Altnet’s lame-duck patent
Boorish Altnet up to old tricks
By Ian Clarke, Freenet
Whether it be the covert inclusion of spyware in their software, or their rather suspect patent activities, Altnet is truly the careless elephant in the china shop of peer to peer, particularly when it comes to respest for their customers.
Altnet finally appears to have cleaned up their act on the spyware front, although why they weren’t able to anticipate that backlash suggests some kind of sociopathic inability to look at their actions through the eyes of their customers or the public at-large. True to form, they are at it again.
In this case they are attacking P2P customers indirectly by going after others in the P2P space with their aquisition of the "TrueNames" patent from Digital Island (who, in case you think you are getting deja vu here, already failed to make this patent stick in their court battle with Akamai several years ago).
It isn’t hard to see why the TrueNames patent wasn’t very valuable to Digital Island. Essentially it represents requesting a piece of information from a remote server using the "hash" of that information’s content. A "hash" is a mathematical fingerprint of a piece of data, in essence a very large number which will always be the same for two identical pieces of data. Hashes can be generated in a wide variety of ways, and the technique has been around and in wide usage in computer science circles since before I saw my first keyboard.
Hashes are a common way to retrieve information, for example – the "hashtable" datastructure, also around since before I knew what a keyboard was, stores data in memory which can be retrieved using a hash of that data.
The Truenames patent claims that the application of hashes to retrieving information over a network constitutes a non-obvious invention. It is so non-obvious, in fact, that the technique is widely used in internet related applications, created both before and after the Truenames patent was filed. The only reason that nobody thought to patent it before was that they didn’t believe the USPTO could posibly approve something so obvious. Clearly they aren’t very familiar with the USPTO.
Anyway, the bottom line is that someone managed to persuade Altnet that the Truenames Patent was worth something (one imagines that this was right after Altnet’s successful purchase of London’s Tower Bridge and a large selection of invisible clothing). Assuming that those Altnet threatens with their lame duck patent put up even the slightest bit of resistence, the patent won’t stand, and Altnet will be left looking like the enemies of consumers, innovation, and competition, once again a pariah within a P2P community that should be working together against its common foes.
August 9th, 2004 at 10:58 pm
interesting – but how has this patent held up in court?
September 9th, 2004 at 4:39 pm
at least they are doing something to fight the “common foes”…if you think it’s ok for the riaa and it’s partners to damage music and then distribute it over p2p and sit idly by except to fight against the people spending time energy and resources to actually do something about it you are showing a blatant disregard for the artists who actually created the damaged works. why don’t you create some music that the riaa would actually find significant enough to destroy and see how it feels…..