This has been the bread and butter of PHP for two decades. I'm glad no one tried to enforce this to take away like 99% of the internet.
Although you can also ”go cuckoo”, as in crazy.
The US (and other countries) law are missing IMHO two parts:
- really serve penalties for abusing the patent systems
- serve penalties for abusing the copyright systems
And many other things too, but someone had to be first. I doubt it was IBM but there would have been some elapsed time between TBL inventing HTML and the first time someone dynamically generated it from an RDBMS. That’s the person who could claim prior art.
And it was definitely not something unique. This project started because I was asking (probably on Usenet) for advice on what GUI framework we should use, and was recommended to build the application using web technologies.
The fact that IBM managed to get a patent on this is just one more of an almost infinite number of examples showing why the patent system is broken.
https://opus-codec.org/license/
Full disclosure, I am a member of the Xiph.Org Foundation.
If a startup has some decent patents, they get to have a conversation with companies like IBM that come calling. Otherwise, they have to roll over.
Basically, when the IBMs of the world come around demanding a license, you show IBM they are infringing on your patent.
In general patents are business assets or business tools. They are important for valuation, among other things.
The greatest good is our aim here.
What I remember from law school is: let's say you're drafting a patent, and you want it to cover as much as possible without getting invalidated by prior art. So you're going to write some claims, and each claim can stand or fall on its own (each claim could be rejected by the patent office, or invalidated later because of prior art, without invalidating the more specific claims). So first you'll write a series of independent claims, and those will each be as broad as you hope you can get away with ("it's HTML on a computer!"). Having the broad independent claims stand is your best case scenario, because that makes it hard for competitors to work around your patent. But then for each independent claim you'll add dependent claims, which narrow down what you're claiming ("OK, it's HTML on a computer with foo," "OK, it's HTML on a computer with foo and bar"). That's your fallback scenario: maybe "HTML on a computer" gets rejected, and "HTML on a computer with foo" gets rejected, but "HTML on a computer with foo and bar" is original enough to make it through, so you still end up owning something of value. But maybe now that your broad claims are gone, your competitors can avoid your patent by doing "HTML with foo and baz" to accomplish the same thing.
So that's how the game theory works: you're basically leaving money on the table if you don't include some super broad claims at the top. Doesn't cost you anything if those ones don't stick. So we can't just read a patent and assume it actually protects every single broad claim -- but we can't assume it doesn't, either. We won't find out for sure which (if any) claims are actually valid unless there's a lawsuit and a judge or jury has to pick through the prior art and decide whether there are claims in there that are narrow enough to be original.
But here it's where the patent system is broken. Doing conceptually trivial combinations of on itself non patentable thinks should _never_ be patentable, at lest for software but probably for anything. Sure patenting a specific complex mechanism for combining two thinks might be patentable but in case of software this is hardly ever the case, most times its more or less trivial glue code.
So e.g. Face recognition + smartphone + unlock screen might all be patentable by itself. Especially a faceregocnition algorithm which works especially good for smartphone usecase might be patentable. Bu using existing face recognition on a smartphone to unlock the screen shouldn't be patentable. They are all existing components and combining them is conceptually trivial. In the end patents where meant to protect research investments, not random ideas.
During the prosecution of the patent (the back and forth with the USPTO) the claims may be amended as long as there is support for the amendment in the description. The description (generally speaking) cannot be amended without refiling and losing the priority date.
These amendments are usually narrowing the independant claims to avoid prior art - similar to your example. Additional details from the descriptions are added to the claims until the examiner agrees that the prior is overcome.
The independent claims are the broadest, and the dependent claims add additional limitations (more or less) that are often directed optional features.
In this patent, which is pretty good for an old-time software patent, this element:
"(c) substituting the data entered by the user into the HTML input form into a dynamic SQL query using a common name space, wherein the common name space comprises variables found in both the dynamic SQL query and the HTML input form;"
is probably what convinced the examiner to allow the patent.
This sounds like the central problem, to me.
> As the Big Blue crew looked on (without a flicker of emotion), my colleagues--all of whom had both engineering and law degrees--took to the whiteboard with markers, methodically illustrating, dissecting, and demolishing IBM's claims. We used phrases like: "You must be kidding," and "You ought to be ashamed." But the IBM team showed no emotion, save outright indifference. Confidently, we proclaimed our conclusion: Only one of the seven IBM patents would be deemed valid by a court, and no rational court would find that Sun's technology infringed even that one.
> An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"
NAL, but something a patent attorney explained to me once.
The new parts are necessarily included in the claims at the end of patent document. However, there's nothing that requires an applicant to specify which elements of a claim are new over the prior art.
Let that sink in.
Source: https://www.research.ibm.com/patents/#:~:text=Since%201920%2....
Is there a list of companies that got screwed by giant companies because they unknowingly infringed a patent?
For example one person patented the wheel and got the patent granted, or recently I found that some company on zooming in and out on a graph or automatically shutting down computers when they are not used.
Normally large tech companies don't use any of this patents, it's not in their interest to make it obvious how broken the patent system is. But the problem starts once a company starts to fall and now tries to make money no matter what. Or this patents are bought up by patent trolls.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Even back then IBM was subject to patent trolls patenting things like using the ctrl key, etc. and then going after IBM. They liked having a huge collection of patents and even disclosed inventions that were not patented but instead published in a publication (I think it was called something like The IBM Invention Disclosure Bulletin) that was available in only a handful of public libraries, like the New York public library. That way if they wanted to use a technique that they had already disclosed they could use these publications of proof of prior art. I filed a few ideas that they said they weren’t interested in that didn’t even qualify for this level of disclosure.
You should see how fierce the patent wars are in the automobile industry, medical devices, electronics, materials science, adhesives, brake pads, throttle cables, fasteners, tooling, construction/building materials, to name a few.
The difference is that software is special compared to electronics, chemistry etc etc You can't be vague in those fields but in software implementations you can as much as you want. Maybe we should start issuing patents in hairdressing as well.
Have a company pay “fee” to the same company registered in another country. You have to defend your patents if not you can get the state against you. The patents is then not guard against competition.
There is not mitigation to SQL Injection attack in the patent - didn't read it all word by wors but skimmed it through.
When I say people, I mean me. On publicly available websites. :)
In the claims this is the element:
"(c) substituting the data entered by the user into the HTML input form into a dynamic SQL query using a common name space, wherein the common name space comprises variables found in both the dynamic SQL query and the HTML input form;"
This expired patent is much narrower than just rendering SQL results in HTML. It claims a particular way of mapping form field inputs to SQL using an intermediate macro language and a macro file that is employed per request/post that defines the mapping rules for the request.
