Hi Scott: I understand - no sense getting involved until EarthLink has invalidated most of the claims.
I think this is a key quote: "Mailblocks' Goldman admits that there were prior publications, but argues that at least some portions of his patents remain valid. "The patents have very specific claims in them," Goldman told me. "The claims are different than the types of things people have been doing before. Maybe here and there, they're the same so not 100 percent of the claims are valid, but many of them are." Translated that means - if key claims are eliminated because of prior art, then the patent may possibly still 'survive' - but everyone will simply design their own challenge/response systems to mirror the prior art. The only thing to avoid are the truly "new" inventions that are left in the remaining claims - unless the remaining claims would have been obvious based on the prior art. Overall - I'm pretty encouraged by the quality of what has been cited already: "By Aug. 28, 1997, when Christopher Alan Cobb filed for his patent that eventually was purchased by Mailblocks, the challenge-response idea had become commonplace on the Internet: Brad Templeton, chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, had written his Viking-12 CR utility and was using it. Templeton says he'd be delighted to testify on behalf of EarthLink to help the company invalidate the Mailblocks patent. Over a year earlier, Brent Chapman's majordomo, the popular mailing list software, included a CR feature. A November 1996 post to Usenet's news.admin.net-abuse.usenet newsgroup talks about a "random challenge that is very easy for a human to respond to, but next to impossible for a computer." Another from January 1997 describes an e-mail "spam block 'bot" that was so effective "I've received hate mail from spammers concerning it," and a third post describes a commercial product called the Deadbolt Personal E-mail Filter. Best Regards Andy Schmidt H&M Systems Software, Inc. 600 East Crescent Avenue, Suite 203 Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458-1846 Phone: +1 201 934-3414 x20 (Business) Fax: +1 201 934-9206 http://www.HM-Software.com/ -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of R. Scott Perry Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 04:05 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [Declude.JunkMail] Spam Lion Functionality >Patent Number? 6,199,102. To view it, you can go to http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm and enter "6,199,102" there. For a bit of background, you can go to http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/business/columnists/tech_test_drive/5 565050.htm ms may be much narrower) than the casual reader >appreciates. Also, one has to look at the patent file wrapper to >determine the outcome of prior art searches to see if subsequent >communication with the examiner may have further narrowed the scope. Good points -- and exactly why it would be expensive to pursue. Patent law isn't simple. FWIW, a number of people have tried to find prior art, and were unable. Extensive searches? Probably not. But a number of anti-spam people tried and were unable to. -Scott --- Declude JunkMail: The advanced anti-spam solution for IMail mailservers. Declude Virus: Catches known viruses and is the leader in mailserver vulnerability detection. Find out what you've been missing: Ask about our free 30-day evaluation. --- [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)] --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com. --- [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)] --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com.
