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.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Hormel
Shouldn't Hormel be suing EVERYONE for using their brand of " meat " in a negative light ?
Let the lawyer gouging begin !
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Re: Hormel
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SpamAssassin
So far as I know, SA and others were doing this well before them, and they're *still* doing it better.
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Re: SpamAssassin
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