Whether or not doing this process through an automated system is unique is…well, up to the patent examiner to determine. But the general concept is not unique and has at least been described in a number of spy novels.

The beautiful thing about math is that it does work the same in the computer as it does on paper, excluding power failures and other such nonsense. Physics on the other hand has a lot more variability to it which goes into things like engines. I agree with the precept that computer science does not equal software engineering, but people aren’t patenting contingency planning, which is the art in software engineering. We have these great things in math called proofs. Most software “engineers” don’t know very much about the mathematical foundations they work with and their code and algorithms are very poor. So I suppose they might not get a working program together that doesn’t have a bunch of bugs in it, but it’s not like the majority of these patents contain any real technical information to alleviate this problem either.

I read all the claims for this patent, or rather skimmed since a lot of it was duplicate text; you can really tell the parts where they include buzz phrases to ensure acceptance. I find claim 20 to be rather odd since all textual material is copyrighted, if the author so wished to fight for it. I guess they mean registered copyrighted works?

Web service infrastructure, relational databases, sophisticated search and replace algorithms, these are nothing new. The fact that nobody has put together this particular combination yet doesn’t say anything about it except that there has been no demand. I didn’t read a single technical sentence in that entire patent that would help me implement this thing if I didn’t know how already, and I could, not just try. To me it just reads like an idea patent on a particular combination of different already existing technologies. If they were the first people to devise an algorithm that could sophisticated search and replace words in a text file or stream then I would be more impressed.

I will say this though, for all the attacks I have made against you I do agree that the future lies in a marriage of open source with proprietary components. I think the future is in modularized programs that use open source libraries to do the work merged with professional design, testing, support, and end user content.

I have a legal question, though: to what extent are motivations important in determining whether someone infringes on the patent? Claim 25, for example, only seems to cover locating unauthorized copies of the data. But what if you used all of the methods in the patent to locate authorized copies of the data? The only difference is the reason you want to practice the methods. Would you still be infringing the patent?