Alexei@Nitobi

Don’t you just hate it when someone is awarded a blanket patent on commonplace technology that they can’t even truthfully claim they invented? Case in point: NetMite (Yongyong Xu) and patent 6,418,462. “Global sideband service distributed computing method”. I’m not a lawyer, but on the surface this patent protects the idea of distributed computing via Ajax.. but if you read the actual language of the patent, it actually appears to describe Ajax itself:

A new method of distributed computing, sideband computing, that is global, scalable and can utilize many idle CPU resources worldwide. Sideband is defined as when a user connects to some (normal) network services, a separate communication channel is opened, through which a server distributes its tasks to all the clients and collects the results later.

OK read between the lines.. Ajax, right? The point of this patent? Frivolous lawsuits, obviously. In a recent article on MarketWatch.com, the writer remarked:

Xu said that while he’s been pleased to see his research put to use, he believes that “these big companies are taking advantage” of technology that they should rightly pay for. He said he hasn’t had any luck getting the attention of companies that might be interested in licensing what he refers to as his “AJAX patent,” and thinks an attorney might fare better.

Well a quick visit to the illustrious inventor’s website will reveal a colorful display of MS Paint images and animated gifs – indicating to even the untrained eye the seriousness and gravity of this impressive individual’s important research and brilliant mind.

So he took his insane patent to a company called Ocean Tomo who auction intellectual property. At the asking price of $2 mil there were no bids, and there were no bids at $1 mil. There were no bids at all, as a matter of fact, but later after discussing the lot with some investors in the hallway, one of them remarked that there might really be an opportunity for development as a “licensing and litigation” property.. heaven forbid we actually try to develop this amazing technology.

A couple things have occurred to me about this particular case.

#1 – Why on earth was he awarded this patent to begin with – given that Microsoft invented “Microsoft Remote Scripting (MSRS)” in 1998 which was intended for exactly this purpose.

#2 – Anyone foolish enough to buy this from him with the intent of blackmailing large companies out of their money has an uphill battle ahead of them. Prior art, and the sheer ludricity of the claim will provoke executives to dig in their heels and fight it until the complainant is broke. Any acknowledgement that they are illegitimately infringing on a valid patent will create a precedent and open the floodgates to all kinds of crazyness.

Despite all that – I can see a useful purpose for this patent. I think a company who is infringing on other patents who wants something in their pocket as a defensive tool might be interested in having something like this since it might at least be effective as a deterrent to lawsuits against them – since probably everyone in the universe is infringing on this.

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 1:22 pm and is filed under Rich Internet Apps, ajax, business, web development, web2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.