Subject: Patent threatens autodiscovery

From: Asbjørn Ulsberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Jul 2004 10:59:12 +0200

I just read the «U.S. Patent 5,892,908: Method of extracting network  
information»[1] and immediately thought about syndication and more  
specifically autodiscovery. Patent 5,892,908 seems to apply to a LAN and  
not a WAN as the Internet, but still as good as all discovery mechanisms  
(UDDI and so on) will infringe this patent. The patent description is as  
follows:

   A method of extracting network information first receives an
   initial link address (102) and retrieves a file (104)
   associated with the initial link address.

   The file is then parsed (106) to find a hyper text link. Next
   it is determined (108) if the hyper text link has a link
   address that contains the network address as a root.

   When the link address contains the initial link address as
   the root, a link file associated with the link address is
   retrieved (110).

What are your reactions to this patent? I find it pretty amazing that the  
US patent service approves a vague patent like this, and that it's  
actually possible to patent an abstract idea, seemingly no matter what the  
idea is about.

The patent was filed September 10th 1996 and approved April 6th 1999. Does  
anyone know of working code that existed before any of these dates that  
may render the patent useless? The group of people holding the patent has  
sued Adobe for infringing it, because Acrobat Reader does something  
similar to the incredibly vague description in it. If Adobe can be sued  
for infringement on this patent, surely all aggregator writers can as well.

____
[1] <url:  
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&r=1&l=50&f=G&d=PALL&s1=5892908.WKU.&OS=PN/5892908&RS=PN/5892908>

-- 
Asbjørn Ulsberg         -=|=-        [email-masked]
«He's a loathsome offensive brute, yet I can't look away»

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From: Jens Alfke <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Jul 2004 10:01:52 -0700

If you scroll down to the "SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION":

> A method of extracting network information that overcomes these and 
> other  problems first receives an initial link address and retrieves a 
> file  associated with the initial link address. The file is then 
> parsed to find  any link address contained inside the file. When a 
> link address is found  in the file, it is determined if this link 
> address has the same "root" as  the initial link address. If the link 
> address found has the same "root" as  the initial link address, the 
> file associated with the link address is  then retrieved. Retrieved 
> files are then further processed so that the  hypertext links they 
> contain can be made to point to other local files,  rather than to 
> files of the Internet. Any image maps in the retrieved  files are 
> converted so they will execute locally. In this manner the  invention 
> creates a bundle of content that can be executed locally,  without the 
> need for Internet connectivity.

In other words, spidering a single website and converting it into a 
local archive by copying the pages to disk and rewriting the links. 
Which implicates MSIE and any other browser that can save "web 
archives"; does Adobe have tools that can do this and generate PDFs? 
That would explain why they're being sued.

IANAL, but: The patent as a whole doesn't seem to cover the general 
process of traversing a hyperlink, though the specific algorithms 
listed are so laughably vague that they could be interpreted that way.

_______________________________________
Jens Alfke — Atom/RSS Wrangler — Apple Computer
You know, I hate to ask, but are "friends" electric?

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From: Walter Underwood <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Jul 2004 11:11:20 -0700

--On Friday, July 9, 2004 10:59 AM +0200 Asbjørn Ulsberg <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
> The patent was filed September 10th 1996 and approved April 6th 1999.
> Does  anyone know of working code that existed before any of these dates
> that  may render the patent useless?

Jef Poskanzer wrote WebCopy around that time. There isn't a date on
that specific bit of code, but WebCat is copyright 1996. WebCopy can
rewrite local absolute URLs to be relative.

  <http://www.acme.com/java/software/WebCopy.html>

Infoseek used the sitelist.txt file to give hints to spiders. This was
described at the W3C Distributed Indexing/Searching Workshop in May 1996.
sitelist.txt is a list of the documents on the site with their sizes
and modification dates. The spider would read that file, extract the
links, and fetch the files which had changed.

  <http://www.w3.org/Search/9605-Indexing-Workshop/>
  <http://www.w3.org/Search/9605-Indexing-Workshop/Papers/[email-masked]>
  <http://www.skirsch.com/papers/distributed.html>

The original location for the sitelist.txt standard is long gone, but
you can get it from the WayBack Machine. Their earliest copy is from
1997, but Steve Kirsch talked about it at the workshop above, and the
Infoseek spider was working by then.

  <http://web.archive.org/web/19970529104229/http://software.infoseek.com/products/ultraseek/docs/sitelist.html>

wunder
--
Walter Underwood
Principal Architect, Verity

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From: Paul Hoffman / IMC <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Jul 2004 15:33:22 -0700

Ah, another rite of passage into the IETF. Here is the first of what 
might be many forays into the world of "I am not a patent lawyer but 
that doesn't stop me from saying what I think about this patent".

Imagine how useful it would be if donut bakers sitting around the 
room said "I don't know anything about XML or syndication, but let's 
start critiquing this new Atom protocol."

As someone who is not a lawyer, and is not a patent lawyer, but is 
someone who has been taught a few things about patent law, let me 
assure us all that trying to figure this out on our own is a complete 
waste of time. Most lawyers wouldn't even try to figure out patent 
law, so it is even more absurd for non-lawyers to do so.

If you know of a patent that you think affects the WGs work, by all 
means let either Tim and I know. That's part of our job.

If you have an expert opinion on a particular patent from a patent 
lawyer that you want to share with the list, go ahead. Everyone who 
likes to rely on free legal advice might be interested. Otherwise, 
please think about whether what you want to post is of any value to 
the WG. Thanks!

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium