GregNews on AOL/ICQ IM patents

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

Greg seems to believe that AOL's instant messaging patents will be
difficult to bust:

  The US Patent Office has awarded four Israelis two patents for instant
  messaging.  The four were the founders of ICQ, which was bought by AOL
  in 1998.  The patents remain valid until 2017-18.  One of the patent is
  6,449,344 and was filed in 1997.  I took a quick look at the patents,
  and there is nothing strange about the claims, so this will probably
  come down to prior art (and I am available :-).  A comment from one of
  readers:

      Greg,

      I worked on a chat program years ago (1988) that did automatic
      discovery of participants on a network.  My program is different
      from the patents in that it didn't have a server, but there are
      going to be plenty of examples with servers.  Multiplayer games
      come to mind.

  Since I can't see AOL going after small fry, it's likely potential targets
  will be Microsoft, Yahoo and IBM.  If the art is there, one of these
  companies will find it.  On the other hand, AOL spent a ton of money 
  buying these patents a few years ago, and must have done a pretty good
  job of due diligence prior art searching.  Fun, fun, fun.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-12789608   
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
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