Time-Series Database patented by GE | Hacker News Reader

Time-Series Database patented by GE

patft.uspto.gov

81 pointsrodionos52 comments

I remember trolling the linked list patent people 10+ years ago. I sent them an email saying my software made extensive uses of linked lists and it had come to my attention that they had patented them. They sent me to their legal department to arrange an agreement.

Insane.

I wonder how influxdb et al will receive this news.

Here is the list of people who should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves:

Lin; Jerry (Latham, NY), Aggour; Kareem Sherif (Niskayuna, NY), Courtney; Brian Scott (Naperville, IL), Interrante; John Alan (Scotia, NY), LaComb; Christina Ann (Schenectady, NY), Mathur; Sunil (East Walpole, MA), McConnell; Christopher Thomas (Latham, NY), Snell; Quinn (Salem, UT)

Pretty much in no way whatsoever. RRDtool as a prior art example.

kdb as well, I would imagine them having some kind of patent.

So I don't know the first thing about software patents, but most central banks (including the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, etc.) -- offer web interfaces for manipulating and retrieving economic time-series (say, taking logarithms, adjusting for inflation or PPP, etc). Does this count as "prior art"?

The European Council also has a large, useful system called Eurostat.

Unfortunately, USPTO only considers other patents or academic papers as prior art.

RRDTool: Logging and Graphing. J Sellens - USENIX Annual Technical Conference, General Track, 2006

The GE patent pertains to metadata indexing and query resolution against a distributed block store, so RRDTool doesn't really apply anyway. Maybe something using HDF5 hyperslabs on a parallel distributed file system would though.

Are you sure? I've been involved in several instances where demonstrable systems were enough.

Sorry, that was just what two different patent officers told me. If they were wrong, I wouldn't be surprised.

Thankfully that is incorrect.

http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2010/10/02/what-is-prior-art/id=12...

While I in no way agreeing with this decision why are these people responsible for the terrible decision of the USPTO? They just get to apply for a patent, not issue one. The employee(s) at the USPTO that approved this patent are the ones that should be ashamed.

Because flooding the USPTO with an unending flow of bogus patents are partly why those same patents get approved. They're taking part of a system that takes advantage of an underfunded and understaffed agency in order to profit from it in the long term, knowing that they will get away with it for years and be able to milk millions through the courts long before anyone big enough shuts them down.

Patent trolling effectively begets more patent trolling, and everyone partaking of it should indeed be ashamed of themselves.

The USPTO is a profit center for the US government. Every extra patent submitted reduces the amount of tax everyone else has to pay. If the USPTO is approving bogus patents then should not the effort be on solving this rather than stopping people applying?

No, it isn't. Look at their budget[1]; very little money enters or leaves the office. The billions collected in the patent and trademark process are all spent on the patent and trademark process.

[1] http://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/fy16pbr.p...

The most interesting thing about the USPTO report is the decline in patent applications and hence revenue. They have gone from making profits year to year to making a loss last year. It seems people have realised the lack of value of most patents.

If people stop putting in bogus patents applications the US tax payer is going to have to start paying to support the USPTO. Lets hope with less applications coming in that the staff at the USPTO have more time to stop these dubious patents being issued.

Not everybody that patents a [generic description of] a system they're developing has any intention of doing anything other than protecting themselves from others' claims.

Aside: I had an interesting conversation a couple of months back with a guy who had a very broad patent on methods of operating a digital auction dating back to the early 2000s which as worded clashed with everything from Betfair to Priceline. He's still far more interested in building a consumer business once he can find people to run it and fund it rather than flogging it to a troll.

Why did he file a patent in the first place?

Garden shed inventor type thinks idea is goldmine; doesn't want anyone else to get there first.

Bear in mind that sometimes the people on a patent listing aren't in favor of the idea being patented. A company I worked for started down the patent road for some processor emulation stuff I worked on; my name would have been on the patent even though I (a) didn't think it was patentable, and (b) didn't think it should be patented.

Because of the company's rules my name needed to be on the patent despite my objections.

>> Because of the company's rules my name needed to be on the patent despite my objections.

Then you had the ability to stop it.

Even if I had quit my name would have been on the patent. I'm interested in hearing how I could have stopped it once the process started.

(Without changing my name.)

>> Even if I had quit my name would have been on the patent. I'm interested in hearing how I could have stopped it once the process started.

Then you'd be a patent owner and could sue for infringement. OTOH you probably agreed to sell them all your IP for $1 or something when you hired in.

>you probably agreed to sell them all your IP for $1 or something when you hired in

usually a condition of employment. FMI see Assignment of Inventions clause - all companies should have employees sign before hiring.

No, the patent would be owned by the company.

Trolling aside, the linked list patent doesn't cover what we think of as linked lists. We've had this conversation before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8231954

I don't see many folks here who've actually read the claims of this patent and analyzed them for validity. For all we know, this could be a legit difference over the art. But hey, claims are hard, let's go shopping. Or shame people, whatever.

If people want some chance of expert analysis, they should submit this to askpatents.com

The uniqueness of a variant on a linked list which I imagine many people have reinvented with variance over the years, is not important. These debates are meaningless because creating a system penalising people for creating something that solves their own problems with no external reference is being made a crime and hurting business. I myself have worked for companies who have had to spend years in legal disputes for trolls. It has a real cost. These people are a cancer and this is a tax on abstract thought.

1. This patent is on a variation that, as I mentioned in my comment, is very unlikely to ever be infringed when "people solve their own problems". Really, if you can think of a problem that that linked-list problem solves, I'd be very interested in knowing.

2. There is no tax on abstract thought. There is only a dispute if you make, use or sell infringing products. You are free to think whatever abstract thoughts you want. Given the vast majority of patents are a) highly specific and b) unlikely to be infringed anyway, it's unlikely any of your "abstract" thoughts turn into infringing products. Do you know of anything you've developed that has ever been the precise thing that infringed a specific patent?

InfluxDB CEO here. I've already forwarded to our lawyers to ask. Reading through the patent there are some key differences between what they describe and what we built.

Your probably fine but only because this is a company with a business. They aren't an IP litigation based business who would use it against you. The idea of incorporating business in north america frightens me. ITTP will make this a global problem.

As someone who has designed a few large-scale time-series databases, I read the entire patent. It was filed in December 2012, long after I last did a clean room design, so pretty much everything I've done could be viewed as prior art. I would have to imagine Splunk has something to say about this too.

The primary claim of novelty in this patent is storing index block metadata on a separate server than the storage blocks. To the extent that pretty much every distributed time-series platform ever designed separates index block metadata from storage blocks, it does not reflect positively on the competency of the software team at GE that they think this is novel. (I realize that this may not have been the choice of the software team.)

Furthermore, in properly designed systems, these functions are separated at the granularity of a process rather than a server because it is more flexible and efficient. They can be implemented on separate servers, and usually are, but it is not a requirement because requiring it would be stupid. But if GE did not make this a requirement, I doubt it would have withstood even the nominal prior art search; that limitation on scope was needed to get it through.

Overall, the architecture of the time-series database implied in the patent is consistent with someone that learned their poor distributed system habits from the Hadoop ecosystem and decided to reinvent the time-series database without knowing much about how those systems actually work. However, I am not surprised this made it through the US patent system.

Come on, stop your Hadoop hate speech, and simply bring SpaceCurve on the bandwagon against this patent.

It may be a bit of a liberal reading of it but doesn't the database that the patent is stored in on that page violate the patent? It certainly has date stamped data which is ingested and query-able...

Just wait for the next patent to be approved by USPTO: "Method of assigning exclusive rights to an inventor."

Who wants to file "Method of assigning exclusive rights to an inventor." with me?

Seems you can't sue the USPTO for issuing bad patents according to this[1]. But I think you should be compensated for the cost of a lawsuit based on bad patents.

[1] http://patentlyo.com/patent/2012/12/suing-the-uspto-for-issu...

You can be, if the judge in the eventual suit decides in your favor for legal fees. But this can take years, and patent trolls big and small tend to deliberately target only those who can't really afford to fight them.

You right on this. I meant that the USPTO seems to have no incentive to stop bad patents. I don't think a small time inventor submitting an idea that seems novel for him should be punished when he tries to enforce this in good faith. USPTO should have the resources and the expertise to stop bad patent and when they fail they should compensate for the mess they create. They are played by NPE and big companies and don't defend the small inventor and the society in general. They fail their public mission.

A very quick skimming of the patent suggests that they are talking more about the online / distributed / dataflowish query evaluation engine than about a simple timestamped data storage widget. (Not that this makes it much more novel.)

We have used such systems in industrial control systems for decades. TSDB is integral part of any modern SCADA system. This patent is a nonsense.

So, if I, like many here I presume, built one of these time series databases long ago prior to this patent, and that "invention" is still active in real production systems, can I claim prior art?

In big corps, patent attorneys have quotas to fill. Usually they don't fully understand the technology but try to patent it anyway.

then pattent attorneys should pay for their crimes, or should be sued by their clients

Nearly all DBs have timestamps. This patent is nonsense. Patent attorneys should also be payed for rejections.

WOW! You can store time series in a database! This is an amazing invention!!!

I can imagine that GE has big plans for improving services like condition monitoring for jet engines where they would sell monitoring data etc. If a competing startup tries to compete they have ammunition.

To determine if you infringe this patent, you only need to look at the claims - specifically, the independent claims (claim 1). If you do anything differently, you don't infringe.

Well, that is not quite true. You also need definitions for the words used in the claims, which may require reading the description to understand properly. But certainly the claims are where you start your analysis.

Sounds a bit like InfluxDB...

Well, this seems reasonable ......

OLAP?

During my tenure at GE, quite a few years ago, there was an intense company-wide drive to patent practically anything at all. We were given incentives to do so, of course. We were told that GE only uses patents defensively, i.e. for negotiations other companies. The incentives got many employees to patent industry-wide practices, or trivially simple stuff, or really convoluted methods that no one in their right minds will use anyway.

I haven't followed GE's track record closely after I got out, but I think they still live by that guideline. In any case, GE is not a software company, and it's unlikely they'd want to (or can) go after software companies on the basis of patents such as this one.

The patent system is broken, and GE is just another company, in a long list, that is abusing it for some reason. But so far, GE has given me little reason to believe they'll come after me for infringing on these kinds of patents.

That's what I'm hoping for as well. It would have been a completely different situation if this patent were granted to a non-practicing entity with a track record of litigating in the Eastern District of Texas.

If you search for other patents/patent applications by the same inventors, you get the picture, e.g.:http://patents.justia.com/inventor/kareem-sherif-aggour

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