Patent US7680883 - Dynamic integration of web sites | Hacker News Reader

Patent US7680883 - Dynamic integration of web sites

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28 pointslabinder17 comments

I think its safe to say now that if you're getting data from any server anywhere, you're "infringing" on 1000's of patents. They're all just kind of running together into a toxic, innovation killing sludge.

Just build stuff. Let the people who can't argue about who's first in line to steal from you when you're successful. Hopefully by then you can just pay some people to argue back.

It is obvious that for some reason the officers in the patent office are not able to find out that the "technology" to be patented is really an ages old technique or device defined in a horribly bloated language to either hide what it really is or include anything and everything that may have any small piece in common with that art or device.

And i guess it's always seen or shown as the patent office is responsible for the problem, not the individual officers who really are the ones that mess up.

Isn't it possible to hold the individual officers or at least the patent office responsible for the damages caused from granting patents to these kind of bogus claims?

I'm no scripting historian, but I believe the relevant date from which to judge this patent's validity is 4/12/2000, the date of the provisional application from which this patent was born. As of that date, were these types of embedded components possible?

I think as a startup, you have to say screw prior patents. Focus on your product. Build build build and when you've made it, fight back.

What alternative is there even? You can't look at patents to avoid infringing because having a policy of looking at patents can actually put you in a worse position when you inevitably violate one (and if you are doing anything, you will).

The only thing you can do is have your engineers operate like patents don't exist, and hire a bunch of lawyers to cover your ass.

I think applying that philosophy to every decision you make will get you sued. Sure, nothing important would come of it if the patent is junk, but if it isn't, and if your product takes off, then you will be in a major bind.

There's a spectrum of who gets sued.

1. Company is too small to be noticed (or sued) 2. Company is noticeable but does not have resources to prevent or defeat lawsuits 3. Company is too big or powerful to be sued

Companies on the smallest end of the spectrum won't be sued, either because nobody has ever heard of them, they don't have anything worth using over, or a combination of both. These are your bedroom startups.

Companies on the bigger end of the spectrum have more patents and lawyers than there are sausage on a meat lover's pizza. These are Microsoft, IBM, and and the like.

A cursory read of the '883 patent suggests that the claims are anticipated in the prior art and that the patent would likely be found invalid were it litigated or re-examined. Just understanding what the "invention" is and constructing claims charts for prior art candidates requires an enormous amount of energy, time, and money. It is not to be approached lightly.

This means if one is doing cross site request by adding script tag and parsing json response will infringe this patent.

Really?

How come a very simple task could be patented, while that task could be done by everyone?

That's WHY you patent things. In this case, you could consider this trade standard, and thus not valid.

It's not clear to me whether the process you describe would infringe. It seems to me that if the component server returns only a data object with all scripting instructions provided by the host computer, this patent would not be infringed. This patent appears to me to be speaking to plugins that return both data and script. Facebook's like button comes to mind, perhaps ...

Then so called "JsonP" is definitely infringing...

This means if one is doing cross site request by adding script tag and parsing json response will infringe this patent.

Yes. Maybe you could skirt this one patent by packaging data and script code in separate connections and by getting very lucky in a Markman hearing where a federal judge might allow you to shade claim construction language in your favor. That would require you to invest about $1 million minimum testing whether you could get a jury to buy it, of course, so I hope a million is just pocket change to you.

Even then, there are hundreds of other patents on the process of downloading Json/XML and parsing data or executable scripts out of it. The patent office hands them out like Hallowe'en candy -- for reasons I really don't understand but hope aren't just incompetence. You can look up a bunch related to the subject in the original version of this application from 2000:

US5881230 Jun 24, 1996 Mar 9, 1999 Microsoft Corporation Method and system for remote automation of object oriented applications US5918010 Feb 6, 1998 Jun 29, 1999 General Internet, Inc. Collaborative internet data mining systems US5918013 Jun 3, 1996 Jun 29, 1999 WebTV Networks, Inc. Method of transcoding documents in a network environment using a proxy server US5959630 Jan 29, 1998 Sep 28, 1999 Sharp Kabushiki Kaisha Display screen processing apparatus and storage medium containing therein program for controlling display screen processing apparatus US6021416 Nov 25, 1997 Feb 1, 2000 International Business Machines Corporation Dynamic source code capture for a selected region of a display US6031989 Feb 27, 1997 Feb 29, 2000 Microsoft Corporation Method of formatting and displaying nested documents US6101510 Jan 29, 1997 Aug 8, 2000 Microsoft Corporation Web browser control for incorporating web browser functionality into application programs US6144990 Dec 23, 1996 Nov 7, 2000 International Business Machines Corporation Computer apparatus and method for communicating between software applications and computers on the world-wide web using universal variable handling US6178426 Jan 15, 1998 Jan 23, 2001 Symbol Technologies, Inc. Apparatus with extended markup language data capture capability

You can find hundreds more with Google patent search.

Assignee is WebCollage, which creates product pages for Walmart, like (http://www.walmart.com/ip/Power-Wheels-Dune-Racer-12-Volt-Ba...).

How can it not be prior art?

This is insane.

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