AJAX patent threat to giants under the hammer A patent scheduled for sale next month in San Francisco could threaten some of the biggest players on the internet leading Web 2.0. Listed in Ocean Tomo's spring auction catalog as lot number seven, patent number 6,418,462: "Discloses methods allowing clients to perform tasks through a sideband communication channel, in …
Patents are supposed to protect inventors from being ripped off. How can you sell a patent to someone? (who is obviously not the inventor and therefore doesn't have anything to protect.) And they will then use this patent to blackmail random companies.
What an evil and twisted world we live in.
Truly, where would the world be if the person who invented the notion of communicating out of the main event loop wasn't able to reap the just rewards of his labor. Implementation is irrelevant, conceptualization is obviously sufficient. That, and having the enlightened foresight to hire some lawyers to stake the claim.
Better yet, be a lawyer-programmer and patent your brilliant ideas for free.
Wouldn't a mouseover be prior art?
If the patent's main claim is an asynchronous data request channel that doesn't cause the entire page to refresh, then the javascript onmouseover='this.src="/path_to_some_image"' is definitely prior art.
Web developers have used that same technique to asynchronously load dynamic data other than images since 1997 or 1998 easily.
Internet Explorer 5.5 was released in march 1999. It had a new feature called "XmlHttpRequest" which had been put in there to support the new Outlook Web Access. OWA was the first AJAX application (before the acronym was coined) and used javascript, out-of-band communication (XmlHttpRequest) and asynchronously loading extensively. Seems like MS has some pretty solid prior art here.
<rant 2.0>
What a great idea someone once had to go and create a patent for a simple yet transforming data transfer method.
This really pisses me off that instead of taking this into the public domain, some hot-shot corporate twats are instead (probably) going to purchase it and raise claims of infringement.
Soon some idiot is going to patent a colour scheme, or the very 'idea' of CSS, or god forbid, that awful txt language which the under-educated of the western world insist on using in full length emails and web pages.
AJAX, in its very notion, was the next logical step of the web - why even attempt to restrict the surrounding development?
</rant 2.0>
Could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure that XMLHTTPRequest was in IE 5.0, which came out in March 1999 and was presumably in wide Beta before the Jan 7th filing of the patent claim.
eg http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000606.html
I wonder what they're claiming beyond the functionality XMLHTTPRequest provided.
Sounds like any background data updating task that world&dog have been doing since the invention of networks, coupled with some post-processing of said data into an interactive system. The first one to find prior art (wild guess: look at early 90's multiplayer games or industrial control systems) is going to be given a cookie.
This has nothing to do with a 'sideband' communication channel. The AJAX mechanism works purely through HTTP, which is the ONLY communication channel in this context. The whole idea behind a sideband system is to provide an extra source of data that can be used while the primary source is in use, which again isn't applicable to web browsing. Somehow I doubt that Google's lawyers would have much trouble getting this thrown out.
Mine's the one on hook 80.
"filed in 1999 and issued in 2002"
The patent infringement analysis (found by a link from the article) refers to claims about server using idle computing resources in clients. seti@home which does precisely that was started in 1997 (see http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_papers/woody.php )
There is probably tons of prior art also for the other claims. Many things that AJAX does have been done using Java applets right since the beginning of Java (circa 1994).
It is time to stop this madness, right now.
"Intellectual property" should not be allowed to be bought and sold in the same way as real property. The original purpose of patents and copyrights was to reward sharing of knowledge. If this end is not being served, then it is time to re-evaluate the means. The privilege of a temporary monopoly should be strictly non-transferrable, except to the Public Domain.
Governments also need to greater make use of their power to annul copyrights or patents in the event of abuse.
"Discloses methods allowing clients to perform tasks through a sideband communication channel, in addition to the main communication channel between a client and server".
A web browser makes a request for a page using the HTT protocol on port 80. The web browser then begins to render the returned HTML (assuming html is returned). As the browser discovers requirements for other resources (.css files, javascript files, images, flash content etc) it makes new requests, asynchronously and often in parallel for these new files using the same 'channel' it used to get the main page - http, port 80.
User clicks a link, the browser loads a new page, user clicks an 'ajax link' browser loads another page in exactly the same manner above but instead processes it according to a new set of instructions supplied in the original request.
As far as the server is concerned, there is no difference between any of these requests other than they ask for a different bit of information each time.
Anyone going after companies for this is a cockpouch and deserves only pain and destitution.
i'm sure there are hundreds, if not thousands of developers like me that started to do ajax style programming before anyone even coined the phrase! non-obvious? more like a bleedin' obvious way to use the technology!! ... or maybe i was the first, hmmm, i have prior art.... stop using my idea, or pay me lots of money!!!
Surely Java Applets were doing this way back in the late 1990's. I certainly wrote several that communicated back to the server on a separate socket (i.e. a 'sideband') as far back as 1997.
The real problem lies with the lawyers, and judges, who don't know the difference between a server socket and a pile of shit, presiding over these cases.
I worked for a little mom and pop called "GE" in the eighties.
We had a product that communicated with the server along a number of connections, using proprietary protocols (across a modem).
I know, because I wrote some of the host drivers. I got a lot of my async education from that.
In support of the argument against this patent, large legal departments will bring every possible action they can against it. Eventually those with deep enough pockets to support them will "win" the others will be held in legal ransom they cannot pay. The sad truth is many formerly productive, growing companies discover patent mining and enforcement (a term I use loosely)is a wonderful way to make money without producing a product and it's associated liabilities. Many people are surprised to learn that those big towering corporate headquarters are filled with patent attornies.
Imagine icon of me hanging a moon
over there next to coat rack.
>"Intellectual property" should not be allowed to be bought and sold in the same way as real property.
This is the underlying principle behind a market economy : any type of property (i.e., something that someone can own) will eventually be sold, bought, traded, and give rise to speculation. What's more, there will eventually emerge a global marketplace where such sales and trades will be formalized and 'industrialized' so to speak, which in turn gives rise to more sophisticated and/or derivative products based on the original commodity.
This principle applies to just about everything : raw materials, currencies, stock, real estate... but also debts (your bank owns your debt, so why shouldn't it be free to sell it to another bank ? Hey, can anyone say 'subprimes' ?), stock options, derivative products (whose sole purpose is to be bought, sold, and speculated with), and much much more...
The only upside is that patents are currently used defensively mostly -except in the good ole district of Eastern Texas of course- and that there isn't yet (to my knowledge anyway) any agreed-upon mathematical formula for estimating the value of a patent. So using and abusing patents is still a somewhat artisanal process: you have to fight it out in court, there's no guaranteed return on investment, etc.
The day we know how to put an accurate value on a patent without 'exercizing' it (i.e. going to court), is the day patents will become just another commodity. Don't believe me ? Think stock options and the Black & Scholes formula.
All this leads me to wonder what will be the next 'property' playground. My bet is on privacy and/or private data. You own your private data right ? So... if you own it, it can be bought. If it can be bought, it can be sold again. Or traded. Or sold in bulk. This is already the case on the black market, it's only a matter of time before it becomes another legal avenue of financial frolicking.
IANAL, but it might be a good thing we don't actually 'own' fundamental rights (if I remember correctly, they're granted by the state although I suspect Your Constitution May Vary) or some poor sods are bound to sell them one day... or be defrauded of them.
Go home. Have a cup of warm milk. Calm down. This is just a manifestation of how the US Patent system really works, as opposed to what most folks think.
The usual assumption, and quite possibly the way it is supposed to work or used to work, is that by the time a patent is granted some real vetting has verifyied that the submission is new, and works. Nope.
What happens: After submission you receive from the patent office a short list of potential prior art that is obviously the result of a pure keyword search, using keywords chosen by someone with no real understanding of what you submitted. So you spend about a half hour writing up why nobody in his or her right mind would think the examples cited have anything to do with what you sent in, feeling like a complete lunatic and trying hard to remain polite while writing things like this: “It is true that, like my invention, case 28703910776 is also eaten. However, it is an orange. My submission is a fish. This case has orange-colored, pebbly skin, and grows as fruit on a plant on dry land. What I submitted is an animal, not part of a plant, has skin that is slippery and scaly, and lives in water, not on dry land.”
You send that back. You get a patent. Simple.
Oh, occasionally there’s a true hit that requires some thought to rebut, or even genuine prior art invalidating your submission. But that happens so seldom it’s clearly a random occurrence.
The only real test of patent validity is whether it stands up in court after someone sues for license fees, and the target of the suit decides putting up a fight is worth it. That a patent has merely been granted, or even produced some license fees, is not a terribly meaningful event.
I’m told this has changed or may change relatively recently, due to the US Patent office posting at least some submissions on the web for others to look for prior art. This could be a good way to get the wisdom of mobs applied to the problem, and may work well. I hope it works for a while, anyway, before getting trashed by spammers and by shills posting bogosity to protect their employers’ interests.
Maybe it would work to kill all that stoopid "Web 2.0" hype? Still, the patent is stupid, as there are a crapload of applications and a few protocols that do exactly this:
- FTP (PORT) uses 21 for control, 20 for data. PASV works in mysterious ways, but basically uses one for control, one for data, just like this.
- Java applets since inception, as somebody else noted.
- One of my early socket experiments did this, and that is from 1998 or something.
- Most P2P software do this, especially those depending on a "central catalog"
- You might even argue the 3270 terminals do this to an extent, as it could update the entire screen, or just some of the fields.
And if the definition wants to be "out-of-bands", well, there is an OOB flag on TCP sockets. Which those who remember the WinNuke days must remember very, very, well...
"Sideband" is a technical word in radio technology and relates to the modulation of the signal. Since our beloved intrawebnettubesthingie uses God-knows-what kinds of modulation schemes at different levels, perhaps not using sidebands at all, it's hard to believe this so-called pseudo-invention has any relevancy.
What puzzles me is the mix between hardwareish details that would be down at the bottom of a tcp/ip stack and applicationish details that would be up near the top. Since the whole point of organizing comms via a stack is to provide layered abstraction, this Does Not Make Sense. Oil & water do not mix, and this pseudo-invention is a pile of horse crap.
Has somebody devised a patent generator that assembles buzzwords in arbitrary, but grammatically correct, sequences and fires them at the US patent office? Rather like throwing shit at a wall to see if any sticks.
Footnote for the linguistically impoverished: "pseudo" = false, "quasi" = "as if". There will be a pop quiz on Wednesday.
"patents are essential.
the solution is an intelligent and competent patent office not to outlaw patents."
No, patents are essential in CERTAIN MARKETS. Software isn't one of them, and patents like this just prove it. Software development is a lot like the development method of mathematics; what appears to be new is generally someone reorganizing or adding to existing knowledge. In this sort of market, patents simply block entire development branches (good example: encryption, which can only be developed by groups with LARGE wallets, due to massive patenting; now no one can develop encryption algorithms without a large bank account to back it up with).
When you submit a patent, you are representing that you have created an invention, and therefore have (intellectual) property rights over it. If the "invention" is in fact utterly obvious common practice, such as in this case ("using two tcp sockets instead of one"), then you cannot possibly own it - since you did not invent it - and any claim you make to do so is therefore a lie for the purposes of obtaining money by deception. Or "criminal fraud" as it is known in the legal system. If they then issue threats to damage your business if you don't pay them, it becomes extortion and blackmail.
Next time some patent troll approaches your firm, report them to the police. Explain that they are demanding money and issuing threats to illegally damage your business. They are offering to "licence" you the right to something which they do not own and you do not need, and threatening some harm - which in fact only they possibly could originate - will befall you if you don't buy their misrepresented goods. This is in no way any different from the situation when a mafia representative calls round and threatens that your business "might" burn down if you don't buy his "fire insurance", and should be treated the same way: with serious jail time.
That fact that the patent examiner doesn't know what async communications are, as evidenced by the fact this patent was granted in the first place, should worry us all.
Software patents have to go. Or at least suspend them until we get some competent software engineers in the patent office.
...does not actually exist. The term was popularized by BSD, which came out of Berkeley around the time that LSD was popular. TCP _does_ have an "urgent data" flag, and the RFCs discuss how to use it, but OOB it is not. Almost as much pain has derived from this misunderstanding as from the IBM PC using edge-triggered interrupts, or MSFT creatively violating the ESMTP RFC :-)
Having read Claim 1 of the patent, it's obvious that this only relates to distributed computing using "idle resources" on clients, much like SETI@home and suchlike - it's not about the general application of "sideband channels" such as AJAX techniques. So relax - move along - nothing to see...
This whole charade of granted inviable patents falls on the shoulders of those that lack sufficient breadth and depth of in software development arena.
If we insist on maintaining and granting software patents (i'd prefer not), then the solution would be to grant such patents only by a consortium of other software engineers and their ilk. No lawyers. No otherwise uninformed or ill-versed judges. Just software folks granting kudos to other software folks for truly novel ideas.
This horse$hit just couldn't occur with any discernible frequency if the granting audience couldn't be dazzled with smoke & mirrors.
Some of us recall that Netscape 1.1 introduced the multipart/replace MIME type. There were a whole range of 'push' applications built on top of this feature including slideshows, IRC clients, etc.
This feature provided true (and efficient) asynchronous applications that were delivered out of band via a long lived socket connection to the server.
Netscape 1.1 was released in 1995.
is a tried and tested yo mamma joke.
Yo' Mamma so stupid she works at da' patent office!
Yo' Mamma so stupid she thinks one click's an invention!
Yo' Mamma so stupid she's at the EU trying to make them take US style patents.
I got a phone call, yo' mamma gone eaten her slippers again!
I wonder if you can patent the process behind yo mamma jokes?
I don't give a fuck who patents what any more. I'm sick of this kind of bullshit, and so if I come up with an idea on one of my websites and somebody cries "patent infringement" I'll just ignore them. Ignore all summonses, ignore the court cases, transfer my assets overseas if necessary, move overseas if necessary, and tell the patent trolls and the courts to just fuck off.
Open, deliberate defiance of the IP laws and courts is what is called for. If enough of us adopt this attitude, we can bring down this whole stinking, corrupt system that does nothing but stifle innovation and suppress free expression. The whole concept of "intellectual property" is mind-controlling corporatist bullshit, and the sooner we eradicate this cancer from our world, by FORCE if necessary, the better!
For instance, Text messaging on mobile phones.
But it doesn't mean that you can't still patent an ingenious use.
One feature of patents is that you start with the most general possible claim (a mechanism activated by the presence of a small rodent) and work up to something detailed (a device, activated by vibration, which delivers a fatal electrical discharge through the mouse via an electrically conductive cheese substitute used as bait).
Most of the time, the more general claims get struck out.
But, under the US system, you could probably still get a patent on a rodent control system using a pattern recognition and target acquisition device mounted on a ball-bearing perambulatory platform, with a dynamic counterweight, tactile obstacle sensors, and high-speed self-righting capability.
...I coded my first "sideband" application in the late 80s. It was a basic pre-fetch that added detail to a table when you clicked on it- My app just used the time that the user was reading the table to get the extra data they would want when they clicked on a row. It was based on modem comms and the fact that you paid for time on the line rather than data thruput. The whole idea was to be to use the modems bandwidth while you were dialed in, rather than have idle periods followed vy slow downloads when you finally "clicked" (hit Return) on something.
Now- how much should I be paid???
The whole point of making patents like this is to accumulate real property. You all have been getting a free ride for too long -- using ideas you've not paid for (per use) is just as immoral as listening to music you've not paid for (per use). Sooner or later there will be the IPAA* snooping around your hard drive looking for ideas you don't own and demanding money from miscreants who aren't properly licensed.
We own the ideas and the world owes us a living. Get used to it.
*Like the RIAA but with somewhat wider scope.
(I can't help thinking there's something wrong with the above....)
Use the idea. If whoever has most recently purchased the intellectual property challenges you, send them several decades of prior art and say "Go on punk, make my day!".
They, or their lawyers, will realise that taking *you* to court would result in their patent being thrown out, thereby depriving them of all the cash that they are currently extorting out of dumber victims. They, or their lawyers, aren't that dumb, so they will leave you alone.
As far as I can tell, that's *how* it is supposed to work in the US. Elsewhere in the world, the price of something is how much money *someone* is willing to pay you for it. In the US, it is how much money *you* are willing to *risk* taking someone to court over it. It makes perfect sense if you are an economist or a lawyer.
I have done several patent myself and I know that getting a patent is not as simple as described here. Most time the examiner are critizing every piece of it.
On the other hand, after reviewing the patent I saw it claims to be "based on a paper filed on Jan 1998 which was presented on a conference." I think, if a conference can accept a paper, it is probably not that obvious. Think about the famous one-click patent. Worthy of mention is that in the US it is based on "first invent time" not "first file time" -- different from the world.
Think about IP industry vs music indurstry, why we think we should pay fee to a mp3 instead of software? The patent system is to protect and encourage industry instead of discourage it.
Whenever the system exists, we should respect it -- if you are in the US.
It is time that all Patent Offices published patent applications for software instead of shielding speculative 'inventions' behind a system originally designed to protect physical artifacts.
This current patent issue has the nasty smell of institutionalised cyber squatting and someone as big as MS could easily buy the patent and use it to screw everyone else.
Time for change.
You people who think Microsoft "pioneered" AJAX in the 1990s don't know your history, and obviously haven't been working with computers and user interfaces and networking for very long. Microsoft does not deserve the credit you're giving them for inventing AJAX.
Long before he developed Java, James Gosling developed a window system called "NeWS" (for "Network extensible Window System".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
NeWS was originally called "SunDew", and the first paper he published about it was in Methodology of Window Management: Proceedings of an Alvey Workshop at Cosener's House, Abingdon, UK, April 1985 (Focus on Computer Graphics).
http://www.amazon.com/Methodology-Window-Management-Proceedings-Workshop/dp/3540161163
The name of the article was "SunDew: a distributed and extensible window system".
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=23810.23814
NeWS was just like AJAX, but with PostScript instead of JavaScript for programming, with PostScript instead of DHTML for drawing, and with PostScript instead of XML for representing data.
The many user interface toolkits and distributed applications we developed with NeWS totally predate and invalidate any AJAX patents.
http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/101
http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/102
http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/98
http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/97
http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/93
http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/92
http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/64
I demonstrated NeWS to the director of Microsoft Research, so of course they knew about it. But I'm sure the would be happy to take all the undeserved credit for inventing AJAX.
-Don
I've been 'in' IT software dev. for 22 years and I remember the 'first' furores over patents... the whole thing is just a pathetic exercise; enough developers will do things the same way given enough time, time and time again. Why *penalise* everybody for having the same good ideas, almost makes you wanna be dumb.
Hey M$, got any vacancies ? :)
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