic discussion here.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Mueller
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, June 19 2013 @ 11:32 PM EDT
The trouble with having a paid shill like this, and having meetings/directing
him without him being a paid employee, is sometimes he goes too far and, as
shown here, reveals too much.
I'm sure there's been a few of his posts he eagerly sends to his customers 'hey!
see? look what I said about them!' and they reply 'why are you mentioning us as
well you fool! we pay you to be /independent/ from us, not paid PR revealing our
plans! that meeting was supposed to be secret, now you've exposed our strategy'

running a site called 'Antifosspatents.com' and saying the exact opposite of
whatever he spouts would be more accurate on what's going on.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Whew!
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 12:07 AM EDT
All these years I've been avoiding infringement of '793.
5. A method according to claim 4, wherein said decoding step does not automatically retrieve the data from the predetermined location when a user decodes the message because the user forbids the retrieval of the data corresponding to the URL.
It used to be the default in most mail clients I have used that remote images and resources were not automatically downloaded. My present client has the box for downloading unchecked, but it's so long ago that I set it I can't remember what the OTB default was.

I doubt this behaviour was deliberate evasion, like the projects that download libdcss and libx264 from the make script.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Intellectual Ventures Sues Motorola for Patent Infringement Again - One Patent Is For Linking URLs in an Email ~pj Updated 3Xs
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 02:02 AM EDT
> There simply aren't enough of those already.

Hopefully they are still not!

> Knight of the Round Table rescuing poor inventors who need them to save

The poor M$ and nokia that are going to die if nobody is sponsoring their faulty
products.

But really I hope there is some way to counter sue nokia and M$ for their
anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices.. can't consumers unite and sue
these bastards?

[ Reply to This | # ]

Intellectual Ventures Sues Motorola for Patent Infringement Again - One Patent Is For Linking URLs in an Email ~pj Updated 3Xs
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 02:15 AM EDT
Do the trolls have to tell the truth?

: )

I know you know the answer to your question. I've always wanted an answer to this question below .

All the CEO's below lied to Congress  under oath. The companies if I recall properly paid huge fines but why weren't the CEO's personally punished?

"Publicly the industry has maintained that nicotine is not addictive – culminating in Congressional hearings in 1994 when seven Chief Executive Officers of American tobacco
companies all testified that nicotine is not addictive. The industry has always said publicly that nicotine was important for taste or flavour – not addiction"

http://www.who.i nt/tobacco/media/en/TobaccoExplained.pdf



[Tobacco company CEOs declare, under oath, that nicotine is not addictive]

REP. RON WYDEN: Let me begin my questioning on whether or not nicotine is addictive. Let me ask you first, and I'd like to just go down the row, whether each of you believes that nicotine is not addictive. I heard virtually all of you touch on it. Yes or no, do you believe nicotine is not addictive?

MR. WILLIAM CAMPBELL
I believe nicotine is not addictive, yes.

REP. RON WYDEN: Mr. Johnston?

MR. JAMES JOHNSTON
Mr. Congressman, cigarettes and nicotine clearly do not meet the classic definition of addiction. There is no intoxication.

REP. RON WYDEN: We'll take that as a "no." Again, time is short. I think that each of you believe that nicotine is not addictive. We would just like to have this for the record.

MR. JOSEPH TADDEO
I don't believe that nicotine or our products are addictive.

MR. ANDREW TISCH
I believe that nicotine is not addictive.

MR. EDWARD HORRIGAN
I believe that nicotine is not addictive.

MR. THOMAS SANDEFUR
I believe that nicotine is not addictive.
MR. DONALD JOHNSTON
And I, too, believe that nicotine is not addictive.
http://senate. ucsf.edu/tobacco/executives1994congress.html

"In the late nineties, as many internal documents showing that cigarettes are addictive reach the public domain, the companies have responded by trying to fudge and change the
definition of addiction - which they now apply to such activities as shopping or the Internet. In 1997, Liggett broke ranks and became the first company to admit that “smoking is addictive”. Many companies still openly deny that nicotine is addictive"

http://www.who.i nt/tobacco/media/en/TobaccoExplained.pdf

[ Reply to This | # ]

Pior Art For Linking URLs in an Email
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 02:36 AM EDT
If my memory serves me, Eudora and
Netscape Navigator were doing this back
around 1996. In 1998 email clients started
to include an option to not automatically
pull down remote URLs as people were doing
the tracking images.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Glad this is patented , maybe it will rein in the lusers
Authored by: kuroshima on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 04:37 AM EDT
I am glad that this functionality is patented. Maybe is people
need to pay for it, we will see them stop using it, as it is
both UNSAFE and an INVASION OF PRIVACY.

Anyone remembers the time when Outlook would execute code
linked/embedded in HTML emails on reception, so you didn't
even have to open the email or click anywhere, you received
the email and blam, computer compromised! Nowadays things
aren't that bad, and I never used Outlook, so I was never
affected (I transitioned from Netscape Mail to Mozilla Mail to
Thunderbird), but I had to repair way too many computers
infected by Outlook leaving the door wide open. Nowadays, the
issue is phishing, and the problem is that it's hard to
separate the good guys from the ones wishing to scam you,
because even the good guys outsource such things to external
agencies that cache and handle the unique tracking ids for
whatever add campaign that the email is part of, so simply
inspecting the links does not serve to identify a phishing
attempt (mind you, most people here will simply consider such
things akin to phishing and simply discard the email, but for
the average luser, what results is that they aren't trained in
proper security procedures).

This brings me back to the second point, privacy invasion.
From the 1px transparent gifs with unique tracking IDs added
as url parameters to images/embedded objects with part of the
url containing hex/base64 encoded tracking info, allowing
people to know if you opened the email and whatever more the
mail client leaks (from IP, to program version, to OS, to much
more sensitive data).

[ Reply to This | # ]

Not just email -- Also describes Web IMO
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 06:44 AM EDT
Although one of the patents talks about electronic mail messages in its Abstract, the claim quoted by PJ just says 'message'
1. A method of communicating between computers, comprising the steps of: creating a message at a first computer, said message including a reference to a predetermined location; transmitting, by the first computer, said message to a second location; and receiving said message by a computer at the second location; decoding said message by the computer at the second location by retrieving data from the predetermined location, automatically by a single application, without requiring user interaction, into the computer at the second location.
How is 'message' defined for the claims in the patent? Unless specifically restricted to 'mail', it seems to me that this claim doesn't just describe the process of sending an email with an external link, it also describes a web page that loads an external image.

E.g.

(a) "creating a message at a first computer, inc. ref. to another location" --> create web page with <img> tag referencing an external image (e.g. an advert).

(b) "transmitting, by the first computer, said message to a second location;" --> browser in second location requests page from 1st location, message data sent over HTTP link.

(c) "decoding said message by the computer at the second location by retrieving data from the predetermined location, automatically by a single application, without requiring user interaction, into the computer at the second location." --> browser decodes HTML with <img> tag, and then makes automatic request for the image from the other location, and integrates it into the page it's displaying.

This happens in people's browsers all the time.

HTTP has been around since well before 1997 (1990 is mentioned in Abstract of the RFC), and HTML 2.0 has been around since before 1995 (See the wikipe dia page)

Cheers, Tim.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Are any of these NOT software patents?
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 07:32 AM EDT
I didn't look too closely, but the 353 sounds like a pure algorithm patent.
Do any of these patents have any physical elements besides sensors that
are part of the supposedly claimed "invention"?

Maybe IV is trying to use these up for some harassment value before they
get invalidated?

[ Reply to This | # ]

Intellectual Ventures Sues Motorola for Patent Infringement Again - One Patent Is For Linking URLs in an Email ~pj Updated 3Xs
Authored by: JamesK on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 08:31 AM EDT
{
One is for linking urls in an email.
}

I have been doing that since the mid 90s. I also recall it being in Lotus Notes
and Personal Communications, back in the late '90s, when I worked at IBM. How
does Intellectual Vultures get to claim something like that?

---
The following program contains immature subject matter.
Viewer discretion is advised.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Intellectual Ventures Sues Motorola for Patent Infringement Again - One Patent Is For Linking URLs in an Email ~pj Updated 3Xs
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 09:16 AM EDT
How many years is a patent good for? The first one is April 95, over 18
years ago. If one infringes, then any browser email system uses it. Has
everyone else paid for the invention?

[ Reply to This | # ]

Financial Incentive to Invalidate
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 11:18 AM EDT
What if the courts could order treble costs against the loser of a patent
enforcement if the patent is invalidated? This would add a financial incentive
for law firms to participate in the defence of the bad patents, and not leave
the costs totally up to the 'alleged infringers'.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Take a breath please
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 12:05 PM EDT
"And you will not believe the seven patents that are being used this time.
One is for linking urls in an email. Yes. Really. Ever do that? Did you know you
should be paying IV because the USPTO gave it ownership of that functionality?
Actually it's less direct and IV keeps it a little bit murky, but I'll show you
the details."

The patent is not for "linking URLs" in an email.

The claim you are referring to is for automatically displaying a web page in an
email without user interaction.

That's a bit more specific, now isn't it.

This is 2013. We have all received spam with such links in it and if we have
our email set to "display images" for the sender, then yes, we have
all used software that infringes this claim. But that doesn't mean that this
was known or obvious in April of 1995, which is the priority date of the
application.

Did we all do this before April '95? I'm gonna guess not.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Obvious combination
Authored by: tknarr on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 12:11 PM EDT

I think we may have a hard time coming up with direct prior art. The patent seems to date from around the time the first HTML support appeared in e-mail clients. But it might be easier to attack it as an obvious combination of pre-existing technologies (KSR v. Teleflex). MIME as a way to embed various types of documents in e-mail and then hand those documents off after decoding to other programs to display predates the priority date by a goodly amount. MIME for use in e-mail is explicitly mentioned in RFC1521 in 1993, and it's usage predates the RFC by a bit (it was hashed out thoroughly before being codified in an RFC). Browsers to display HTML content also predate the patent, and HTML as a MIME document type was officially codified in RFC1866 in November 1995 and was first described as a candidate for official registration back in 1992. From there, given the number of other document types that had had handlers associated with them already, adding an association between a browser and the "text/html" MIME document type so the existing mechanism for handling documents would display HTML content in e-mails would be a very obvious thing to do.

In fact, I believe that's very close to how Microsoft did HTML support in the first version of Outlook Express that supported it: when seeing HTML content in the message, embed an IBrowser COM object (Internet Explorer) in their reading panel and pass the HTML body to it to render.

[ Reply to This | # ]

MS + IV + Nokia have hit an all-time low
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 12:58 PM EDT
I have nothing else to say. Everytime I think they've gone as far below as
possible, the troika of Microsoft+IV+Nokia keeps going lower...

[ Reply to This | # ]

Pure coincidence, of course...
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 03:41 PM EDT
That Nathan Myrvold (Intellectual Vultures) and Paul Allen (Interval Licensing)
are both former Microsofties (co-founders, no less) and both seem to sue M$
competitors but not M$...

Much like Elop, another former Microsoftie who can't seem to distance himself
from a former employer.

"Former" when applied to M$ may not mean what we've traditionally come
to expect.

[ Reply to This | # ]

The most obvious prior Art reference
Authored by: celtic_hackr on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 04:35 PM EDT
INTERNET DRAFT Dave Raggett, W3C
Expires in six months email: <xxx@w3.org>

HyperText Markup Language Specification Version 3.0

<draft-ietf-html-specv3-00.txt>

...

"Dave Raggett
Page 3
HTML 3.0 28th March 1995

Introduction to HTML 3.0

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a simple markup system used to
create hypertext documents that are portable from one platform to
another. HTML documents are SGML documents with generic semantics
that are appropriate for representing information from a wide range
of applications. HTML markup can represent hypertext news, mail,
documentation, and hypermedia; menus of options; database query
results; simple structured documents with in-lined graphics; and
hypertext views of existing bodies of information. "


Especially note: "HTML markup can represent, hypertext news, mail
...".

I think it is especially noteworthy that "mail" is the second most
term for a use case of HTML. Hence composing an email in HTML and including URL
links MUST have been anticipated by March of 1995, a full month before the
filing of this application.

Thanks to Google for the "find prior art" button.

[ Reply to This | # ]

FTC missing the point
Authored by: rocky on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 04:39 PM EDT
the F.T.C. investigation will require patent-assertion companies to answer questions about how they conduct their operations, including whether they coordinate their lawsuits with other patent holders and if they funnel proceeds from lawsuits and patent licenses back to the original patent owner.

Argh! Talk about missing the point and following a red herring. Of course they are going to truthfully say that they don't pay any money directly back to Microsoft or whoever. They don't care about getting a check from IV; that would mean nothing to them. They donate these patents, and the trolls get to keep whatever money they can manage to get, but the main benefit to the donors is that their competitors are HARMED. That is the only form of repayment they are looking for. Jeez. I just have this sinking feeling that the fact that they don't pay any money back to the patent donors is going to be wrongly interpreted by the FTC as innocence, because the donors "are not benefiting" from the trolls' actions. Sigh. I feel like hopes are about to be dashed, but maybe that's just my pessimism from seeing the bad guys get away with stuff for too long.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Three Hats In The Ring For Nokia?
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 07:46 PM EDT
Microsoft won't buy until they've whittled all the meat off the bones.
Google might buy if they get annoyed enough with the silly games,
but Google already has a mobile manufacturing division, Motorola.
Huawei could buy for the patents, but they only need them for
those markets where litigation is a problem, and the US govt has
already said Huawei is not welcome. Huawei could buy for the
manufacturing capacity, but they have little to zero experience
making stuff outside China. Nokia's distribution and sales channels
would be an attractive bargain for Huawei.

[ Reply to This | # ]

RICO?
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 10:39 PM EDT
The actions of Intellectual Ventures and many of the others strike me as
racketeering. A bunch of gangsters and thugs acting with impunity. I'd like to
see them investigated under RICO.

Tom Marchant

[ Reply to This | # ]

  • RICO? - Authored by: mvs_tomm on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 10:58 PM EDT
  • RICO? Moto/Google - Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 23 2013 @ 01:23 AM EDT
Comes here
Authored by: SpaceLifeForm on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 12:31 AM EDT
Apparently, designerfx was distracted.

(don't put them here, wait so that PJ will see them)


---

You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.

[ Reply to This | # ]

The '392' Patent and IBM
Authored by: complex_number on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 12:40 AM EDT
You know, this one
13. On November 14, 2006, U. S. Patent No. 7,136,392 (“the ’392 Patent”), titled “System and Method For Ordering Data Messages Having Differing Levels of Priority For Transmission Over A Shared Communication Channel,” was duly and lawfully issued by the PTO. A copy of the ’392 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit B.

IBM will probably have a brief all ready for this one should IV ever decide to go after them on this. To my 'non-lawyer' eyes, this patent describes exactly the features used in the WebSphere MQ Communications channel. Messages can have different priorities and the channel can be shared by messages destined for different end users.

In my day job, I use this sort of thing all the time. Talk about obvious. Pah and I've been working with Queue Managers for more than 30 years in one shape or form. Heck, I seem to recall that even my undergrad college notes on Queuing Theory that date from 1974/75 mentioned priorities of messages in the queue.

If a communication channel is not in effect a queue then I really should hang up my coding sheet and retire.

IMHO, the likes of IV are a plague and needs to be eradicated ASAP.

---
Ubuntu & 'apt-get' are not the answer to Life, The Universe & Everything which is of course, "42" or is it 1.618?

[ Reply to This | # ]

Intellectual Ventures Sues Motorola for Patent Infringement Again - One Patent Is For Linking URLs in an Email ~pj Updated 3Xs
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 02:33 AM EDT
We need to ban non-practicing entities by requiring that in order to sue for
patent infringement that you must be currently manufacturing a product using
said patent, or be manufacturing within 1 year. In the second case, all
judgements will be placed on hold for the duration of that year, and if no
product is being made at the end of that time the judgement is cast aside.

[ Reply to This | # ]

NPR Patent Stories
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 03:00 PM EDT
NPR has done a number of pieces on patents, and has featured Intellectual Ventures on more than one occasion. One example:

W hen Patents Attack

In another story: How Carbonite, EMC Beat a Patent Troll Tied to Intellectual Ventures

Not even safe for a user of technology.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Intellectual Ventures Sues Motorola for Patent Infringement Again - One Patent Is For Linking URLs in an Email ~pj Updated 3Xs
Authored by: albert on Sunday, June 23 2013 @ 01:28 PM EDT
The problem started with the USPTO and has to end there. They started issuing
bogo-patents (all s/w patents are bogus), and things went quickly downhill.

I'm not certain anything can be done to stop them. Most exist only to enrich
their lawyer staffs & 'investors'. Some, to kill competitors of certain
companies whose ties are obscure or well-hidden.

Remember, these folks are unethical, even criminal, but not stupid. (OK, forget
Prenda :)

I expect we'll see some window dressing, lip service, and rhetoric from our
InCongruous Critters to satisfy critics, but not enough to scare off their
funders.

[ Reply to This | # ]

No, I am not shocked.
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 23 2013 @ 06:27 PM EDT
There is no limit to corporate idiocy.
No limit to chauvinistic or governmental idiocy either.

[ Reply to This | # ]

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