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Comment by austincheney | Hacker News Reader

I included a full language specification with my patent application. Reading boring specifications can also be a drag, so I even wrote a version that sorts information by color. Its all available on http://mailmarkup.org/

If you are aware of any prior art please do the right thing. I have not been able to find any, but that does not mean it doesn't exist.

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I have a few thoughts:

- Your patent application is much more readable than most. That's a good start.

- hosay123 has already said basically what I would've - you may have found something that no one else has done 100% before, but it is clearly very similar to HTML in email with a few minor differences. Here are a few examples that I think would bring both the idea's novelty and non-obviousness into question: http://www.boutell.com/wusage/8.0/eml.html

http://petewarden.com/2008/10/15/an-xml-format-for-email/

https://www.google.com/patents/US7970842?dq=electronic+mail+...

My question to you is: what will happen if you are granted this patent? You've been working on this for 4 years at least, judging by the 2009 date on the application, so my main argument would simply be that you could've probably found a more interesting use for your time. It pains me to say this, since I can tell you've spent a lot of time on your application, but honestly I would feel worse if I didn't say anything.

Regardless of whether or not the patent is granted I would like to create a start-up to build a new transport medium. It would be nice to have an online software platform built for automation and data integration above all else that allows any data repository to become a possible publication point using just URI addressing. I can see many possibilities that could arise from such a thing, especially if the primary markup language is always immediately accessible.

My gullibility alarm is ringing loud..

Slideshow:

* Nobody uses this!

* It's patented!

* It's just like HTML!

* I'm not going to tell you which bits are patented!

Can't tell if (literal) troll or comedy genius

Edit: so going by the age of the domain and you having actually filed the patent, I'm assuming it's not just some elaborate joke. And having only skimmed the patent text, I'm failing to see the innovating mechanism or idea you're claiming. The language itself sounds like HTML mail or any of the plethora proprietary markup languages from the 90s (e.g. MS Exchange).

Can you tell us why you think yours is different? This otherwise seems like a textbook case of ridiculous patent.

Did you bother to even open the spec or were you too busy making assumptions? Here is a link in case the you missed the one on the site: http://mailmarkup.org/mail-documentation.xsd

I am going to make the baseless assumption that your intentions were well placed, and happily await a contribution of prior art.

EDIT: My lawyers have deliberately asked that I not transcribe the claims in the patent application, but its really not hard to figure out from looking first at what the language does differently from the spec and then glossing over the claims in the patent application. I put this stuff online myself years ago, because I have nothing to hide and want nothing more than to ensure the software is valid and novel. Please feel free to prove otherwise, because either way you are contributing to a software project.

Yes I saw it, it's some crazy XML schema for an e-mail message that nobody has ever used. That's like me patenting some bus ticket design I got carried away making on a rainy afternoon.

So that's why I'm asking, what makes your approach worth protecting? It looks like just another XML schema from this angle

Anybody can protect an invention. The average 8K-18K in average lawyers fees is trivial. Building a team and acquiring the necessary funding to launch a business investment based upon an invention is a far greater challenge. Not everybody is at a stage where quitting their job to work on such things full time to build a product complete enough to present to angle investors is a viable option. If it were so simple then every software developer would be a successful start up founder.

That's what I find so perplexing about this patent in particular – email is only useful due to interoperability, so patenting the underlying representation of an email is a non-starter for general purpose use.

I really hope you don't have general purpose use in mind, I'm guessing you're hoping it's more for something along the lines of EDI applications between governments, or something else. I just don't get what it's for.

At risk of going blue in the face, where is the value in this patent that I'm not seeing?

Can you tell us in 2-3 sentences the application of this patent and then it would easier to come up with prior art examples. Like hosay said is it like a "novel" bus ticket design but for emails.

The intended goal of this thing is to fully describe email threads in a manner that is durable. To my knowledge, even today, there are no structures or grammars that are capable of describing email content and fully retaining their original definitions after full exposure the various software of the email platform. Rich text format comes close, though.

http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/NOTE-HTMLThreading-0105

("but XSLT" does not meet the standard of non-obviousness to a person of normal skill in the art)

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