Stopping Spam Patented (Again)
from the ah,-legal-battles dept
Earlier this year, we noted that Postini had received a patent for the incredibly obvious concept of anti-spam filtering. Well, it looks like they may be in for some competition, because Network Associates/McAfee has now been awarded a patent for an idea that (sarcasm alert) no one could have possibly come up with prior to December 2002 when they applied for it: using a combination of methods such as "filters, paragraph hashing, and Bayes rules" to stop spam. What this really means is that there are now going to be anti-spam patent battles which will slow down the process of stopping spam, and do no one any good, other than a few lawyers who will get rich. Why can't these companies just compete in the marketplace? Still, it would be great if, at some point, AT&T finally made it clear why they patented spamming itself last year.
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No Subject Given by NOBODY on Jun 2nd, 2004 @ 12:00pm
Remarkably, this patent sounds like it voilates the streamcast patent for searching hash tables. Wouldn't it be ironic to bust a bad patent with another bad patent?
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Hormel by Anonymous Coward on Jun 2nd, 2004 @ 1:55pm
Shouldn't Hormel be suing EVERYONE for using their brand of " meat " in a negative light ?
Let the lawyer gouging begin !
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Re: Hormel by NOBODY on Jun 2nd, 2004 @ 2:29pm
No, they okayed that.
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SpamAssassin by McGroarty on Jun 2nd, 2004 @ 2:33pm
Sounds like they've patented SpamAssassin.
So far as I know, SA and others were doing this well before them, and they're *still* doing it better.
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Re: SpamAssassin by Mike on Jun 2nd, 2004 @ 8:02pm
Well... I think that's the thing. McAfee *bought* SpamAssassin, which is why they probably filed this patent claim.
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