EFF Threatened with Defamation Lawsuit

On December 31, 2008, the United States Patent and Trademark Office accepted an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) request for the reexamination of a Seer Systems patent.  EFF had filed for the request as part of its patent-busting project, where the Foundation is looking to overturn 10 questionable patents.  Although the USPTO decided to reexamine the patent due to “a substantial new question of patentability”, Seer Systems responded last Wednesday by threatening EFF with a defamation lawsuit.

Seer’s letter, which is available here, disputes EFF’s claim that Seer was threatening small companies.  Seer also claims that they have no idea what is meant by EFF’s statement that Seer was “threatening to compromise at least two public media standards.”

EFF responded in a letter of its own on Friday, and claimed that its discussions of Seer were protected by the First Amendment.  That response is also available.

USPTO Overturns Virtual Subdomains Patent

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has rejected 20 patent claims on an Internet subdomain patent.  According to Ars Technica, the patent in question was originally submitted to the USPTO in 1999 by a company named Ideaflood, and it was approved in 2004.  However, the recent ruling by the USPTO concluded that the concepts in question were obvious and were not patentable material.

The patent became questionable after the Electronic Frontier Foundation called it a “bogus software patent” that stifled both creativity and innovation.  In fact, the Ideaflood patent made the EFF’s top ten in their “Patent Busting Project.”

To explain that patent a little more, it basically describes virtual subdomains with the idea that it would be impractical for companies with a large number of domains to create news DNS records for each subdomain.  The solution would be to use virtual subdomains that put a wildcard in the DNS record, and it would resolve to a single IP address.  The webserver at that IP address would then read the host request and parse it so that it pointed to the specific public HTTP folder residing somewhere on the server.

In EFF’s patent reexamination request, it states that this capability was already being used early in 1998 – before the patent application was filed by Ideaflood.  Additionally, EFF argued that the techniques in the patent were already integral features of the Apache web server at the time of filing. 

To EFF’s delight, the USPTO noted that the patent stated previous knowledge of a way to supply a wildcard character for a subdomain in order to implement virtual subdomains, and the concepts were not patentable.  Thus, the USPTO rejected all 20 claims in the Ideaflood patent.

EFF Wins Patent Reexamination from USPTO

In 2004, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Patent Busting Project set out to overturn 10 extremely broad patents.  Since then, only six of the patent requests have been written, but each one has been granted reexamination by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.  The latest came yesterday, as EFF announced that it had won the reexamination of an illegitimate music patent currently owned by Seer Systems.

The patent in question involves a system and method for joining different musical data types together in a file, distributing them over the internet, and then playing the file.  In the request, EFF stated that descriptions of this technology were published numerous times before Seer Systems claimed ownership.  EFF argues that Stanley Jungleib, Seer’s founder and named inventor on the patent, even mentioned the technology in his own book before he applied for the patent.

Seer Systems now has the opportunity to file comments defending the patent, and then the PTO will determine whether to invalidate the patent.  The PTO has narrowed or revoked 70% of all patents it has decided to reexamine.

The patent was originally filed in 1997, and then granted in 1999.  However, if EFF has anything to say about it, this patent will not last the normal 20 years.