[88] in Zephyr Mailing List
Someone is trying to gain patent rights to Zephyr-like functionality!!
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tony DellaFera)
Thu May 20 18:08:26 1993
To: zephyr@Athena.MIT.EDU
Cc: tony@tay1.dec.com
Date: Thu, 20 May 93 18:05:22 -0400
From: "Tony DellaFera" <tony@tay1.dec.com>
Hi all,
I've been contacted by someone at Cornell who is involved in leagal action
against a firm called Teknekron Software Systems (Palo Alto). He would
like to remain nameless because of the legal ramifications. Apparently
Teknekron has filed for a patent on "subject based addressing" (the whole
concept) used for "high performance decoupled computer to computer
communication". They filed in August 1989 and a patent was awarded in Feb.
1992!!
I hate this kind of shotgun patenting stuff!
The reason I was contacted is that this person belives that Zephyr is part
of the set encompased by the patent and that Zephyr (being in the public
domain) invalidates the patent.
The person at Cornell's argument hings on the fact that no prior work in
this general area was cited in the patent at all, except for "email" and
some reference to the VMS mailbox facility (bizzare if you ask me).
In my opinion the agument is valid. It sounds to me like Teknekron didn't
do ANY homework. I thought that there was A LOT of work in this area PRIOR
to 1988 both at the Media Lab and Sloan School at MIT. The "Information
Lens" project comes to mind.
For that matter... one could look at Usenet News!!! Although, the person
from Cornell said that News isn't quite fast enough to qualify, but I'm
skeptical.
Apparently the window of prior-ness is one year before they filed. So, in
addition to the ISIS "news" interfaces (which has this) the person at
Cornell is hunting for literature showing that subject-oriented message
deliver (we called it class-oriented in Zephyr) was in common use in the
1987-1988 timeframe. Our 1988 Usenix publication is probably too late to
help him because of this.
I have told him that Zephyr was in use between 1986-1988. The manuals he
has were updated and the current MIT distribution is all from
1989/1990/1991 so he doesn't have any of the early stuff.
I belive that Zephyr's first public publication was in the MIT Project
Athena Technical Plan. A draft was published in 1986 and another in 1987
(Copyright 1987 MIT). I'm pretty sure that the first version of Zephyr
went into use at Project Athena around 1986.
Anyone who has some help to offer I would be glad to forward it to the
folks at Cornell.
Thanks,
Tony...
