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Comment by thefounder | Hacker News Reader

How could they patent SSO?

Or... How could they be trying to enforce a patent from the late 80's (if the article is correct)? Quite a lot of things don't add up here. I'd love to see some actual information here. Bloomberg's article has slightly more content: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-16/ibm-seeks... I'd really like to see what patents they are talking about, though...

Found the actual suit: https://www.b2ipreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Intern...

Edit again: That's a memorandum opinion, not the suit :-) But at least it lists the patents...

I won't bother to edit again. The SSO patent is here: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...

Filed in 2005 (on April Fool's day no less!) and published in 2006. It looks like the strongest of the 4 patents. The other ones look pretty weak to me. The first 2 (from 1989!!!) seem to be discussing displaying cached data on a monitor... I couldn't actually get much sense from it. The third one seems to be describing a cookie... But it's pretty darn general.

Not an expert in patents by any stretch of the imagination, though...

I remember sitting in on a meeting where an “enterprise” consultant was trying to sell the telecom I worked for at the time on a single sign on system that worked by wrapping intranet sites in a frame with a shared cookie.

He insisted on calling the cookie a secure token so it would seem different.

Asking price? $100k

Wouldn’t shock me if it was related.

Hmm, aside from the triviality, it sounds like they may also have patented pre-existing art in 2006 then..

I-Planet portal server can be traced back through Webtop to Pony Express.. It was one of several competitors in the late 1990s, and I think they all provided this style of SSO.

Only $100k? That is much, much less than a big ol' intrusive SiteMinder or BMC project. In fact, it's so cheap as to cast serious doubt on the consultant's credibility. And I am already assuming this happened about 15 years ago.

Oh man.

[Enterprise PTSD intensifies]

If it’s from the late 80’s, how is the patent still enforceable? 20 years right?

...from the date of issuance. They're called "submarine" patents when the applicant intentionally delays issuance to get more years of life out of them.

https://www.google.com/search?q=submarine+patents

arstechnica.com article "IBM sues Groupon over 1990s patents related to Prodigy" [1] from March, 2016 includes some more details and links to 4 patents:

- US5796967 Method for presenting applications in an interactive service https://patents.google.com/patent/US5796967

- US7072849 Method for presenting advertising in an interactive service

- US5961601 Preserving state information in a continuing conversation between a client and server networked via a stateless protocol

- US7631346 Method and system for a runtime user account creation operation within a single-sign-on process in a federated computing environment

1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/ibm-sues-groupon...

Simple. IBM filed first.

Reminds me of the "online shopping cart" patent that was sueing all major e-retailers years ago. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/how-newegg-crush...

The difference here, is IBM loves to license out their innovations. And I think that makes it easier (cheaper) for Facebook, Google, Amazon, to decide to pay the fee rather than battle in court.

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