The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

BackWeb sues Microsoft over 'push' technology

Benny

um 

Posted Thursday 26th March 2009 20:03 GMT

Stop

so anyone 'pushing' data to an application is infringing on a patent?!

That doesnt sound right

Psymon

sigh 

Posted Thursday 26th March 2009 20:03 GMT

Coat

what's the betting said patents are vague, woolly listings of prior art?

Mines the one with the patent for "ingesting oxygen into complex organisms through the use of respiration" in the pocket

kain preacher

Um why now? 

Posted Thursday 26th March 2009 20:03 GMT

BITS first came out in 2001. So why did they wait so long ?

CC

Not quite true who was first 

Posted Thursday 26th March 2009 20:03 GMT

Black Helicopters

Pointcast was doing it years before BackWeb.

Brian Miller

What happened to "previous art" 

Posted Thursday 26th March 2009 20:03 GMT

Ever wonder when the USPTO is going to get some people who know what the concept of "previous art" means? Copying files between computers has been established for quite some time now. Anybody remember uucp? Kick it off with a crontab entry and ignore it. Software patents are stupid because the patent office keeps rubber-stamping these things. If the office were to actually examine them, they would be rejected 99% of the time.

Goat Jam

Great News 

Posted Thursday 26th March 2009 23:58 GMT

Paris Hilton

The more insanely retarded patent claims we have the closer we get to having the idiot system overhauled.

The fact it is targeted at Mickeysoft is a bonus!

Paris, because she's the ultimate push client

Anonymous Coward

old technology 

Posted Friday 27th March 2009 16:56 GMT

Stop

Sorry I wrote software to push (and pull) software and data updates automatically way back when the only comms was dial up modems running at 1200 baud. As soon as autodial modems came out we wrote our own software and implemented it for our customers to replace manual methods which had been used in the past.

That was probably around 1984. Clear prior art! It even included recovery from point of failure, error checking (as not all modems were then) and numerous other 'modern' features.