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Amazon, Google, Yahoo, And Others Sued For Automating Their E-mail (InformationWeek)

[Posted August 29, 2007 by corbet]

Here's an InformationWeek article about this week's software patent silliness. "The lawsuit charges the companies with implementing systems that 'comprise interpreting electronic messages with rule base and case base knowledge engines' as described in the patent held by the plaintiff, 'Automatic message interpretation and routing system.'" The patent claims are quite general and could easily describe packages like Mailman.

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Posted Aug 29, 2007 17:49 UTC (Wed) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link]

The patent was filed in 1998. I was using procmail long before that - early 90s. I'm sure that many were using .forward pipes and shell scripts long before *that*; it was easily doable in the 80s. I hope Google decides that fighting this kind of crap is worth spending some money on.

Amazon, Google, Yahoo, And Others Sued For Automating Their E-mail (InformationWeek)

Posted Sep 3, 2007 13:10 UTC (Mon) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

I'm also pretty sure that Procmail's SmartList module, which does amazing
things with automated interpreting of email, existed well before 1998.