Xerox sues Google and Yahoo! over patentspeak
Xerox has sued Google and Yahoo!, claiming that various services offered by the two web giants infringe on a pair of its patents. In a suit (PDF) filed on Friday in a Delaware federal court, the copier king says that several Google and Yahoo! services - including YouTube, Google Maps, AdWords, and Yahoo! Shopping - step on …
Not another stupidly obvious patent on something circulating within the developer community for a few decades.
The quoted text is a work of complete fiction and means nothing at all (what happened to patents needing a description of how to build the working product?)
It seems to be as fictional as the Harry Potter series, and Xerox are probably trying to get the same amount of money for it. BUT it adds no value to humanity at all (even less than Harry Potter!)
FAIL
The 'patentspeak' sounds like a Computing Science research paper written in the '90s, or earlier.
I'm sure that all these ideas and implementations were explored to death by many students and researchers in universities all over the world. Does anybody out there know about prior art?
This is a big company with a big patent portfolio suing other big companies, also with big patent porfolios (at least Google counts here.) The likelihood that Xerox have a product that infringes some odd patent that Google owns is pretty high. So there is a good chance that this will break out into the sort of war that lawyers love. It isn't supposed to work like this. The big boys are supposed to cross licence everything and use their patents to wipe out small fry. (Or in the case of Apple versus Nokia, slog it out until they admit one another to their seperate private cross licencing clubs. Then they wipe out the small fry.)
Whilst Xerox have hardly been the titan of innovation they once were (where just about everything people think is modern in computiing was invented 30 years ago at Xerox PARC) they are not exactly fading away either. So they are not some dying has-been of a company trying to leverage a piddly bit of IP to significantly bolster the company's bottom line. In all, slightly odd.
On the other hand, a few more highly damaging and stupid patent cases that cost big companies real money might start to sway to pro software patent lobby in these companies. That just might start to sway the lawmakers. We can onyl hope.
Many of my books have an index, is that not an application of the same foggy notions as "very clearly (not)" expressed in this 'patent'? As such I thought that prior art was excluded from patent action, not the objective of a patent. Anyone like to use MY wheel, for a fee of course!
they effectively negated all that nice patentable protection about 30 years ago when they let a couple of nerds walk out of PARC with the keys, blueprints, and bills of materials, and deed for the kingdom.
Actually, Xerox offered those nerds a visit in exchange for stocks and shares. They weren't exactly robbed.
"One patent - US patent number 6,778,979 - describes a system for "automatically generating queries,"
A search engine maybe? What about asking a bloody question :P
while the other - 6,236,994 - details a "method and apparatus for the integration of information and knowledge."
Uhhh a wild guess here but school books? Prior art possible here?
Theres your defence Google go get em
"...[Patent number] 6,236,994 - details a 'method and apparatus for the integration of information and knowledge.' "
Hang on, let me check my dictionary real quick.
Information - (n) knowledge gained through study, communication, research, instruction, etc.
knowledge - (n) acquaintance with facts as from study or investigation; the fact or state of knowing
So the above quoted patent describes a "method and apparatus" for the integration of facts and, uh... other facts? You know, I think they have those already: they're called "books".
