> From: “Mr. FoRK”
> Date: Thu Dec 19, 2002 9:05:58 AM US/Pacific
> To:
> Subject: AOL patents IM?
>
>
> http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncidX1&e=1&cidX1&u=/
> nm/20021
> 219/tc_nm/tech_internet_aol_dc
>
> Patent
> Thu Dec 19, 8:56 AM ET Add Technology – Reuters to My Yahoo!
> By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent
>
> LONDON (Reuters) – Media giant AOL Time Warner has quietly won a U.S.
> patent
> for instant messaging (news – web sites), a potential goldmine as the
> online
> activity rivals mobile phone text-messaging as the most popular new
> communication tool.
> The patent, issued in September, grants AOL’s instant messaging
> subsidiary
> ICQ broad ownership rights to the technology, which enables users to
> chat
> quickly and cheaply across the Internet.
> The broad wording of the patent means AOL could get an important legal
> leg
> up on rivals Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo, the other players in the
> potentially
> lucrative instant messaging (IM) arena that have their own proprietary
> technologies.
> AOL has offered little comment on the patent or whether it intends to
> enforce it.
> “There are no plans to do anything with the patent at this time,” a
> London
> spokesman for AOL’s Internet division, America Online, told Reuters on
> Thursday.
> Microsoft and AOL have recently embarked on a project to develop
> secure chat
> applications for corporate users, the first major effort to cash in on
> what
> has been a largely free software tool. Reuters Group is one of the
> biggest
> corporate clients, using Microsoft’s IM technology.
> AOL has scores of other technology patents, including one for Internet
> browsing memory tags, or “cookies,” and another for Secure Sockets
> Layer
> (SSL), an application that secures e-commerce transactions. But it has
> never
> sought to enforce these.
> It has, however, been notoriously protective of its IM technology. It
> did
> not permit rivals’ proprietary IM applications to communicate with its
> own
> AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and ICQ for years. It now allows this,
> albeit in
> a limited fashion.
> The new patent defines AOL’s IM application as one that enables users
> to
> chat with and identify one another across a specific “communications
> network,” opening up the possibility for AOL to collect royalties from
> rivals.
> Developed in the mid-1990s by a group of Israeli technologists at a
> company
> called Mirabilis, ICQ was the first breakthrough chat application. It
> filed
> a patent for its technology in 1997 and was acquired by AOL in 1998
> for $287
> million.
> AOL said it has 180 million registered AIM users and 140 million
> registered
> ICQ users. The company said 2.1 billion instant messages were sent
> across
> its network daily.
>

———–

I use LimeWire.

For the uninitiated, all of the clients we’re discussing use the same GNUtella code base which was developed by the the WinAmp guys, NullSoft. Ironically, they released GNUtella six months after they were bought by AOL, which became AOL Time-Warner.

Here’s a quick Ascii Diagram to help you out:

[LimeWire] [BearShare] [Morpheus] [XoloX] [Shareaza] \ [Swapper] | [Gnucleus] | [Phex] | [Qtella] / \ \ \ | | | / / / \ \ \ \ | / / / / \ \ \ \ / / / / / \ \ \ \ / / / / / \ \ \ \ / / / / / \_____\______[GNUtella]__/____/____/

🙂

It’s all the same thing…

-Ian.

On Thursday, September 5, 2002, at 11:49 AM, Adam Wood-Gaines wrote:

> Curiously, I decided to check out Morpheus.
> But it doesn’t look like it’s getting good reviews.
>
> http://download.com.com/3302-2166-10141574.html
>
> And what’s the deal with it being flamed “spyware”?
> That’s seems tres uncool. Are these accusations founded?
>
> I have little experience with file sharing networks, but
> I’m curious to check ’em out on my OSX box.
>
> –Adam
>
>
> — Mark Bussanich wrote:
>> Of course, I would never do anything illegal like download copywritten
>> materials but, in response to Mark’s question regarding alternatives,
>> I am
>> told that Morpheus is a pretty good service. http://www.morpheus.com
>>
>> After all, it’s good to share.
>>
>> Mark (the other)
>>
>> —– Original Message —–
>> From: “mark winder”
>> To: ;
>> Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2002 10:46 AM
>> Subject: Re: @F: [GEEKS] Napster Goes Unmourned to the Grave
>>
>>
>>> I hvae to disagree somewhat – companies dying that had no business
>>> plan is
>>> old news – SO 2000 ;o)
>>>
>>> Personally, I think that what’s really noteworthy is that by going
>>> to the
>>> Napster website (http://www.napster.com – for those of you who need
>>> the
>>> reminder…) one can still find utility in the site. For instance,
>>> the
>>> “Napster was here” image can really spruce up an otherwise drab
>>> desktop
>>> pattern on you PC. You can also… well… actually, I guess that’s
>>> about
>>> it, really…
>>>
>>> …so Napster was fun – what are people now using to get tunes and
>>> videos
>>> off the net?? Any front runners??
>>>
>>> okbye,
>>>
>>> – Mark.
>>>
>>>
>>>> From: Ian Andrew Bell
>>>> To: foib [at] ianbell [dot] com
>>>> Subject: @F: [GEEKS] Napster Goes Unmourned to the Grave
>>>> Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2002 10:40:34 -0700
>>>>
>>>> The death of Napster is not so much a signifier of the victory of
>>>> the
>> RIAA
>>>> over the infidels as it is of the defeat of companies which had no
>>>> identifiable business plan..
>>>>
>>>> -Ian.
>>>>
>>>> ———–
>>>> http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020904/wr_nm/
>>>> media_napster_reaction_dc
>>>>
>>>> Napster Goes Unmourned to the Grave
>>>> Wed Sep 4, 1:38 PM ET
>>>>
>>>> By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent
>>>>
>>>> LONDON (Reuters) – Like so many one-hit wonders before it, the
>>>> demise of
>>>> the once iconic online song-swapping service Napster ( news – web
>>>> sites)
>>>> has failed to stir much sympathy.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> “Really, who cares?” Sebastian, a student at the Technical
>>>> University of
>>>> Darmstadt, Germany, told Reuters as he heard that Napster would
>>>> likely
>> be
>>>> forced into Chapter 7 liquidation as early as Thursday.
>>>>
>>>> “Everybody’s moved on to other file-sharing (services). The
>>>> interest for
>>>> Napster in the Internet community just wasn’t as high as everybody
>>>> originally thought,” said the 28-year old student of IT engineering.
>>>>
>>>> During its heyday in 2000, Napster attracted tens of millions of
>>>> music
>>>> fans who traded all manners of recorded music from Eminem ( news –
>>>> web
>>>> sites) singles to rare concert recordings of the Dave Matthews Band.
>>>>
>>>> To the chagrin of the media establishment, Napster introduced the
>> concept
>>>> of file-trading to a generation of youths who now exchange a wide
>>>> range
>>>> copyright-protected materials from feature-length movies to video
>>>> games,
>>>> drawing Hollywood and lawmakers into the fray to corral the
>>>> activity.
>>>>
>>>> NO CHANCE
>>>>
>>>> While the legacy of Napster thrives, the service itself became a
>>>> non-entity as it shut down a year ago amid mounting legal troubles.
>>>> Thursday, Net discussion groups were largely devoid of commentary
>>>> on the
>>>> online service that major music labels once considered to be public
>> enemy
>>>> number one.
>>>>
>>>> “Well, it’s official,” read one discussion group posting, summing
>>>> up a
>>>> demise that has long had an air of inevitability — as an
>>>> underground
>>>> service it was a hit, but as a business it had no chance.
>>>>
>>>> The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, one of
>>>> Napster’s chief nemeses, gave a bitter-sweet obituary to the defunct
>>>> service.
>>>>
>>>> “Napster had a great technology but it was never going to be
>>>> successful
>>>> until it managed to turn that technology into a legitimate business
>> model
>>>> that respected the copyright of artists and record companies,” the
>>>> IFPI
>>>> said in a statement.
>>>>
>>>> Napster’s fate was sealed Wednesday when a U.S. bankruptcy court
>> rejected
>>>> German media group Bertelsmann’s bid to buy Napster. Record labels
>>>> and
>>>> songwriters had opposed the deal, saying the price was unfair.
>>>>
>>>> IMMINENT LIQUIDATION
>>>>
>>>> The decision leaves Napster, which had been grounded since July,
>>>> 2001,
>>>> with no choice but to pull the plug on the operation.
>>>>
>>>> Napster, which still has a large copyright-infringement suit hanging
>> over
>>>> its head from the labels, is expected to file for Chapter 7
>>>> liquidation
>>>> Thursday, sources said.
>>>>
>>>> A statement from Napster Wednesday said the company had fired staff
>>>> and
>>>> shut down the operation. A trustee will auction off Napster’s assets
>> that
>>>> include its globally recognized brand name, Web addresses and
>> proprietary
>>>> technologies.
>>>>
>>>> The Napster Web Site now consists of two pages — “Napster was
>>>> here” on
>>>> the home page, linking only to a crude tombstone bearing the
>>>> trademark
>>>> headphone-wearing cat and the legend “Ded kitty.”
>>>>
>>>> Wednesday, officials at some of the music labels told Reuters they
>>>> did
>> not
>>>> think the fall of Napster would have any meaningful impact on the
>>>> file-sharing and music piracy craze.
>>>>
>>>> The labels may have triggered Napster’s demise, but it leaves
>>>> behind a
>>>> more powerful crop of imitators including Morpheus MusicCity,
>>>> Grokster
>> and
>>>> Kazaa, sites which have succeeded in driving the activity further
>>>> underground.
>>>>
>>>> As a posting by a person nicknamed “PianoMan” said: “They will never
>> stop
>>>> it. Or even slow it down. And as you may have guessed, I’m not
>>>> sympathetic.”
>>>>
>>>> Henry Wilson, founder of Grokster, a peer-to-peer network named in a
>>>> lawsuit by Hollywood and the labels for copyright abuse, pointed out
>> that
>>>> Napster went out of business before the courts could make a final
>>>> ruling
>>>> on the legitimacy of file-sharing networks.
>>>>
>>>> “I don’t think you can say this is a win for (the labels) on the
>>>> legal
>>>> front,” Wilson told Reuters.
>>>>
>>>> ———–
>>>> FoIB mailing list — Bits, Analysis, Digital Group Therapy
>>>> https://ianbell.com:8888/foib.html
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> – Mark
>>>
>>> —
>>> Mark Winder
>>> me [at] markwinder [dot] net
>>>
>>>

-Ian.

———– http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020904/wr_nm/ media_napster_reaction_dc

Napster Goes Unmourned to the Grave Wed Sep 4, 1:38 PM ET

By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent

LONDON (Reuters) – Like so many one-hit wonders before it, the demise of the once iconic online song-swapping service Napster ( news – web sites) has failed to stir much sympathy.

“Really, who cares?” Sebastian, a student at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, told Reuters as he heard that Napster would likely be forced into Chapter 7 liquidation as early as Thursday.

“Everybody’s moved on to other file-sharing (services). The interest for Napster in the Internet community just wasn’t as high as everybody originally thought,” said the 28-year old student of IT engineering.

During its heyday in 2000, Napster attracted tens of millions of music fans who traded all manners of recorded music from Eminem ( news – web sites) singles to rare concert recordings of the Dave Matthews Band.

To the chagrin of the media establishment, Napster introduced the concept of file-trading to a generation of youths who now exchange a wide range copyright-protected materials from feature-length movies to video games, drawing Hollywood and lawmakers into the fray to corral the activity.

NO CHANCE

While the legacy of Napster thrives, the service itself became a non-entity as it shut down a year ago amid mounting legal troubles. Thursday, Net discussion groups were largely devoid of commentary on the online service that major music labels once considered to be public enemy number one.

“Well, it’s official,” read one discussion group posting, summing up a demise that has long had an air of inevitability — as an underground service it was a hit, but as a business it had no chance.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, one of Napster’s chief nemeses, gave a bitter-sweet obituary to the defunct service.

“Napster had a great technology but it was never going to be successful until it managed to turn that technology into a legitimate business model that respected the copyright of artists and record companies,” the IFPI said in a statement.

Napster’s fate was sealed Wednesday when a U.S. bankruptcy court rejected German media group Bertelsmann’s bid to buy Napster. Record labels and songwriters had opposed the deal, saying the price was unfair.

IMMINENT LIQUIDATION

The decision leaves Napster, which had been grounded since July, 2001, with no choice but to pull the plug on the operation.

Napster, which still has a large copyright-infringement suit hanging over its head from the labels, is expected to file for Chapter 7 liquidation Thursday, sources said.

A statement from Napster Wednesday said the company had fired staff and shut down the operation. A trustee will auction off Napster’s assets that include its globally recognized brand name, Web addresses and proprietary technologies.

The Napster Web Site now consists of two pages — “Napster was here” on the home page, linking only to a crude tombstone bearing the trademark headphone-wearing cat and the legend “Ded kitty.”

Wednesday, officials at some of the music labels told Reuters they did not think the fall of Napster would have any meaningful impact on the file-sharing and music piracy craze.

The labels may have triggered Napster’s demise, but it leaves behind a more powerful crop of imitators including Morpheus MusicCity, Grokster and Kazaa, sites which have succeeded in driving the activity further underground.

As a posting by a person nicknamed “PianoMan” said: “They will never stop it. Or even slow it down. And as you may have guessed, I’m not sympathetic.”

Henry Wilson, founder of Grokster, a peer-to-peer network named in a lawsuit by Hollywood and the labels for copyright abuse, pointed out that Napster went out of business before the courts could make a final ruling on the legitimacy of file-sharing networks.

“I don’t think you can say this is a win for (the labels) on the legal front,” Wilson told Reuters.

———–

This is moronic not only because it is a completely unenforceable and indefensible patent claim, but for so many more reasons. They can’t possibly win. Why?

– BT, as a seller of data circuits and communications solutions, has knowingly assisted other companies to “infringe” upon their “patents”. – The prior art of Nelson, Engelbart, et al is fairly concrete and has been thoroughly documented.

This is a great way, right as BT attempts to enter the US market as a competitor, to piss off most of your potential partners and customers in the IP communications marketplace..

It’s just really, really stupid.

-Ian.

———–

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20020207/wr/tech_bt_patent_dc_1.html

Thursday February 7 8:37 AM ET

BT in Fight to Establish Web Surfing Patent

By Bernhard Warner and Eric Auchard

LONDON/NEW YORK (Reuters) – Imagine if one company held the right to collect a fee each time an Internet user clicked on a Web site link and jumped to another Web page.

It may sound far-fetched, but a U.S. federal court will hear preliminary arguments next week to determine if this most elemental of Internet activities is the business property of a lone company, protected in the form of a patent.

BT Group Plc believes it holds such a patent covering ”hypertext links” — the illuminated text on a Web page that enables users to surf from page to page with the click of a mouse. On Monday, BT will go to court to try to cash in on it.

Its first target is Prodigy, the oldest online access service, which dates back to 1984 and is now a unit of SBC Communications, the second largest U.S. local telephone company.

The former British telecoms monopoly maintains that Prodigy, with its 3.6 million customers, is in violation of a hyperlink patent granted years before the Internet as we now know it even existed.

BT is calling the trial a test case whose outcome will determine whether it can commercialize a potentially lucrative patent. If successful, BT intends to go after other American internet service providers, the lone jurisdiction governed by the patent.

“We believe we have a duty to protect our intellectual property and we would expect companies to pay a reasonable royalty based on the revenues that they have enjoyed through the use of that intellectual property,” a BT spokeswoman said.

“A ROCK STAR”

The case, which will ultimately determine whether every move on the Internet can be taxed by a single company, promises to be one of the most closely watched patent disputes in history.

“It’s probably among the top ten most controversial patents in the world,” said Charles Cella, a former patent attorney and co-founder of BountyQuest Corp., a U.S. startup that monitors patent cases.

“It’s a rock star in the patent world,” he added. “That’s a scary thought.”

A preliminary hearing will begin on Monday in the Federal Court for the Southern District of New York in White Plains, Prodigy’s original home town, 25 miles north of New York City.

For its part, neither Prodigy nor its parent, SBC, will discuss the case. “We don’t comment on pending litigation,” said an SBC spokeswoman for Prodigy Communications.

WHO’S FIRST?

Since the controversial lawsuit became public in late 2000, BT has come under heavy fire from computer programmers, developers and Web business executives alike, a group that has traditionally attacked technology patents of any kind.

Public critics of BT say the notion of hypertext linking was devised decades before BT developed its own version in the 1970s, for which it was issued the US patent in 1989.

In a unique display of solidarity, the Internet and legal communities have used Web message boards over the past year to ferret out claims that “prior art” for hypertext links exists.

Most cite British scientist Ted Nelson, who ostensibly coined the word “hypertext” in 1963, using the term in his book ”Literary Machine” in 1965.

A more damning counter-argument, they say, may come in the form of grainy, black and white film footage located on the Stanford University Web site at http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html.

The clip shows a 1968 demonstration by Stanford computer researchers demonstrating what computer experts believe is the first example of hypertext linking. If true, it could invalidate the BT patent, experts claim.

In the film, lead researcher Douglas Engelbart, the father of the computer mouse and a local hero in Silicon Valley, demonstrates how by clicking on certain words in a computer program a new page of text appears.

“It’s like gold dust from a prior art point of view,” said Ben Goodger, a senior attorney at London-based intellectual property consultancy Rouse & Company International.

“It’s unusual. There is apparently evidence that someone was doing this long ago,” added Goodger.

In a biographical sketch on his Web site, Engelbart claims to have invented the first hypertext system in the 1960s, known as NLS (for oN-Line System).

Engelbart’s computer was the second computer connected to the Defense Department-sponsored ARPANet, the predecessor to today’s Internet.

Finding bullet-proof prior art — considered the best shot at defending a patent claim — is difficult though, experts say.

Cella, for one, questioned whether the Engelbart film would hold up in court, adding that the heavily indebted BT would be unlikely to head to court and incur millions of dollars in legal fees if it thought the film could harm its case.

While the debate over the validity of the patent rages on outside of court, many in the tech community agree on one thing: heading to court to defend a claim of ownership on Web surfing is a potentially big public relations gamble for BT.

“But, on the other hand, one could admire them for having the guts to do it. If you have it why not use it?,” Goodger remarked.

More like: “Hacks now out of business.”

-Ian.

——— http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20020201/wr/tech_hack_attack_dc_3.html

Friday February 1 8:19 AM ET

Internet Firm Hacked Out of Business

By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent

LONDON (Reuters) – Fears are growing once more that companies operating on the Internet may not be equipped to ward off electronic sabotage after anonymous “hackers” forced a small British firm out of business.

CloudNine Communications, one of Britain’s oldest Internet Service Providers (ISPs), shut down last week with the loss of eight jobs in what computer experts believe is the first instance of a company being hacked out of existence.

The electronic attack — a so-called “Distributed Denial of Service” or DDOS — was reminiscent of one in February 2000 that crippled Yahoo, one of the world’s leading Internet media firms, along with the online auctioneer eBay and the electronic brokerage ETrade.

Other Internet operations have been infected by malicious software in the form of computer “viruses.”

In a DDOS attack, a computer is swamped with an overwhelming number of requests that are disguised to look innocuous, so that the Web site that it controls grinds to a halt.

Experts say tens of thousands of such attacks occur each year — and that a far greater number probably go unreported by companies fearful of hurting their business.

FORCED TO SELL UP

CloudNine, six years old, was forced to sell its business and hand over 2,500 customers to its rival Zetnet.

“The basic reasoning was we would have needed to bring the network offline for far too long (to make repairs). We just came to the conclusion that we couldn’t continue,” said co-founder Emeric Miszti.

Two other recent victims of DDOS attacks were the British Internet portal of the Italian ISP Tiscali, whose service was halted for several days, and the British Internet provider Donhost, whose outage lasted a few hours.

“It’s not just a game of taking down one server,” said Stephane Huet, acting chief operating officer for Tiscali UK. ”It affects portal revenues if the rest of the world cannot access it. It has a powerful business impact.”

The motivation for such attacks is diverse. Many hackers are simply after illicit thrills, while others seek publicity for a particular cause. It is now common in wars, especially civil ones, for each side to sabotage the other’s Web sites.

BIG-NAME TARGETS

Past targets include sites associated with the White House and the Palestinian Authority.

A DDOS attack last week is also suspected to have sabotaged a live online chat with the Dutch crown prince and his Argentinian fiance.

A number of programs that can shut down computer systems by overwhelming them with data requests are even freely available on the Internet.

In the case of CloudNine, the DDOS attack prevented users served by the company from logging onto the Internet and shut off access to Web sites hosted on its network.

“It was a very methodical attack,” said Miszti.

“It occurred over a number of months. Their objective was to map out our network, identifying the key servers and determining their capacity. Then they knew how to attack with the appropriate force.”

Miszti says he is not sure why his firm was targeted and has no clear idea who was behind it.

He and Tiscali are both working with police, but computer experts say DDOS investigations are rarely successful.

“If (a hacker) takes reasonable precautions, it would be very difficult to track them down,” said Gary Milo, managing director of security start-up Webscreen Technologies, which has developed software to protect companies against such attacks.