Larry Seltzer wrote: > I'm not defending the patent and I don't remember everything from when > they talked about it to me, but I do believe it was important to the > patent that it operated as a proxy. Perhaps MIMESweeper didn't work as a > proxy?
Based on Trend's subsequent actions regarding enforcement, it seems that "being a dedicated scanning device" is the key thing, and _that_ is why the patent fails the "obviousness" test for any vaguely clueful techie... In short, Trend is effectively admitting that it did not invent the idea of passthrough Email virus scanning, merely the (obvious) procedural "improvement" of off-loading that overhead workload to a dedicated scanning machine via (the equally obvious, particularly for a protocol designed from the ground up for relaying and proxying) a proxy. And _that's_ why -- sorry ferg -- many folk quite rightly IMNSHO think of Trend in terms such as "douchebag" for trying to enforce this clearly bogus patent. (If it had simply used the patent as a defensive patent, parrying other vendor's patent infringement claims with this one it would be a different matter -- still a bogus patent, but "somewhat reasonably" used only in its own defense...) Regards, Nick FitzGerald _______________________________________________ Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts. https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.
