[Ecommerce] Email filter patent puts industry on edge

[James Love]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/36666.html

Email filter patent puts industry on edge
By Lucy Sherriff
Posted: 30/03/2004 at 19:52 GMT
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A US patent granted to Postini, the email security company, could grant
it legal ownership of a large chunk of the methodology underlying
anti-spam and message filtering technology on the market.

The implications for the mail filtering business are huge - if the
patent can withstand a legal challenge.

The patent effectively says that any system which intercepts mail,
filtering viruses and spam messages from the inbox and then sends what's
left to the intended recipient is using Postini's intellectual property
(IP). This could apply to a large section of the anti-spam and
anti-virus market.

Postini's patent describes using a modified DNS address to redirect
email to an email pre-processing service which can "detect and detain
unwanted messages such as spam, viruses or other junk email messages".
It covers various actions that could be performed on an incoming
message, based on a user's settings. These include deletion, forwarding,
forwarding of partial messages and mailing to several addresses. It also
covers broadcasting the message to one or more wireless devices.

Postini=92s founder, Scott Petry, agrees that the remit of the patent is
broad, but said that it had to be to cover the work the company had
done. He told The Register that the company had filed the patent based
on work it considered novel, and that all of it was developed in house.
=93All our technology is home grown,=94 he said. =93And we protect our IP w=
hen
we can. If nothing else, this patent will be a good defensive bargaining
chip in the event that we get sued for infringing someone else=92s IP.=94

This is an interesting illustration of the cut-throat world of patenting
in the US software business, certainly, but not everyone is convinced
the work was novel, even back in 1999 when the patent was filed.

Alyn Hockey, product director at Clearswift, a rival email filtering
firm, argues that there is nothing new in the patent, and that if
Postini was to seek license fees from Clearswift, the matter would be
decided in court: =93We have so much prior art on this, it is incredible.
There are things in here that are very familiar from other patents I=92ve
seen in this area.=94

Steve Frank, a partner in the patent and intellectual property group of
the Boston law firm Testa Hurwitz & Thibeault, told IDG that the patent
has many tell-tale signs of weakness: its research section in which the
appellants establish originality only cites other patents. According to
Frank, this often indicates poor background research, making it more
likely that a legal challenge would be successful.

Petry argues that Postini=92s job was not to check the validity of its
claim, or to find prior art, but to make the claim in the first place.
=93It may turn out that there are people in the industry whose methods
infringe this patent=94, he said, but argued that the company did not file
the patent to find a loophole to exploit, but to protect the work they
had done.

Postini has no immediate plans to try to enforce the patent, but Petry
would not speculate about any such activity in the future.
--
James Love, Director, Consumer Project on Technology
http://www.cptech.org, mailto:james.love@cptech.org
tel. +1.202.387.8030, mobile +1.202.361.3040