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Tim Churches wrote: | See http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/06/01/HNnaantispam_1.html | | | Some of the claims mentioned for this particular patent are doubly | absurd, particularly the use of Bayes rule for email classification, | because such use is obvious from the literature | I initially thouht the same as you Tim. But re-reading the article (I have not read the patent, which we should do to verify the reportage) they claim not to have patented Bayes techniques, but to have patented combining several techniques, including Bayes, together to detect Spam.
Thus, the IP history of Bayes techniques is only relevant to the degree that someone else revealed this combination in combating Spam that they use!
There are even broader claims at the Patent level, by Postini, for example, for the general idea automatically detecting and processing mail in a way to remove Spam.
If you examine the industry and see the deals being done and the consolidation underway (Brightmail is used by at least two other vendors and was just purchased themselves by Symantec), you might see that these Patents have something to do with corporate valuation...... So, I would suspect that it's more then the Patent system, per se, at fault here..... -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
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