Red Hat Claims Patent On SOAP Over CGI 191
WMGarrison writes "US Patent 7453593 claims command-line processing by a web server of SOAP requests, resulting in XML responses, from and to a remote client. The HTTP Common Gateway Interface (CGI) operates precisely as described in Claim 1. If you POST a SOAP document and return an XHTML response or a SOAP document, this infringes Claim 2, since both XHTML and SOAP are XML languages. This patent thus claims to own the processing of SOAP documents by CGI programs."
Thanks for the spam link (Score:5, Informative)
All of the various "free patents" sites are pure spam. The USPTO, like many other patent offices around the world, lets you view patents online for free - including free from ads.
In this particular case, you can read the patent here [uspto.gov], straight from the horse's mouth.
I should patent (Score:3, Informative)
A circular load bearing device where a bent-wood rim is suspended around a hub with wooden segments of equal length. This is useful as a method of facilitating the motion of wagons, chariots and the like. Optionally a metal (bronze or iron) rim can be placed around the wooden rim adding greater durability at the expense of weight.
Re:In Re Bilski (Score:2, Informative)
Bilski doesn't apply here, as the In Re Bilski ruling only applies to Process claims. The claims in question are directed to a system.
Re:Patent Troll (Score:2, Informative)
You are aware they aren't patenting things to prevent others from using those concepts or to change a fee to use the process. Instead they are doing it as a defensive measure against the likes of SCOs, M$ and greedy lawyers. They aren't patent trolls, they are protecting themselves and the Linux.
You don't need a patent for that just prior art in the wild
Probably not so broad as to encompass CGI (Score:1, Informative)
The claims of a patent aren't completely isolated from the specification of a patent. While multiple cases warn against reading limitations from the specification into the claims, the terms in the claims often only take on meaning in light of what the specification teaches.
Take a look at figure 1 to get a sense of what Red Hat's inventor claims to have created: a command-line interpreter that can take something like "cat members | http://ws.example.com/ldap-lookup [example.com] -name | xml://phone > member-phones" and produce meaningful results. That is, making the Unix command line a tool that seamlessly integrates services that are available remotely.
Does this help in interpreting the terms in the claim: "A system comprising: a command-line interpreter ("CLI") to obtain a text string describing a data processing pipeline ... process-launching logic to launch a plurality of child processes ... and remote service interaction logic to accept delimited data strings from a first of the plurality of child processes on a standard input" (simplified).
Well...CGI does not really have a command-line interpreter. You can run a CGI script from the command line, but Apache doesn't need to go through sh when it communicates with a CGI script. If you are running a CGI script from the command line, you're running it locally (even if you have remotely logged into another machine, you are still running it locally on that other machine). Thus, running the CGI script from the command line does not involve remote service interaction logic.
CGI is a poor example to use of something that might anticipate this patent. Perhaps a stronger argument could be made that the claimed invention was obvious in light of combining a command-line interpreter with wget or rsh, but given how long command-line interpreters have required additional programs to access remote services, an argument could be made that integrating the functionality directly into the command-line interpreters is, in fact, non-obvious.
Re:Defensive patents (Score:2, Informative)
Oh how adorable!
Is your mommie a lawyer? You should ask her to read their patent promise to you one night before bed.
In particular, she could explain to you the difference between "patent litigation" and a patent re-examination. They are not the same thing (yes, I'm ignoring ex parte vs. inter partes).
The phrase you refer to means that the license for a third party to use the patents is terminated if that third party attempts to sue the holder over any other software patent.
Ps. it's "renege".
bric_soap (Score:2, Informative)
I've been using such a command called bric_soap in Bricolage [bricolage.cc] (Perl-based CMS) for the last six years at least.
Introduced in 2002: ViewVC [bricolage.cc]
An example (see the API docs [bricolage.cc], navigate to bin -> bric_soap ...): "Republish all published stories. This is useful when a template change needs to be reflected across a site. The sort -k2 -t_ -n is a crude way to make sure that newer stories overwrite older ones."
bric_soap story list_ids --search publish_status=1 | sort -k2 -t_ -n | bric_soap workflow publish -
Their patent policy is worth reading... (Score:4, Informative)
Patent 101.... (Score:3, Informative)
A patent is not infringed upon unless all claims within the patent are infringed upon. The slashdot submission does not take into account the other claims in the patent.
Of course, that doesn't really matter, because there are numerous prior art implementations of a CLI integrating to SOAP for something like this. For example, IBM WebSphere Portal has an xmlaccess command line utility that does exactly this.
Re:Patent 101.... (Score:2, Informative)
A patent is not infringed upon unless all claims within the patent are infringed upon.
You are wrong. A single patent in the US may have multiple independent claims. Inside the patent there are also dependent claims that refine either an independent claim or a dependent claim. Duplicating any of them is an infringement. Period. Think of it as a venn diagram.