The deal they sent museumtour is nothing compared to what we received. I am from the company that museumtour purchases its services from. They contacted us wanting a $950,000 settlement for infringment and because we host thousands of sites including museumtour. A bit rediculous eh? They basically want licensing fees for every infringement on our part (which is in thousands of sites) for instances of any navigation menus, footers, headers, side bars, ad bars, etc.

The links on the musuem website are broken, so you can't see the scans of the letter. It appears to be a typo -- they wrote http://www2.museumtour.com/spc_lawsuit/page1.gif instead of http://www2.museumtour.com/sbc_lawsuit/page1.gif. To see the images, just change that p to a b:
http://www2.museumtour.com/sbc_lawsuit/page1.gif
http://www2.museumtour.com/sbc_lawsuit/page2.gif
http://www2.museumtour.com/sbc_lawsuit/page3.gif
http://www2.museumtour.com/sbc_lawsuit/page4.gif

To summarize the text: "That's a very nice website, see? It would be a shame if anything were to happen to it. Wouldn't want to see any more links get *broken*, would we?"

Interesting. The link on museumtour.com points to http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?...841&RS=PN/5,933,841
which is US Patent #5,933,841, filed May 17, 1996 and issued August 3, 1999.

Cypherpunks' link points to http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?...42574&RS=PN/6442574
which is US Patent #6,442,574, filed April 29, 1999 and issued August 28, 2002.

The abstracts are identical, but the details are different. The lists of references are almost identical, but #6,442,574 includes a reference to #5,933,841.

Then, under "Parent Case Text", #6,442,574 says:

This application is a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 08/649,271, filed May 17. 1996, U.S. Pat. No. 5,933,841, which application is hereby incorporated by reference herein.

Shortly after that point, I exceeded my capacity to read patent claims while engaging in sentience, but it sounds like May 17, 1996 may be the date to beat for prior art.

Hmmm, I thought I filed a patent on filing patents a number of years ago...I wonder where it went? I filed one on lawyer letters complaining of patent violations too...

They're *welcome* to a patent on frames. We may end up with a few more usable websites. :)

This doesn't have a leg to stand on. If they could spell properly, it might have a little more credibility.

"Of course the strategy for these patent-enforcement companies is to go after the little guy first..."

Hmmmm--I think Washington has prior use on this strategy...

Edited by author 01-20-2003 01:04 PM
Oh, for crikey's sake. If I understand this complaint properly, they're claiming to have a patent on frame-based navigation, where your navigation bar is constant, and the "main" frame changes around.

This has been the method of navigation for many a crapola Front Page website for YEARS. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But let's go way back and see what Microsoft looked like in late 1996 (notice the strip across the top): http://web.archive.org/web/19961020014044/.../www.microsoft.com/

- Robert K. Brown

Charlie--you better check the patent link again, the USPTO says the filing date was in 1996, not in 1999, which means that the claimed invention date could be as early as May, 1995. That having been said, I hope your prior art holds up. If you've got records of drafts of the book that were dated and witnessed that'd be useful to the defendants as well. (I'm presuming that your book actually addresses the specific patent--I certainly hope it does.)

Edited by author 01-20-2003 01:02 PM
SBC's actions are not without humor:

I did a large contract job for a gentleman back in 1999-2000 who had been granted a patent on, of all things, breadcrumb navigation. The links can be found in this post:

http://www.redmonk.net/monkinetic/2003/01/20#item1754

If you drill into SBCs site at all, you'll find something like this:

http://www.redmonk.net/1754/enclosure/sbcPatentInfringement.gif

I found it quite funny.

Cheers,

--steve

"Sperating?"

Any spokeslawyer for a major corporation who can't even spell "separate" tells me that said corporation is not to be taken seriously.

This pile of junk was filed on April 29, 1999.

Prior art can be found, documented, in "The Web Architect's Handbook", author Charles Stross, published Addison-Wesley, 1996 (ISBN 0-582-87735-X) on page 201 (heading: "Avoiding links entirely: an embedded web browser").

(If the victims of this extortion want me to show up in court as a witness, I'd be happy to discuss my air fare and dates :)

If example code in a book with an ISBN on deposit at the Library of Congress three years before they filed this patent isn't good enough, what is?

As a side note, preventing more logos with swooshes in them would be a GOOD thing, IMHO :-)

...that reminds me--somewhere in the basement I've got my grandfather's patent on shakedowns. Does that mean SBC owes me?

Edited by author 01-20-2003 11:18 AM
It will be interesting to find out whether some sites have already paid and encouraged this shakedown. Damn, where's that patent for electricity that I mislaid....

More than prior art though, does this patent violate the First Amendment? It's one thing to patent inventions, it's another to patent certain forms of speech. What's next? A patent on logos with swooshes in them?

Edited by author 01-20-2003 10:54 AM
I love how "bribing harassers to go away" has become "respecting the intellectual property rights of others".

I'm sure there is invalidating prior art. For example, persistent nav was a major element of the HyperCard UI guidelines in the late 80s; what's more, Ted Nelson discussed this in his Xanadu hypertext work decades before.

Which doesn't mean they won't threaten and that companies that can't afford a suit won't pay up. Nor that companies that CAN afford a suit won't toss millions into the court-system blackhole on the way to proving this point. This is a protection racket, pure and simple. It disgusts me. We need to clean up the USPTO and fast.

IAAL and I cannot believe that there is not some kind of "prior art", a documented instance of this kind of HTML document structure, extant before 1996. Some early Web design book? That's all it would take to shut this little protection racket down.

...yeah, "preferred rate" is kinda tempting. Maybe if they threw in some air miles...

Wow, these guys must've invented the TARGET="" thingie for the A HREF tag!

BTW, and I know this isn't the right board for it, I just realized that the buttons in that new GIF animation bring whole new meaning to "boingboing"...

IANAL, but I recall Lotus v. Borland, where Lotus sued Borland for copying the 1-2-3 menu trees and macro language. The Supreme Court threw that out lock stock and barrel:

http://www.panix.com/~jesse/lotus.html

Given that structured documents have been a part of the web for many years now, aren't they a little late in defending their patent? I also haven't paid a dime for gif either.

This won't stand...

Edited by author 01-20-2003 11:23 AM
Hey, they were cool enough to offfer a "Preferred Rate license" ! That makes up for it, right?