The Death of Google's Patents (Patently-O)
If the PTO's test is followed, the crucial question for the vitality of patents on computer implemented inventions is whether a general purpose computer qualifies as a 'particular' machine within the meaning of the agency's test. In two recent decisions announced after the oral arguments in the Bilski case, Ex parte Langemyr (May 28, 2008) and Ex parte Wasynczuk (June 2, 2008), the PTO Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences has now supplied an answer to that question: A general purpose computer is not a particular machine, and thus innovative software processes are unpatentable if they are tied only to a general purpose computer." (Thanks to Duncan).
Posted Jul 23, 2008 14:51 UTC (Wed)
by elanthis (guest, #6227)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jul 25, 2008 14:34 UTC (Fri)
by kingdon (guest, #4526)
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Posted Jul 25, 2008 18:02 UTC (Fri)
by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
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If the patent troll industry is crippled, then so are the industries that supply it with patents: small inventors and pure inventors (companies that invent but don't also manufacture or do legal work).
You can criticize patents themselves, but as long as patents exist, the patent trolls are an important part of the economy.
Posted Jul 23, 2008 16:23 UTC (Wed)
by wookey (guest, #5501)
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Posted Jul 23, 2008 16:28 UTC (Wed)
by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
[Link] (5 responses)
I'm afraid the best we can hope for in the US in the short term is for a tightening of the rules, with many patents tossed on the grounds of obviousness.
As for PageRank, it's only a small part of Google's search algorithm, and most of it is protected by trade secret, not patents.
Posted Jul 23, 2008 20:45 UTC (Wed)
by samroberts (subscriber, #46749)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Jul 24, 2008 0:09 UTC (Thu)
by rahvin (guest, #16953)
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Posted Jul 24, 2008 2:51 UTC (Thu)
by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 25, 2008 17:58 UTC (Fri)
by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
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They aren't necessarily offering to produce garbage results pointing to your site, though, are they? It could be as legitimate as they say it: getting your site to show up in searches done by people who are looking for sites like yours. For example, maybe your pages don't contain the keywords that your prospective customers think of when they think about what you're selling.
Posted Jul 24, 2008 0:11 UTC (Thu)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
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Posted Jul 24, 2008 9:34 UTC (Thu)
by ayeomans (guest, #1848)
[Link]
The Death of Google's Patents (Patently-O)
The author is very, very clearly pro-patent-everything.
Not that it matters, I guess -- there'll always be idiots. If what he says about "the death
of software patents" that's going to cripple the industry (where "the industry" clearly means
the "patent troll industry"), then I feel like throwing one hell of a celebratory party.
I haven't heard about this anywhere else, though, so I wonder if it's just a case of a patent
troll going Chicken Little about some minor changes that only invalidates a handful of
software patents.
The Death of Google's Patents (Patently-O)
If you want to see something about these cases from a not-so-pro-patent point of view, see for
example http://www.eff.org/cases/re-bilski" (EFF) or
http://web.archive.org/web/20190822115020/http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080409033837121 (groklaw). Things are not going so
badly these days (see for example the Supreme Court's KSR decision -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KSR_v._Teleflex - regarding obviousness which is having a big
impact in the lower courts and patent office), although of course things had gotten pretty far
out of whack in the 1980s and 1990s, and these things can turn around pretty slowly.
The Death of Google's Patents (Patently-O)
If what he says about "the death
of software patents" that's going to cripple the industry (where "the industry" clearly means
the "patent troll industry"), then I feel like throwing one hell of a celebratory party.
The Death of Google's Patents (Patently-O)
As is made clear in the comments, the author is involved in the Bilski case he mentions and is
famous for a 'patents on all information processing' view of the world. He tries to use Google
as a poster child for patents due to their success, although I don't think that has much to do
with their patents. (It/they might have been useful for initial VC funding?).
Getting people (especially the patent people who hang out on that blog) to see that patents on
information transformation are nothing more than a tiresome drag in development and a skewer
of the direction of development and standards remains an uphill struggle. Most of them can't
see past the money.
... as this guy has his own axe to grind. If the USPTO were really about to throw out all software patents, I fear that Congress would intervene to reinstate them in any case, as there would be many wealthy contributors urging them to do just that, and plenty of pundits who would loudly scream that we face economic disaster otherwise.
Don't get your hopes up ...
Don't get your hopes up ...
The idea that if anybody could take the ideas in PageRank and attempt to
start their own search engine business that that would have any impact at
all on google's business is ludicrous. The value is in their
implementation, and that isn't reproducible, not without access to the
source.
Don't get your hopes up ...
Not just implementation but Maintenance as well, as they constantly revise the system to
negate the effect of people trying to "beat" the system. The single most important thing about
Google's search is they don't let advertisers game the system. Everyone using Google knows
what's paid for and what's not.
The same isn't true of Yahoo or MS search, and just like we saw in the days before Google, the
other companies don't have the will power to avoid the $$$ offered by those trying to game the
system. Until Google came along search on the internet was garbage, you typically didn't look
at any of the search results on engines like Altavista until the 3rd page because everything
before that was a paid ad made to look like search results. Even today if you look close at
the other engines you will see that there are paid ad's hidden in the search results whether
it's intentional by the engine or just gaming by outsiders.
Don't get your hopes up ...
I thought the vast majority of garbage sites in search results were there because they were
able to game the system, not because they were paying search engines *per se*. I know that if
doing that were possible, even for Yahoo and MSN, management at my job would have jumped at
the chance.
I suspect Google's spidering and filtering is still ahead of the pack, though by not nearly as
much anymore.
Not that people realize it: it seems like every two months or so, we still have someone
proffering to "drive millions of visitors to our site" by "optimizing our industry-standard
META tags, which will search engines what your site is about."
Don't get your hopes up ...
it seems like every two months or so, we still have someone
proffering to "drive millions of visitors to our site" by "optimizing our industry-standard
META tags, which will search engines what your site is about."
Don't get your hopes up ...
Plus you'd need a huge server farm to get anywhere close to Google's
amazing response times.
I'd claim that a patent I wrote while working at IBM "Method and system for weighting the search results of a database search engine" covers the claims and pre-dates the Google Page Rank patent. Of course, patent lawyers might make a nice income disputing this, especially as my GB patent was filed before the Google US patent which in turn was filed before the US version of my patent.
Prior art?
Not that Google's fortunes depend on PageRank. Their business model was the truly clever invention.