Re: The Empire Strikes Back

From: Davids (nowhere_at_nowthere.com)
Date: 11/05/03 

Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2003 14:14:55 -0700

Edmund wrote:

> Dennis Landi cried "Banzai!" and then wrote::
>
> > http://www.w3.org/2003/10/27-rogan.html
> >
> >
>
> Oh buggered. Can someone fluent in patentese and
> English please explain what the smeg is being
> bantered about in the patent as given by :
>
> http://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/patog/week42/OG/html/1275-3/US06636857-20031021.html
>
> (watch wrap around)
>
> I just read the abstract and the 'actions' that it describes seem
> pretty much describe every thing from ftp sites to backup centers
> and everything in between.
>
> Did I read the patent correctly?
>
> Thanks

There are two things interesting about this patent ('857). One is that it was filed on
17 Dec, 2002, and issued less than a year later, 21 Oct 2003. It was based on a
provisional application filed 18 Dec, 2001.

Secondly, I was the architect of a design that got a patent a year ago (6,366,930) on 2
Apr, 2002 that was filed 9 Apr, 1997 based on a provisional app filed 12 Apr, 1996. Our
actual design incorporated almost identical mechanisms that are described in the '857
patent, but that our patent attorneys had us remove because they said there was too much
prior art to substantiate them!

The concept we were implementing (that isn't apparent from the patent we were granted)
was a remote backup/restore mechanism that achieved extremely high effective rates of
data compression. The idea was that a facility would use our software to do remote
backups of all of their computers, and if any of their computers ever died, or if the
facility were engaged in a major accident, each of the computers' hard drives could be
restored virtually intact following a reformat of a new drive.

Our design was symmetric in that it could be (and WAS) used to distribute updates to
people in the field using the same high compression mechanisms.

In order to do either of these, it was necessary for us to capture information regarding
the state of the computer, in the same way as described in the '857 patent, so we could
restore things to their previous state if required.

Another interesting comparison between the '857 patent and ours is that ours referenced
78 other patents, while the '857 patent referenced only 6 other patents plus one foreign
patent.

The only difference I can see between what they're doing and what we were doing is that
they're using a web browser rather than a Delphi-based GUI application. (When we started
our work back in 1995, the "web" was barely in its infancy and we were trying to figure
out how to backup 2GB of data over a 56kb modem.)

So much for exhaustive patent research!

-David

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