Technology and You - Intellectual Property

Patents Eat into Social Networking

nospam@example.com (Rohan Dayal) — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 00:32:02 +0200

Could this be the end of Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, and many other social networking sites, at least in the way they exist now? If a little used (at least in India) networking site called Friendster has its way, then that may just be true.

Friendster has recently been granted a patent (US Patent No. 7,069,308) that protects a very important feature of social networking. The main claim of the patent protects the following functionality:

In a social networking site, people that are related to each other through others (friends of friends...etc.) and the relation is less than a threshold (for example, not more than 5 friends away), then they are allowed to connect to each other. This is accomplished for a pair of users by searching through users that lie within the threshold distance from one user. If the other user lies farther than this distance, the two are not connected.

As would be apparent, this functionality is used extensively by such sites. Orkut shows a connection for any profile that you see (how you are connected, A > B > C), on the top of the page. Similarly, LinkedIn shows the path of your connection to any profile.

The patent was filed on (and hence its coverage started on) June 16, 2003. Orkut launched in January 2004. However, here is something interesting that I found as a comment to a blog post covering the launch of LinkedIn. The comment is dated May 7, 2003.

The idea of the site (LinkedIn) is specifically to disallow trolling for people outside your network. If they're not in your network (i.e., within four hops of you, I believe), then you can't be recommended to them, and so LinkedIn won't allow you even to see them. If that's what you're after, Ryze will do the trick.

Look out Friendster! Even if Friendster's patent stands - it would be very difficult putting a monetary value on a feature of sites that are predominantly free.

Disclaimer: All views expressed in this article are entirely of the author's and are not provided in any professional authority. The views should not be construed to be a legal opinion.

Windows Media Photo vs. JPEG

nospam@example.com (Rohan Dayal) — Sun, 28 May 2006 00:24:53 +0200

Everybody has heard of JPEG. This is the format of most of the photographs that we see on the Internet and the ones that we click with our digital cameras. It has been around for quite some time now (since 1994 to be precise).

However, continuing with their tradition of starting media format wars, Microsoft recently announced the availability of a new Windows Media Photo format that is supposed to be a new and improved (pardon the oxymoron) file format that allows better quality with possibly a reduced size.

Enthusiasts would know that Microsoft took on the MP3 format with their Windows Media Audio format. Similarly, they took on DivX, RealVideo, MPEG-x, and QuickTime video formats with their Windows Media Video format. Both Windows Media formats gained mild popularity primarily because of their support for Digital Rights Management (DRM). However, most users still prefer MP3, DivX and MPEG for personal use.

On a related note, a company named Forgent has been suing companies (31 - including Microsoft and many other major players) for infringing on a patent which they say covers the basic aspect of JPEG encoding. In a landmark decision, the USPTO decided that the broadest claim for this patent was actually invalid, based on a review request and prior art submitted by the PUBPAT (Public Patent Foundation), a non-profit organization that challenges patents that stifle innovation, instead of supporting it.

With the Forgent threat over, people should find the JPEG standard easier to return to, instead of defining and supporting a new format. Then again, Microsoft *is* the world's largest software maker and has the monopoly in the operating system market. If the equivalent of the 'Windows Paint' tool in Windows Vista saves files in the Windows Media Photo format by default, people would more often than not, go for this option. Stay tuned in as the story unfolds.

BlackBerry vs. RedBerry

nospam@example.com (Rohan Dayal) — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 01:09:03 +0200

Just days before the release of Research In Motion's (RIM) BlackBerry in China, a local chinese service provider (China Unicom) has deployed a service provokingly called 'RedBerry'. The RedBerry service is similar to the BlackBerry service in that it provides email sending/receiving on mobile phones. However, the mails are sent and received using SMS which allows the service to be accessed by any existing mobile phone. BlackBerry requires a proprietary handset. Further, the cost of the RedBerry service is a small fraction of the cost of the BlackBerry service.

Though RIM cannot stop the RedBerry service based on technical grounds (the implementations of the services are quite different even though the end objective is same), RIM will probably go after China Unicom with a case of trademark infringement. China, as we all know, is quite famous for such infringements.

More commentary and examples can be found in this article.

What Do You Want to Search for Today?

nospam@example.com (Rohan Dayal) — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 00:53:35 +0200

Google's latest granted patent (US Patent No. 7,027,987) describes searching by voice. The basic methodology is as follows:

Voice input of a user is captured (say from a microphone or during a phone call).
Probable words are extracted from the voice input using speech recognition.
The probable words and variants are searched for in Google.
Probable results are presented to the user.

The speech recognition can be customized based on the locale and/or accents. The results can also be categorized based on the probable words.

I'm a little confused about how Google will implement voice searching. In the presence of a keyboard, entering information would be more precise (albeit a bit slower) as compared to voice input. The accuracy of the results would, of course, be much better. I have yet to use a speech recognition engine that can construct a sentence based on what I say.

The obvious implementation appears to be in mobile devices such as cellphones, PDAs and the recently launched Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC), which still offer clumsy keypads. Further, this service would be most useful for single answer searches - such as flight tracking, FedEx package tracking, currency conversion, etc.

Maybe someday, Google will be able to tell you where your car keys are. All you will have to do is to ask the right question.

Point to be noted: Monica Henzinger, one of the inventors, looks surprisingly like one of my friends.
Further reading: US Patent No. 7,027,987

Searching for a Needle in a Haystack

nospam@example.com (Rohan Dayal) — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 16:26:36 +0200

The news is abuzz with Google's acquisition of a new searching algorithm 'Orion', named after its inventor Ori Allon, a student of the University of New South Wales, and an Isreali by birth. Bill Gates had apparently praised this very algorithm a little time back, and Google has edged out Yahoo! and Microsoft who were also in the fray to get their hands on the algorithm.

This news report takes a crack at describing the search algorithm:

Orion finds pages where the content is about a topic strongly related to a keyword. It then returns a section of the page, and lists other topics related to the keyword so the user can pick the most relevant.

As you can see the paragraph creates more questions than it answers. Ori Allon has filed two patent applications for the algorithm at the Australian Patent Office. Sadly, these applications have not been published and are not available to the public. I'd love to have a read. I spent quite some time trying to reach the text (hence the article's name) eventually gave up as patent applications are only published 18 months from the date of filing (these applications were filed in November 2005).

To wrap up this article, here are a couple of tricks for searching using existing search engines. They are probably a part of some Google hacking book or the other but here goes.

Stopwords - There are some words that all search engines block by default (such as 'a', 'an', 'the', and 'and'). However, there are some words that you should avoid even though they are available - words like 'free', 'download', 'latest'. These terms are liberally thrown into the metadata of most webpages, and so results that have nothing to do with what you're looking for appear.
The exact quote operator - This is a trick that I find to be quite handy when I am searching for definitions or facts or numbers. Search for a sentence construct that is followed by what you are looking for. For example, search for "the lord of the rings was filmed in" using Google, instead of keywords like 'lord', 'rings', 'location', 'filming'. You can quicly get your answer as part of the search result extract that Google provides.

Remember, the more specific/precise the query, the better the results. Happy searching!

Online businesses beware

nospam@example.com (Rohan Dayal) — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:35:01 +0200

So you came up with a grandiose online business model - one that ensures a large customer base - it is convenient, cheap, cuts out middlemen, and ensures a quick turn around time. You implement it, create delivery channels, and develop interactive websites. Everything seems to be going right. Some competitors emerge, but then don't they always. Three years later, a competitor files a lawsuit against you for infringement on a business method patent.

That is exactly what is happening to Blockbuster DVD rentals. Netflix (a competing movie rental service) has filed an infringement suit against them for infringing on U.S. patent No. 7,024,381 (read more in this news item). The patent describes a method for processing rental orders for movies. A customer can create a list (in a particular order) of movies which he/she wishes to rent. A set of movies (say not more than three) are delivered to the customer. When the customer returns one or more movies, the corresponding number of movies from the list are dispatched to the customer. Quite intuitive and slick, I must say.

My guess is that Blockbuster will first try to attack the patent based on its obviousness - "what's so inventive about automatically dispatching movies from a list when rented titles are returned?". In parallel, Blockbuster will also try to search for 'prior art' for this patent, i.e., an existing implementation of such a business model.

Moral of the story: If you have something new, it's a wise investment to file a patent application for it. The cost will be quite negligible as compared to setting up the process. If you don't think this worthwhile, do not be surprised when someone slaps you with an infringement suit for something that you thought was not worth patenting.

I wonder why Priceline.com did not patent their business model of online airline ticket booking with itineraries that span multiple airlines such that the overall trip cost is minimum. They could have put many players, including Indiatimes air-ticket auctions and Makemytrip.com, out of market (of course, they would have had to file a patent application in India too).

Disclaimer: All views expressed in this article are entirely of the author's and are not provided in any professional authority. The views should not be construed to be a legal opinion.

Who's idea was this anyway?

nospam@example.com (Rohan Dayal) — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 01:15:33 +0200

So you thought Intellectual Property and Patents are all about serious technological inventions right? Well, think again!

The next time you play Charades during a party over drinks, you might actually be infringing on this patent (well apparently only if you are above 21 years of age).

From the abstract:

The present invention is a social game and method of playing the same comprising a plurality of cards. Each card has at least one task for the cardholder to attempt to successfully complete, such as at least one question to answer, at least one act to perform, at least one instruction to follow, and/or at least one fact, quote or saying to read. When a cardholder successfully completes a task, the cardholder earns a predetermined amount of points. Additionally, where a task requires another player to guess what the cardholder is acting or doing, the player that correctly answers may also earn at least one point. The first player to earn a predetermined total number of points wins the game. The game and method of the invention may be played using alcoholic beverages throughout the course of the game, but only by players twenty-one (21) years of age and older.

This patent is currently under review, and may one day be granted.