ActiveBuddy's Patent Win Riles IM Bot Developers. Oho. So ActiveBuddy, commercial Instant Messaging 'bot agency, now have Patent 6,430,602 on (among other things): running a bot on an IM network to talk to really people; loadbalancing the processing; using the IM channel to form a simple kind of authentication to the www; having a presentation layer to use the same back-end to talk to many IM systems.
I find it difficult to dispute the patent because within the rules of the system that granted the patent, everything is fine. But a system that grants a patent that consists of well-understood components and patterns previously practiced and obvious, a system that does that has to be wrong. I've built IM bots. I admire ActiveBuddy's services, and I admire their scripting language. It's clever. But it's not revolutionary. It's been done before. Hell, I've done a lot of it before, and I'm just another not-very-good Perl hacker. All they've done is facade it with agency-speak and move it into the commerical arena.
And here's what fucking riles me. Their USP, the thing they and they alone have, the thing they really should be protected -- it's got fuck all to do with the technology. It's about their sales team, their PR machine, their position in the sector. They're doing very well. If I had the funding, I could start a company tomorrow to do what they do and quite possibly do it better. But I wouldn't beat them because they're established, and you don't need a patent to protect that. You just need to carry on working hard. Looks like they want to sit back.
ActiveBuddy's Patent Win Riles IM Bot Developers. Oho. So ActiveBuddy, commercial Instant Messaging 'bot agency, now have Patent 6,430,602 on (among other things): running a bot on an IM network to talk to really people; loadbalancing the processing; using the IM channel to form a simple kind of authentication to the www; having a presentation layer to use the same back-end to talk to many IM systems.
I find it difficult to dispute the patent because within the rules of the system that granted the patent, everything is fine. But a system that grants a patent that consists of well-understood components and patterns previously practiced and obvious, a system that does that has to be wrong. I've built IM bots. I admire ActiveBuddy's services, and I admire their scripting language. It's clever. But it's not revolutionary. It's been done before. Hell, I've done a lot of it before, and I'm just another not-very-good Perl hacker. All they've done is facade it with agency-speak and move it into the commerical arena.
And here's what fucking riles me. Their USP, the thing they and they alone have, the thing they really should be protected -- it's got fuck all to do with the technology. It's about their sales team, their PR machine, their position in the sector. They're doing very well. If I had the funding, I could start a company tomorrow to do what they do and quite possibly do it better. But I wouldn't beat them because they're established, and you don't need a patent to protect that. You just need to carry on working hard. Looks like they want to sit back.