Subject: [Asrg] News Article - MailBlocks, Patents and Prior Art

From: Yakov Shafranovich <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 12:12:29 -0400

Take a look at this CNET news article, it addresses the fact that 
MailBlocks claims patents on ALL C/R systems:

http://news.com.com/2010-1032_3-1003921.html

----snip-----
In-boxes that fight back
By Declan McCullagh
May 19, 2003, 4:00 AM PT
http://news.com.com/2010-1032-1003921.html

If you're overwhelmed by spam like the rest of us, there aren't any really 
terrific solutions.

You can try smarter spam filters, though you'll still have to verify that 
legit mail isn't swept up among the dross. You can switch to a new e-mail 
address and pray that nobody except friends and family ever learn it. Or 
wait a few years for micropayments, small cash payments required to deliver 
an e-mail that could make it uneconomical for spammers to annoy us.

But the spam-blocking technique that's attracted the most attention among 
start-ups recently is a very simple one: Challenge-response (CR) 
technology. When your mailbox is protected by a CR system, anyone who tries 
to contact you will be greeted with a response saying something like "click 
on this link to deliver this message" or "type in the word you see in the 
box above." Well-designed CR utilities won't challenge mail from known 
correspondents or mail that you specifically asked to receive.

The problem with CR systems is that one company, Mailblocks of Los Altos, 
Calif., claims to own all rights to the concept and hopes to prevent anyone 
else from selling such a system without paying hefty licensing fees.

Mailblocks has purchased two patents, 6,199,102 (filed in 1997) and 
6,112,227 (filed in 1998), and has been aggressive in wielding them against 
competitors. Mailblocks' targets so far include Seattle-based SpamArrest 
and EarthLink (after the Internet provider said it would begin offering CR 
technology to subscribers by the end of May). Mailblocks has asked for a 
preliminary injunction in both suits.

Phil Goldman, Mailblocks' chief executive, is no stranger to the 
rough-and-tumble world of start-up companies. He got rich when he and two 
partners co-founded WebTV and sold the unprofitable venture to Microsoft in 
1997 for a handy $425 million. (Anyone think he might be eyeing the same 
exit strategy again?)

But Goldman has a problem. He's betting his company on the validity of the 
two patents, both of which are questionable because of other work that was 
published well before the filing dates of the Mailblocks patents.

Under U.S. law, a patent is invalid if either of these conditions apply: If 
the "invention was known or used by others in this country...before the 
invention thereof by the applicant for patent" or if it was "described in a 
printed publication" more than a year prior to the date the patent was filed.

These services might be able to convince consumers to switch over to them. 
They might not. But they deserve the chance to try.
That's catastrophically bad news for Mailblocks. In 1992, five years before 
the first Mailblocks-owned patent was requested, Cynthia Dwork and Moni 
Naor of IBM Research published an amazingly prescient paper. It began with 
this paragraph that rings true today: "Some time ago one of us returned 
from a brief vacation, only to find 241 messages in our reader. While junk 
mail has long been a nuisance in hard (snail) mail, we believe that 
electronic junk mail presents a much greater problem. In particular, the 
ease and low cost of sending electronic mail, and in particular the 
simplicity of sending the same message to many parties, all but invite 
abuse. In this paper we suggest a computational approach to combatting the 
proliferation of electronic mail. More generally, we have designed an 
access control mechanism that can be used whenever it is desirable to 
restrain, but not prohibit, access to a resource."

Dwork and Naor even envisioned a "frequent correspondent list of senders 
from whom messages are accepted without verification." Naor expanded on 
this idea in a September 1996 article titled "Verification of a human in 
the loop or Identification via the Turing Test." That's a reference to the 
great British mathematician Alan Turing, who in 1950 described a test to 
distinguish a human from a machine.

By Aug. 28, 1997, when Christopher Alan Cobb filed for his patent that 
eventually was purchased by Mailblocks, the challenge-response idea had 
become commonplace on the Internet:

Brad Templeton, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, had 
written his Viking-12 CR utility and was using it. Templeton says he'd be 
delighted to testify on behalf of EarthLink to help the company invalidate 
the Mailblocks patent.

Over a year earlier, Brent Chapman's majordomo, the popular mailing list 
software, included a CR feature.

A November 1996 post to Usenet's news.admin.net-abuse.usenet newsgroup 
talks about a "random challenge that is very easy for a human to respond 
to, but next to impossible for a computer." Another from January 1997 
describes an e-mail "spam block 'bot" that was so effective "I've received 
hate mail from spammers concerning it," and a third post describes a 
commercial product called the Deadbolt Personal E-mail Filter.

Mailblocks' Goldman admits that there were prior publications, but argues 
that at least some portions of his patents remain valid. "The patents have 
very specific claims in them," Goldman told me. "The claims are different 
than the types of things people have been doing before. Maybe here and 
there, they're the same so not 100 percent of the claims are valid, but 
many of them are. Patents aren't really invalid or valid until you test 
them. We're in the unfortunate position where we're testing them."

We'll find out whether Goldman is right after a federal judge rules on his 
request for injunctions against SpamArrest and EarthLink. But it's worth 
highlighting the harm that software patents can inflict when they're used 
to assert exclusive ownership over portions of products already on the 
market. Free software developers learned that lesson the hard way after 
seemingly endless struggles over the Lempel Ziv Welch compression algorithm 
used in GIF files (owned by Unisys) and the MP3 encoding patent (owned by 
Thomson Multimedia).

Whether we like them or not, CR systems are set to become wildly popular 
really soon. They're easy to program and the market remains wide open. And 
like any new industry, CR companies have encountered growing pains: 
SpamArrest spammed advertisements to people who e-mailed its customers; 
Mailblocks' hastily amended initial privacy policy said "you may not 'opt 
out' of the receipt of such promotional materials from Mailblocks and/or 
its affiliates, advertisers or other business partners"; Mail-block.com (an 
unrelated company) has been blocked by Outblaze.com for spamming; 
MailWiper.com has been caught spamming; MailFrontier.com hasn't handled 
mailing list subscriptions properly.

These services might be able to convince consumers to switch over to them. 
They might not. But they deserve the chance to try. Mailblocks should 
abandon its legally dubious patent lawsuits against its competitors and 
compete fairly in the marketplace. At just $10 a year, its service is 
reasonably priced, and it has some features, like integration with Outlook, 
that its competitors don't.

Mailblocks should do the right thing--the future of our in-boxes may depend 
on it.

Copyright ©1995-2003 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.
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