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| Authored by: stegu on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 05:46 AM EDT |
The filing date is April 4, 1995 for that patent, the first in the list. We need
to find prior art predating that.
If "sending a message" could include "putting a web page up for
viewing" and "receiving a message" could inlcude "viewing a
web page", the prior art is trivial, as it is the foundation of URLs for
the <img> tag in HTML to be of remote origin. No image data is ever
included in an HTML file. It's all references to external data.
If a plain Web page is not enough, there were several web-based messaging
systems and message boards around in the early days of the WWW, and someone is
bound to have thought of empowering message authors with at least some URL-based
image inclusion. Even image replacements for emoticons would qualify.
There is lots of relevant prior art in professional publishing, where documents
have always included references to images and other resources in databases and
networks instead of sending everything along with the document itself. However,
that would not formally be "a URL", and not formally "over the
Internet", and I think that is a smoke screen that very few patent
examiners are able to see through, or even allowed to see through with the
current interpretation of the rules. "But the Internet is just another
computer network, there's nothing special to it from an application
perspective" seems to be an ineffective argument right now, and "A URL
is just another kind of network address, there is nothing special or novel about
it" is probably equally moot in the eyes of the USPTO.
It's really sad that we need to find prior art for this. It should be fought on
the grounds of non-specificity and obviousness (being a non-invention), not on
the grounds of non-novelty (which indirectly acknowledges that this is an
invention potentially worthy of a patent).
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: rkhalloran on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 12:59 PM EDT |
The patent dates IIRC to 2004? I think this trumps it:
Definition of the URL MIME
External-Body Access-Type October 1996
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SCOX(Q) DELENDA
EST!!!
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"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety
deserve neither." - Benjamin Franklin [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: celtic_hackr on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 03:41 PM EDT |
I'm fairly sure both Compuserve and AOl were doing this prior to 1995. I might
even have an old Compuserve or AO(He)-double-hockey-sticks disk around, but I
doubt any of those are prior to 1995, when they likely would have been a floppy.
I might, just might, remotely possibly have one of those. What condition it
would be in is highly suspect.
As a side note, both Compuserve and AOL had the email clients internal to the
website application (which was a custom web-browser) so the email clients ran
inside HTML based web-browsers. It's simply inconceivable that a person skilled
in the art and writing email clients did not have either an AOL or, more likely,
Compuserve account, and thus perpetrated an intentional fraud in applying for
this patent. Just Saying.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: celtic_hackr on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 04:08 PM EDT |
Both Lycos and mail.com had web-based mail applications in 1995. Lycos in
January 1995. Not sure of Mail.com.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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