Patent Troll Sues Google, AOL Over Search 'Snippets' and Ad Serving Tech 83
First time accepted submitter WindyWonka writes "Google and AOL were sued for patent infringement Thursday, accused of violating two former British Telecom patents via Google's search 'snippets' and by Google AdSense and Advertising.com ad serving technology. Incredibly, the lawsuit by apparent patent troll Suffolk Technologies asserts that every Google search result 'snippet' display violates one patent, and that another really broad server patent is violated every time Google and AOL serve up ads."
Re:Funding? (Score:5, Informative)
I looked at the Server patent - it essentially patents download files via the web. It is bogus beyond all recognition! It was filed in 2000 - I would imagine that gopher, or some of the other earlier web technologies take care this patent nicely, i.e.. prior art exist in spades.
Re:Funding? (Score:5, Informative)
This appears to be British Telecom - aka BT, the main telecoms provider in the UK. They are a huge organisation that got broken up into smaller separate business units for wholesale, business, retail (internet phone) and network maintenance. They have a large 2000-3000 person R&D (at least there used to be lots of R&D there are few years back, but I'm not so sure now) center at Adastral Park in the county of *Suffolk* (just south of Cambridge/Cambridgeshire in the East of England). I assume either BT has setup Suffolk Technologies, or someone close to them has bought the patents to pursue. If it is BT then it will be a well-funded operation.
I think the broad server patent is rubbish. But, the snippet patent IMHO is a legitimate patent.
Re:Funding? (Score:5, Informative)
The patent covers using the page the request was made from to decide what file you should get. The original patent was filed in the UK in April 1996 and discusses the HTTP protocol and the referrer address, but RFC 1945 [ietf.org] was published a month later and defined the HTTP protocol (including the misspelling of referer). Perhaps this information was added to the US version of the patent when it was filed in March 1997.
This seems like something they could get a few bucks each out of the various blogs that forbid hotlinking by serving up goatse whenever the referer URL for a picture is some other site. But I guess they can get more than a few bucks out of Google and AOL, even if it's not really clear how they infringe on the patent.
Snippet patent prior art (Score:3, Informative)
Showing the use of a search term in context (i.e. showing a "snippet") is a feature of a concordance [wikipedia.org] - a kind of document that has been produced manually for hundreds of years. So there seems to be lots of prior art.
Re:Snippet patent prior art (Score:4, Informative)
Showing the use of a search term in context (i.e. showing a "snippet") is a feature of a concordance [wikipedia.org] - a kind of document that has been produced manually for hundreds of years.
So there seems to be lots of prior art.
Ahh, but this patent seems to use the 'on a computer' trump card, thus invalidating whatever medieval concordance you may reference.
They've patented math... (Score:4, Informative)
If you go read the patent [google.com], there are two things to note.
First, is that the patent provides very explicit flow charts that describe the algorithm that generates the summary. All Google and AOL have to do to win is show that they generate their summaries using a different algorithm.
Second, is that the patent is for an algorithm to calculate which section should be shown in a summary. You cannot patent algorithms [wikipedia.org]. The patent shouldn't have been awarded in the first place.
I hate the USPTO and I hold a (hardware) patent.
Referer header is unarguably Prior Art (Score:2, Informative)
Although the RFC was only published a month later, it had been circulating in draft and discussion forms for over a year before it was published, and the notion of the Referer header and its use by servers in deciding what content to return was already public knowledge by the time of both patent application and publication.
In short, this is yet another fraudulent patent where someone has claimed to invent something that was already standard practice. The patent-holder and applicants should be prosecuted for attempting to obtain money by deception. The egregious criminal bastards just took something that was being developed in a public standards process, wrote it up in generic and abstract terms, and rush-filed a patent just ahead of the completion of the standards process. Fuck them and the horse they rode in on.