[tsimionescu]

This doesn't seem like a few protocol fields, but about the entire mechanism of distributing the information and how to get from a request to any one server in the distributed network to the one that actually stores the information you requested (at least looking at the claims in your first patent).

I have no idea if there was prior art or how close the procedure they describe was to known storage algorithms in 2000 when the application was made, so I'm not saying this is a valid patent, but it doesn't seem like a completely frivolous patent to me at first glance.

Of course, if indeed AWS came to a very similar implementation themselves, as the jury found, then that further suggests that the idea is not that novel.

[nulbyte]

I stopped after claim 9 on the first patent linked. It had, up until that point, described: peer-to-peer routing, downloading data and programs, running downloaded programs using downloaded data, redirection, and variable length strings.

The next of claims seemed to begin to regurgitate the previous ones with some indiscerbable minute difference.

None of this sounds novel. I read another of their patents where they invented a directory backed DNS service and web browser connections. This company sounds like one massive troll.

[tsimionescu]

Another poster I think put it better: what the patent is describing is essentially building a DNS system for data. Claim 1 describes how DNS forwarders work (the "client" is a DNS client, the "server" is a DNS forwarder, and the "data location server" is a DNS authoritative name server). Claim 10 then describes how a DNS recursive resolver works (the "client" is the rescursive resolver, and the "data location servers" are authoritative name servers). Claims 17 and 18 then essentially describe the full distributed DB that uses this DNS-like mechanism for retrieval.

The sub-claims are just covering minor variations of the implementation, and can safely be ignored in general in any patent.

[maratc]

IANAL but there was a patent describing a USB-powered vibrator.

While the idea of a vibrator is not new, and the idea of powering devices via USB isn't new either, the combination of these two non-new ideas was new.

The patent was granted, and when someone (not the patent holder) produced a USB-powered vibrator, they were found in a violation of the patent in question.

Similarly, if someone made a patent about "building a DNS system for data", and someone else used that idea to actually build that system, they may be in a violation of the patent. The more claims (or sub-claims) there are, the more specific the innovation was, and now the question is whether the supposed infringement was actually implementing all of the claims of the patent.

[McBun]

That sounds ridiculous to me... By the same logic, I could patent a car that is charged by USB (not very efficient, but eh, it's new !) and then nobody could build a car charged via USB ?

[LordKeren]

One of the strangest aspects of patents is that it is much easier to get a patent than it is to defend that patent in court.

Many patents are granted by the patent office then revoked by judges.

[maratc]

> I could patent a car that is charged by USB

If you paid the filing dues (a significant sum), and nobody has patented that before, then yes.

> nobody could build a car charged via USB?

Anybody could build a car powered by USB, and you could then sue them for the infringement of your patent. It could then go in many directions, from you becoming very rich, to your patent being invalidated and you found responsible for court fees.

This system is not as ridiculous as it sounds.

[mrguyorama]

>This system is not as ridiculous as it sounds.

It's so not ridiculous that Amazon was able to prevent the entire ecommerce industry from implementing anything even close to a "one click purchase" flow because of a patent. Not because you couldn't see Amazon's source code for the feature, or couldn't come up with your own completely different implementation of the idea, but because as long as you can convince a completely unsophisticated and inexpert jury members that a paragraph of extremely vague text can be read in any way to apply to anyone else's system, you are violating their patent.

Imagine being able to patent addition, or the very concept of a cake, such that nobody could make a product that was bready and/or sweet without paying you a protection fee.

Remember that the US patent office had to expressly ban any patent for "perpetual motion machine", not because it is literally impossible by physical reality, but because they kept granting patents for physically impossible perpetual motion machines

[yareal]

You've correctly identified how patents work, at least in the U.S.

[rasz]

Except for the "non obvious to the practitioner" part.

[SkyBelow]

You missed the part where I filed the patent first, so I am now the one in charge of USB charged cars.

Yes, it is even more complicated than that; I'm just trying to toss out a joke while also pointing out the system is even worse than implied.

[Workaccount2]

Missed opportunity to patent putting a USB-C port in a car...

[shuvuvt5]

Why do we cling to this idea of patent trolls?

The patent system is the problem. None of this should have been granted but when you really try to define what software patents are novel it becomes incredibly difficult.

Just because you think this is trivial does not mean a layperson does.

Is an encryption algo novel? What's novel about it, it's just a hashing function with some new parameters.

The reality is, software patents are a joke and should be dropped entirely. Copyright is enough protection for most use cases.

Aka, don't hate the player, hate the game. And ideally, do something to fix it instead of complaining about "trolls" as if that'll ever fix the issue.

[highwaylights]

IANAL but the route to resolve this seems to be to challenge the patent on the grounds it should never have been granted and have it overturned, which it looks very much like it would be an easy argument to make, if not easy to achieve in practice.

[zupa-hu]

The problem is the cost of doing this. If it gets overturned, the defendant shouldn’t be the one to bear the cost. I’d be happy with either 1) the patent owner or 2) the patent office, who didn’t do its job properly.

[pbhjpbhj]

The UK and USA patent offices, I understand, have procedures to file evidence showing a patent application is not valid - eg because of the 'invention' already being known.

Your comment seems to relate more to unfairness in [lack of] awards of costs in USA legal proceedings.

If you sue me for something I didn't do then it shouldn't cost me anything; that seems reasonable whether the domain is IPR or any other aspect of life.

[graemep]

This varies between countries. AFAIK it is far harder to get the other side to pay your costs if you successfully defend a case in the US than it is in the UK.

[zupa-hu]

Indeed.

[Draiken]

While I agree with you, I can't see how we could ever fix the issue.

The same patent holders are the biggest backers of our politicians and will absolutely never allow any reasonable fix to the system itself.

All I read is how we should vote and yell at our representatives, completely ignoring the fact they were only elected because of donations from those benefiting from this system in the first place.

[shuvuvt5]

It costs relatively very little to "buy" Washington. Any group of fang like companies could do it and have good reason to do so.

NZ abolished software patents years ago, literally nothing bad happened as a result, companies didn't even notice.

[j16sdiz]

> None of this sounds novel

None of these sounds novel now.

It was much more back in 2000.

[mbreese]

Not reading the patents, having a metadata server separate from the stored object data has been around for a long time. For example: IIRC, Lustre does this and was around well before the cloud (to the point where any patents that may have applied would have expired). Many HPC storage systems work with split metadata and object storage nodes, I’m just not sure how long others have been around. But, I’m sure AWS tried to get the patents invalidated first… right?

If this covered separate store networks, then maybe that’s somewhat unique, but that’s not a far leap for me.

[tsimionescu]

According to Wikipedia, Lustre was released in 2003, while these patents were filed in 2000 and 2001 (they were only granted much later, in 2007, but the filing date is the most relevant), so that's not a good example. The patents are expired today, but they weren't in 2018 when this suit was filed.

Still, even if the patents were in some way novel at their time, I think the details are far more important, especially: how close is AWS' implementation to the exact algorithm they describe? How many others came to the exact same implementation not knowing about this patent, potentially proving that it didn't actually meet the bar for novelty at the time it was granted?

[throwaway11460]

How are you supposed to not infringe on patents that were not granted yet?

[tsimionescu]

It's supposed to be very unlikely, unless you're actively looking for trouble. In principle, patents are supposed to only be given out for inventions that pass a bar of novelty. If that were true (it often isn't), it should ensure that it's very very unlikely for others to arrive at the same patentable invention independently. If they do, tough luck to the second person.

Still, patents become public from the moment they are filed. So you can scour the patent applications database as well if you fear others have already filed for a patent for something you are trying to do. Of course, that will mean that, if you go ahead with your own implementation and the patent is later granted, you will not be able to claim that you didn't know about this, and will face higher damages if you end up in a lawsuit.

The principle here is that a company decides to publish some internal discovery instead of keeping it for themselves, and the government in return grants them a limited time monopoly on that invention. The company could instead keep the invention a secret, but in that case, they can't stop others from using it, and if someone else patents it, their secret invention can actually infringe on the patent granted to someone else later.

[sokoloff]

> Still, patents become public from the moment they are filed.

No. There is an 18 month delay to publication: https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s1120.html

[tsimionescu]

Oh, I wasn't aware, thanks for correcting me!

[irjustin]

You have to show that you were already working on it independently which is effectively establishing prior art and you are literally it.

How do you do that? beyond my pay grade.

[zaroth]

Simple - You keep a notebook, or send yourself emails.

If you want more definitive timestamping, there are services that will do that, like OpenTimestamps, an actually a decent use case for blockchain.

[hughesjj]

I'd say thank God for git history but I suppose they were using perforce back then

[mbreese]

Lustre started out as a research project in 1999, before commercialization and release. I assume this means more was publicly available about the design prior to the patents being filed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lustre_(file_system)

Also, depending on the feature set listed in the patent, GPFS (which I remember using around 2000) was definitely around earlier than 2000. It was/is a clustered file system from IBM that had distributed storage nodes. Not sure how it did metadata though, which might not make it relevant to the patent, but the same ideas were definitely at work here.

(And it being IBM, you can be sure those were patented too)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPFS

[chessgecko]

My read of patent one is that they basically created DNS for storage. But DNS was invented in 1983 so I'm not really sure what was novel here other than pointing it at data, which uses a few extra headers, ala my comment.

Even if there was nothing closer to this than DNS I don't think this patent should be valid.

[tsimionescu]

I think that in general, "use solution A to problem X to solve problem Y instead" is, in principle, a valid patent - assuming that it's not obvious that solution A would help with problem Y. After all, patents are about "how do I solve problem Y", not about the general algorithms themselves.

However, the "it's not obvious" part is very important. Not working in the field, it's not at all clear to me if using DNS for data was an obvious idea in ~2000 for building a distributed DB or not.

[wang_li]

TXT records were specified an rfc published in 1987. SRV records in feb 2000.

This sounds to me like the web. You make a connection, you request a resource, it returns content and references to further resources that are required to get the full content of the resource you originally requested.

[manicennui]

You are literally describing software engineering.

[datascienced]

Something shouldn’t be a patent if a candidate could have come up with it in a system design interview

[freejazz]

>Of course, if indeed AWS came to a very similar implementation themselves, as the jury found, then that further suggests that the idea is not that novel.

That wouldn't matter if AWS came to the very similar implementation on their own, after the Plaintiff's patent was issued (and became public information). Patent, unlike copyright, does not allow for independent invention/creation. If you come to, on your own, something already covered in a patent during its term, then you infringe.

[tsimionescu]

Yes, it doesn't matter for determining if you are infringing on the patent. But it does matter for (a) the kinds of damages that you can be liable for, and (b) it can matter if you try to attack the patent itself to try to get it invalidated. Patents are only supposed to be granted for non-obvious ideas, so one way of attacking a patent is to show that many people came up with that idea independently, which is a strong argument that the idea doesn't pass the non-obviousness test and can get the patent invalidated.

[freejazz]

Yes, they can be evidence that invalidates a patent if they qualify as prior art.