Stopping Spam Patented (Again)

from the ah,-legal-battles dept

Earlier this year, we noted that Postini had received a patent for the incredibly obvious concept of anti-spam filtering. Well, it looks like they may be in for some competition, because Network Associates/McAfee has now been awarded a patent for an idea that (sarcasm alert) no one could have possibly come up with prior to December 2002 when they applied for it: using a combination of methods such as "filters, paragraph hashing, and Bayes rules" to stop spam. What this really means is that there are now going to be anti-spam patent battles which will slow down the process of stopping spam, and do no one any good, other than a few lawyers who will get rich. Why can't these companies just compete in the marketplace? Still, it would be great if, at some point, AT&T finally made it clear why they patented spamming itself last year.
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  • identicon
    NOBODY, 2 Jun 2004 @ 12:00pm

    No Subject Given

    Remarkably, this patent sounds like it voilates the streamcast patent for searching hash tables. Wouldn't it be ironic to bust a bad patent with another bad patent?

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    McGroarty, 2 Jun 2004 @ 2:33pm

    SpamAssassin

    Sounds like they've patented SpamAssassin.

    So far as I know, SA and others were doing this well before them, and they're *still* doing it better.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      Mike (profile), 2 Jun 2004 @ 8:02pm

      Re: SpamAssassin

      Well... I think that's the thing. McAfee *bought* SpamAssassin, which is why they probably filed this patent claim.

      link to this | view in chronology ]


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