Amicus Brief From Public Knowledge Distills Ultramercial's 'Complex' Patent To 16 Lines Of Code
from the one-rarely-sees-javascript-in-a-legal-filing dept
Public Knowledge has entered the battle against Ultramercial, the holder of a broad patent for an abstract idea that it has casually stapled "on the Internet" to in order to push it through the patent office. At one point the patent was rejected by the court, but Ultramercial repeatedly tapped the words "on the Internet" until the CAFC obligingly agreed that the insistent tapping had some merit and overturned the lower court's ruling.
WildTangent appealed this ruling in 2012, drawing immediate support from Redhat, the CCIA, Google (in conjunction with Verizon, no less) in the form of petitions for the Supreme Court to hear the case. A couple of months later, the Supreme Court vacated the CAFC's ruling, asking it to reconsider the case in light of Mayo v. Prometheus. As of Sept. 24th, Google [et al, incl. Redhat, HP, Zynga and Homeway, Inc.], the CCIA and the EFF have also filed amicus briefs on behalf of WildTangent, urging the CAFC to rule in a consistent manner on Ultramercial's patent in light of its decision on Mayo.
Public Knowledge's brief takes a somewhat novel approach, attacking the supposed complexity of the patent head on
Today, Public Knowledge filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to review an important case on software patents, WildTangent v. Ultramercial. The basic question in this case is whether a patent to a simple, abstract idea can be valid simply by tacking on enough legal and technical language to that idea, even if that extraneous language has no real meaning.As Public Knowledge points out, ideas aren't patentable and what Ultramercial has here is nothing more than an abstract idea obscured by layers of technical language.
The patent in question is U.S. Patent No. 7,346,545. That patent basically describes a simple idea familiar to anyone who has watched videos on the Internet: the idea of taking a video available for purchase, and showing it for free in exchange for viewing an advertisement first.
Whoever wrote the patent on advertising in this case, however, was clever. Instead of simply describing the simple idea for what it is, the patent expounds an eleven-step process in a patent claim of 349 complex, technical-sounding words. This was enough to convince one court that the process required “intricate and complex computer programming,” thus making it patentable and not an abstract idea.Public Knowledge's brief exposes the extremely simple underlying process of Ultramercial's patent. What took its patent lawyers 349 words to explain boils down to 16 lines of code -- hardly the indicator of "intricate and complex computer programming." As a demonstration in PK's blog post, Charles Duan turns the following process steps into two (short) lines of code.
As an example, here are two steps of the process claimed in the patent.82 words and three complex sentences reduced to 11 words of code spanning two lines. Duan refers to
"a fifth step of offering to a consumer access to the media product without charge to the consumer on the precondition that the consumer views the sponsor message;
a sixth step of receiving from the consumer a request to view the sponsor message, wherein the consumer submits said request in response to being offered access to the media product;
a seventh step of, in response to receiving the request from the consumer, facilitating the display of a sponsor message to the consumer;"
For all those words, here's the computer code that implements them:
if (window.confirm("View ad or buy?")) {
window.alert(selected_ad.text)
And if no one believes it's that simple, Public Knowledge has provided a working version of its sixteen lines of code at this URL.
Here's the process Ultramercial's suing about in all of its 16-lines-of-code glory.
As Mike has pointed out before, the only reason Ultramercial even has this patent is because it convinced the CAFC that the addition of "on the Internet" turns an abstract idea into a patentable process. The additional wording describing the "process" is a diversionary tactic. Hopefully, a second run through will find the CAFC willing to cut through the dense wording and ridiculous "Internet" assertion and find Ultramercial's patent invalid.
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Filed Under: amicus brief, on the internet, patents
Companies: public knowledge, ultramercial, wild tangent
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Excuse-me as I grab my popcorn to watch how they are gonna get out of it.
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Better than vague hope: argue against ALL software patents.
[* Not that I'd eat clams in any circumstances short of tied down and force fed. The big bugs and squishy things that God or nature hides under wet rocks or damp logs are not meant to be eaten.]
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Re: Better than vague hope: argue against ALL software patents.
From my view up here in the cheap seats, you have absolutely no foundation to critique any of the Techdirt staff's writing abilities. Your comments rarely make sense and are fairly often just plain incoherent.
I guess everyone just can't resist being an armchair quarterback from time to time.
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Re: Better than vague hope: argue against ALL software patents.
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Re: Better than vague hope: argue against ALL software patents.
Some of us like jazz... And is that an actual concession of a good point to TechDirt's writing I see?
Maybe some of us should be nicer to you, Blue.
Not quite sure what part(s) of this piece you're actually critiquing, though. Elaborate, please?
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Re: Re: Better than vague hope: argue against ALL software patents.
C'mon, that shit was funny G, give him credit. Unfortunately I love such squishy things that hide under wet rocks. Raw or boiled it matters not =/
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Re: Better than vague hope: argue against ALL software patents.
And oh yeah, I forgot to add that Mike HAS given his thoughts on fixing the patent system many times throughout the last 15 years. Here's a good example:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120712/18322919680/judge-posner-mission-to-fix-patent s-we-have-some-suggestions.shtml
Once again Blue, if you spent a little more time reading through the history of this site instead of rushing to nay-say every article, you might end up looking a little less foolish.
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Re: Better than vague hope: argue against ALL software patents.
Yeah! Because Techdirt has never suggested any possible solutions for the patent... oh, wait...
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110819/14021115603/so-how-do-we-fix-patent-system.shtm l
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Re: Re: Re: Better than vague hope: argue against ALL software patents.
Yeah OK. I do actually agree with Blue's sentiment on that one, but that wasn't the main thrust of his comment, just a cute little sidebar.
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Re: Better than vague hope: argue against ALL software patents.
- You don't like clams (with horseradish...which apparently is a thing)
- You don't like Jazz
- You don't like Techdirt
What do you like? Besides preaching the intellectual superiority of your world view?
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But I will point out that I can also write down...let's say...the diffie-hellman key exchange algorithm in just a few lines, despite the fact that such an algorithm is absolutely not trivial (as in, it would take you a few pages of text to explain what it did and why).
Saying that something is easy or simple just because it can be reduced to 16 lines of code is somewhat deceitful.
(However, that doesn't seem to be the case here...and whatever helps to kill off the concept of software patents is fine by me. But I'll just throw this out there anyway.)
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If only...
Legal verbal haze reminds me of the poem, "This is the Theory that Jack Built"
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~hsg/134/poems/space-childs-mother-goose.txt
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Re:
With diffie-hellman, the problem is a different one: it is pure math, and math should not be patentable. And it is very short and simple math, too: using ^ for exponentiation and * for multiplication, (g^a)^b mod n == (g^b)^a mod n == g^(a*b) mod n. One side knows a and publishes g^a mod n, the other side knows b and publishes g^b mod n, so both sides now know g^(a*b) mod n which is the shared secret. The only complication is the mathematical proof that you cannot efficiently find x given g^x mod n... which has not been proved yet (it is the discrete logarithm problem).
Oh, wait, I just described diffie-hellman IN A SINGLE PARAGRAPH. It is even simpler than RSA.
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Innovation?
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Re: Innovation?
'And now, a word from our sponsors'.
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Re: Re: Better than vague hope: argue against ALL software patents.
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Just a small nitpick
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