Can’t we find a knowledgeable software patent expert to comment about the validity of the patent itself? I agree that the abstract seems to describe databse query technology that predates the 1997 patent by many years, So the real question is whether there is anything really unique in the patent? the fact that is was granted doesn’t really mean that much – there are many patents that, when challenged can be found to not valid. This seems like it might be one of them and of course, none of has any idea what technology Google is actually using…

@Duncan Riley
“Don’t play ethics and credibility with me boy, it’s a zero win game for you ”

Couldn’t have agreed more Duncan.

…not quite sure to make of that last snide comment; so, a couple of thoughts for you:

- perhaps they don’t have a lot of money with which to fight a patent case (and with one foot in the academic arena and the other in a commercial company, it sure sounds like this is the case). Finding a lawyer who will take the case on a contingency basis is probably the only way this thing will see the light of day

- patent law is designed to protect all economic benefit from an idea. That include past, present and future. Just because an idea isn’t earning a profit yet, doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be defended against infringement. Unfortunately, it’s obvious that patent lawyers are reluctant to take cases on a contingency basis… I wonder why that is? Perhaps because patent law is a large crap shoot that depends heavily on outlasting the other guy and has very little to do with fairness in either the letter or the spirit of the law.

As a computer programmer I hate patents. It is so difficult to know all patents and ensure you aren’t breaking any. And even harder are all the obvious patents that should never have been accepted to begin with. How can I compete with that?

Have you read the patent? The complaint? Have you examined the prior art? Obviously not by your statement.

“I vote patent troll.”

Who cares what you vote? You’re obviously uninformed.

“There should be a poll after every patent lawsuit article to let readers vote on whether the litigant is a patent troll or not.”

Similarly, who cares what a bunch of uninformed readers think? A completely useless poll, IMHO.

—-

By this and my previous comments, I’m not faulting TC or Duncan for reporting this, just by the completely uninformed labeling of this as a “patent troll” case. And just to be clear I do not know nor am I affiliated with any of the parties on this issue.

If you know Ken and I then you should give both of us a call and apologize.

Michael Belanger

Here is to hoping Google takes them to the cleaners – shameless patent trolls!

Good article follows on the silliness of the term “patent troll.” How does investing in patents differ from investing in stocks or real estate hoping to make money in the future off the work of others while sitting on your butt, except that it is far more risky as only a small percentage of patents make money?

http://www.host...eny%2005-06.pdf

Have to agree with you!

#3:

Before you go posting all over Techcrunch forums advertising your website, you should considering getting something that works first, rather than the slow, badly-designed excuse of a website you have right now (which looks like it only took a couple of minutes to create in Frontpage).

Actually, the whole point of patenting is that you don’t get to use something without the consent of the patent holder even if you (re)-invented it yourself.
Even if it is software. Even if you are Google. And Google, of course, understands that very well — when someone violates their patent they are not friendly. (This helps feed you, Nick, and your family).

And, of course, you don’t have to “run with thingys” to have rights where those “thingys ” are concerned. M any patents, in fact, are filed precisely to block someone else running with somethingy and making a commercial success of it and negatively impacting the patent holder’s current business. that could bebuilt around an inferior technology. Deep-sixing innovation is S.O.P.

And you don’t lose your protection by not reacting immediately. You get leeway in deciding when to prosecute your claims.

Kind of the way it is.

I’ll give you some charity.

In software, here’s how the “little guy with a patent” story usually plays out:
(a) some “little guy” might obtain a patent or patents on some software-based system
(b) the “little guy” then makes a product that incorporates the patented systems
(c) if the market niche is small enough perhaps nothing more happens, other than that the “little guy” perhaps has more protection from market forces than is socially optimal (in a small niche copyright on the software + incumbent advantage should be sufficient; adding patent protection on top of it is perhaps excessive)
(d) if the market niche is large or the system contains components that would be valuable otherwise, the “little guy” winds up having to give licenses away to those “big guys” you mentioned — IBM, Microsoft, etc…Why? Because there’s about 20 years’ worth of fairly obvious patents in the “big guys”’s inventory, and it can be very difficult to make _any_ software-based system that infringes none of those patents (do your text fields infringe any patents for “simulating a carriage return in an electronic text editing environment”?…there are some still-valid patents actually that obvious out there)

Thus: if there’s any real value or general applicability in your patented system you’ll be at the mercy of teh big guys if you actually produce a product incorporating it, because so many dubious software-related patents have been granted over the past couple of decades.

What is a “little guy” to do? It seems the answer these days is: don’t make a product, just sue companies that use “your idea”; I put “your idea” in quotes because the “big guys” don’t have a monopoly on dubious patents, and — unsurprisingly if you think about it a bit — it’s the case, more often than not, that when a “big guy” is found to be infringing some “little guy”’s patent that that patent is pretty dubious to begin with.

Thus in the software field:
— most software-related patents are dubious (probably at least 25:1 in my experience reading them…)
— legit patents on truly novel ideas offer minimal protection from big guys, due to the large # of obvious patents that’ve been handed out
— most patent litigation is performed either by “little guys” without products but with some dubious patents and a legal team working on contingency, or by a company of mostly-lawyers who don’t have any products but who have managed to acquire some dubious patents; in both cases the target is almost always some “big guy” who is almost certainly infringing the patents but who also probably couldn’t help but infringe them (because the contents are so obvious)

…which winds up looking less and less like the healthy functioning of a system designed to promote innovation, and more and more like a transfer of wealth away from those actually producing value (in this case, “big guys” with actual products) and towards non-value-producing sectors of the economy (litigation and other paper-shuffling fields).

It’s not clear what sort of fix would actually work: tightening standards for new software-related patents would eventually solve most of the current problems, but it’d take another 20 years or so for all the dubious patents to expire first, and you’d have to actually trust that the same agency that handed out so many dubious patents in the first place would be able to stick to it’s new mandate for letting only high-quality applications through.

If I were a patent holder in fields not related to software I’d be nervous right now; the brazenness of software patent litigation combined with the typical low quality of the patents is a kind of rot that, if not contained, might spread to other sorts of patents with time, eventually dragging down their perceived legitimacy — and thus, eventually, their legislative sympathy…

Nick

Disclosure: Google feeds me and my family.

Oh, and Jon, sorry about the world ending and all that, but don’t you have anything better to do than rant in the wee hours of the morning? Good thing you’re so much more erudite than the rest of us.

United States Patent 5,694,593
Baclawski December 2, 1997
Distributed computer database system and method

Abstract

A distributed computer database system including a front end computer and a plurality of computer nodes interconnected by a network into a search engine. A query from a user is transmitted to the front end computer which forwards the query to one of the computer nodes, termed the home node, of the search engine. The home node fragments the query and hashes the fragments of query to create an index by which the hashed query fragments are transmitted to one or more nodes on the network. Each node on the network which receives a hashed fragment uses the fragment of the query to perform a search on its respective database. The results of the searches of the local databases are then gathered by the home node.
Inventors: Baclawski; Kenneth P. (Waltham, MA)
Assignee: Northeastern University (Boston, MA)
Appl. No.: 08/318,252
Filed: October 5, 1994

Taken from this article http://www.msnb...60819/from/RSS/