gregh  2007-08-07 22:30  eroom  patents   

A couple of weeks ago I was in an interview with a partner from a major law firm. His concern over my lack of legal work experience was evident, and he started actively trying to find out other areas I may have touched on. One of those things was whether my work had been involved with patents my previous employers applied for. "No." And so, imagine my surprise last night. There I was, reading some blog posts and patents concerning some the latest blitzes by patent trolls (this suit against Apple and this against Microsoft and Adobe) when one of the patents made me think of some of Instinctive Technology's work.

I was employee #7 at Instinctive, the makers of eRoom, and spent a couple of years there working like a dog. I started to read U.S. Patent #6,314,408, and I sort of felt like I was punched in the gut. Let me start by saying, it hardly seems nonobvious, certainly by KSR standards. More importantly, the industry must be rife with prior art. But the part that really galls me is that I, very independently, designed and implemented chunks of the inventions claimed.

Let's take a look:

1. A method for controlling access to a product, the method comprising the steps of:

(a) receiving a request for a product;
(b) generating, substantially at the time the request is received, a license string that controls access to the product, the license string being formed using a cryptographic process to encode a date of creation of the license string, a number of users enabled by the license string, and a type associated with the license string; and
(c) transmitting the license string to a requestor of the product.

2. The method of claim 1 wherein step (a) comprises receiving the request via a distributed communications network.

3. The method of claim 1 wherein step (a) comprises receiving payment information from the requestor.

4. The method of claim 3 further comprising the step of verifying the received payment information.

Wow.

Here's how we sold licenses at Instinctive. I know this very well, because I developed everything but the actual Windows executable that took in a license quantity and spit out a license string. I also did nearly all of the work in 1997.

To start the process, we took an order, either through the web (through a series of interfaces I developed to our customer management system) or through the Visual Basic application front-end to our customer management system. The customer management system stored all of the information about the order in a MS SQL Server database, and then kicked off a stored procedure to process and fulfill a new order.

When the order was processed, the stored procedure would check to see if it was a credit card order. If it was, it called another stored procedure I wrote. That stored procedure used external procedures to instantiate a CyberCash COM object, submit a request to CyberCash, and process the results. If it wasn't a credit card order, it checked to see if the salesperson had authority to process a purchase order, and routed or acted accordingly.

Once appropriate payment details were complete, the stored procedure looped over a table contained each license string it was to create. It repeatedly called an external stored procedure that executed a shell command, in this case, Perl scripts to call the single Windows executable I was handed to generate license strings. It took the output from the executable, returned them via the external procedure, and updated the customer's record in the customer management system.

After the user's record was updated, it kicked off an email notification, whereby it took each license string and called an external procedure calling another Perl script that built up an email and sent it to the customer.

In other words, components I designed at Instinctive dealt with 1(a), 1(c), 2, 3, and 4. Do you know how many of the "inventors" on the patent were involved in the design and development of that system? Quick guess... 0?