[OT-Slashdot] McAfee Granted Far-Reaching Spam-Control Patent

[Stephen Smoogen]

On Wed, 2004-06-02 at 06:39, Chris Kloiber wrote:
> Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 02, @08:01AM
> from the what-the-system-isn't-meant-for dept.
> Titusdot Groan writes "Infoworld is reporting that Network Associates,
> makers of McAfee, have been granted a broad anti-spam patent. The patent
> covers "compound filters, paragraph hashing, and Bayes rules" and was
> filed in December of 2002. The patent appears to affect Spam Assassin,
> Spam Bayes and many other anti-spam products and services. As an aside
> Paul Graham's "A Plan for Spam" was published August 2002."
> 
> http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/04/06/01/2315239.shtml?tid=111&tid=126&tid=155&tid=99
> 
> <rant>
> I almost (but not quite) wish that all linux distributions would yank
> all the spam control projects out aka the multimeda stuff, and we allow
> spam to go unchecked for a while. Then when the *net melts down we can
> tell the idiotic governments of the world that this is all the fault of
> software patents. So ban software patents now.
> </rant>
> 

No.. we need to have a patent-a-thon, where we get 200 geeks at a
conference to think up ideas to patent that are very broad and then have
them looked at by some lawyers who are on our side. We then file them in
short order and when awarded put that the only way the items can be used
is if the implementation is GPL'd or they buy a private license from
FSF. (or put your favorite license/organization there.) I figure that we
can hack the system quite well enough that the organizations decide that
making changes should be ok. Then you start parading out the worst
patents in ways that really affect people until they decide that they
need to clean/remove it. 

> -- 
> Chris Kloiber <ckloiber at ckloiber.com>
-- 
Stephen John Smoogen		smoogen at lanl.gov
Los Alamos National Lab  CCN-5 Sched 5/40  PH: 4-0645
Ta-03 SM-1498 MailStop B255 DP 10S  Los Alamos, NM 87545
-- You should consider any operational computer to be a security problem --