Patents were designed to protect inventors so they had time to perfect a process or invention and recoup the costs of development. Don Dunner, past pres. of American Patent Lawyers Association, got a patent on creating life in a test tube for Dow Chemical. Companies now own your right to disease treatment after patenting the gene sequence that causes the disease. You will have to pay royalties to take medications based on these patents. It is way out of hand.

Borland was sued over it's infringements using Lotus 123's interface. Office Accel ended the debate.

Software patents have been controversial since I began programming in 1965.

My take is that software sould be copyrightable but not patentable. Look and feel should be protected due to branding issues but not patented.

The only ones who will benefit from this will be lawyers.

If I made a Time Machine, I would go back in time and pattent my idea before you tried. Therefore, any time machine can be pattented by the inventor. If he sells his invention, any customer can go back in time and pattent it before him, ad nauseaum. So perhaps the time machine is
a bad example?

It is wonderful that the American IPR
system is attempting to get as many
ideas as possible into private ownership. We wouldn't want them to get into the hands of poor people, would we? More seriously, US IPR laws represent a significant non-tariff barrier to trade, and merely increase the scepticism the rest of the world has towards the US government and trade system. If the US government was consistent in trying to make friends rather than foes of the rest of the world, it would seriously cut back its rapacious IPR system.

While the gov't created legislation for patents it appears it forgot to file a patent on the patent idea so I'm gonna get my filing in first. ;-)

If so, I will patent the not build yet Time Machine!

productization?

Northrup's patent is yet another reason to prefer the REST architecture over SOAP and so called "Web Services".

Representational State Transfer (REST), the existing architecture of the web, is an alternative to the RPC-based architecture of "Web Services". Some people consider REST to be a superior architecture for communication between distributed applications when compared to the RPC architecture.

From the Rest wiki:
"REST stands for Representational State Transfer, a phrase coined by Roy Fielding in his dissertation attempting to describe the Web's architectural style in a rigorous enough fashion to make the principles both comprehensible and extensible."

In a post to rest-discuss Mike Dierken wrote:
"I looked over Roy's dissertation a few days ago also and summarized some (but not all) points of REST as this:
- addressable resources
- uniform interfaces that apply to all resources
- stateless messages
- 'representations' - multiple content types accepted or sent"

In the case of the web we have:
"- URI's as the addressable resources
- HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc) as the uniform interface
- HTTP [requests/responses] as the stateless messages and
- media types as the representations" (post by Robert Leftwich)

The general argument is that these four requirements are essential in an architecture for the successful operation and interoperability of distributed applications. RPC in general, and the SOAP implementation in particular, fail to provide these four aspects and so are considered to be an inferior architecture in comparison to the use of the URIs/HTTP alone.

Below are some links that you might find interesting for further reading on this subject:

Second Generation Web Services - by Paul Prescod: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/02/06/rest.html

REST and the Real World - by Paul Prescod: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/02/20/rest.html

The REST wiki wiki web site: http://internet.conveyor.com/RESTwiki/moin.cgi/

The rest-discuss mailing group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rest-discuss

He'll eventually lose in court, but not before alot of money is wasted. Scum like him makes me sick. His patent is similar to me trying to obtain a patent for a programming language I vaguely describe and then I try to go back and collect for infringement on all software companies using a language which might in some small way be loosely in connection with my patent. if it is determined by a court of law, that there is truely no substance behind a patent and the primary goal of the patent it to sue people/companies for an invention claimed to have been invented by the patent holder, (but really is just a plot to rob people of their money), that kind of scummy injustice should be against the law and be means enough to file suit directly against someone. even seeking jail time and compensation for trying to commit such a crime.

Is it any coincidence that this guy hails from New Jersey?

"Charlie suggests that a license might also be helpful in mitigating the liabilities of companies being sued by other companies for some sort of Web services infringement."

If this doesn't sound like mob extortion I don't know what it is. Pay up the protection money so we can protect you from what we'll do to you if you don't pay up.

Jeez.. How can a person get a patent on something that's conceptualized, but not developed yet?.. I mean, can I run out now and get a patent on a time machine, and then charge licensing fees when someone finally develops one?

Long live entrepreneurs - I

Long live entrepreneurs

I

"If the man had the foresight, and invested time and money to create an patentable invention, then he's entitled to profit from it"
Correct but this man patented an idea nothing concrete or workable was submitted to be tested, only an idea.
Patents should be reserved for things not ideas. you shouldn't be able to patent something without showing it works the way you said it would.
I could go right know and patent the transporter from the enterprise as long as an idea can be patented.

WTF? Over...

Oil is a physical commodity, you have it on your property or you buy it from someone who does. There's scarcity because if I buy it someone else can't. Cars are the same way, physical creations which are built one by one, and if I buy one someone else can't unless they make another one.

This guy is saying that an entire sector of our businesses and private individuals (there's no fair use for patents) must pay him a tax for research and development in any aspect of a huge field of technology.

Think about other patents. The RSA patent covered a specific encryption method. What would you think if they had gotten a patent that effectively covered any method of encryption? What if someone had gotten a patent on any useful method derived from mathematical number theory, regardless of the specifics? This is the kind of scope we're talking about.

The real problem here is that it sounds like he did not /invent/ anything, he's just predicted what others would invent.

Where's his revolutionary web services product? He's had since 94 to get this to market...

I don't think developers begrudge other developers charging for their own work, but its when they try to charge for others work that it rankles.

There seems to be a lot of begrudgery here towards the patent holder. If the man had the foresight, and invested time and money to create an patentable invention, then he's entitled to profit from it (its not as if its an invention that is necessary to save any lives or eliminate world hunger). It's the law. Just like song writers are entitled to their copyright fees, software developers are entitled to their license fees, and pharmaceutical companies are entitled to charge for their medecines. What's the problem with paying the inventor his license fee? Do you protest and organise petitions about paying oil companies for oil? Ford for their cars, U2 for their music??

Just because the USPTO made an error, don't think for a second that companies like Sun & IBM are going to just blindly cough up large sums of money.

It is so easy to invalidate a patent, anybody can do it, yet so very hard to make money from a patent, very few can do it.

This is just a fad. Like the merger mania of the 80's and the Internet craze of the 90's, this IP feeding frenzy will implode just like the other business fads once people realize that you can't build a business model around litigation.

Yes, some people are going to make some serious change on this but by and large you cannot sustain a business like this. It's been proven time and time again that you eventually have to actually produce something that someone else wants in order to stay in business.

The Common Business Communication Language, published in 1982
Posted by Olaf Klischat 2003-04-21
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/cbcl.html

I just read part of this paper, refering to work done in 1982. He has this jackass trying to patent web services seriously trumped. I hope he goes bankrupt from lawer fees!

The US Government's SHARE, SHADE and MADE programs funded research into geographically distributed, e.g. Internet mediated, knowledge capture, design collaboration and services. At the beginning of 1994 the MADEFAST experiment was initiated as a test showing that of all of the research worked. MADEFAST was "an exercise in geographically distributed design and prototyping conducted by members of the ARPA MADE research community." There is an ACM paper that was written about it. I worked on MADEFAST--it was my first paid RA'ship in grad school at Stanford. Madefast.org is no more but an archive of that website is here.

I also worked on the short documentary that was filmed during the course of the project and which was shown ultimately to a Congressional committee, IIRC.
Maybe someone somewhere will find the existence of this old research and its public publications of use...

I fail to see how SunRPC (from the early 80's) DOESN'T qualify as prior art. I hope Mr. Northrup can sleep well at night knowing he's caused quite a bit of pain without really contributing anything in return. "Deadbeat" is really too nice a term, since it implies a certain innocuousness.

Read it and sign it if you agree. The petition has been signed by people aroun the world to stop this kind of abuse which is slowing down our industry.

GJC

Just because a process is new, useful, and non-obvious, then why does the inventor deserve a monopoly for 20 MORE YEARS?

If you have any idea that hasn't been patented, regardless of how useful it may be, you are free to patent it. Years later, an idea like pushing a button on the screen and getting a response may sound obvious, but that certainly doesn't mean that it was obvious then, and hence shouldn't be patentable.

Regarding a button on a screen - Xerox PARC should've patented it. If they didn't

It appears to me that Charlie has a new
defination of a telephone system, and has pulled the "wool" over the eyes of the genelemen of the pattent office.

It is incredible that an idea like web services can be patentable at all. Maybe I can patent a verbal answer in response to a question, a client server paradigm, how about a switch that, when activated, results in a light going on somewhere? What are those people thinking? How about a patent for a button on a screen somewhere that evokes a response?