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My gullibility alarm is ringing loud.. Slideshow: * Nobody uses this! * It's patented! * It's just like HTML! * I'm not going to tell you which bits are pa

My gullibility alarm is ringing loud.. Slideshow: * Nobody uses this! * It's patented! * It's just like HTML! * I'm not going to tell you which bits are patented! Can't tell if (literal) troll or comedy genius Edit: so going by the age of the domain and you having actually filed the patent, I'm assuming it's not just some elaborate joke. And having only skimmed the patent text, I'm failing to see the innovating mechanism or idea you're claiming. The language itself sounds like HTML mail or any of the plethora proprietary markup languages from the 90s (e.g. MS Exchange). Can you tell us why you think yours is different? This otherwise seems like a textbook case of ridiculous patent.

austincheney 13y ago
Did you bother to even open the spec or were you too busy making assumptions? Here is a link in case the you missed the one on the site: http://mailmarkup.org/mail-documentation.xsd http://mailmarkup.org/mail-documentation.xsd I am going to make the baseless assumption that your intentions were well placed, and happily await a contribution of prior art. EDIT: My lawyers have deliberately asked that I not transcribe the claims in the patent application, but its really not hard to figure out from looking first at what the language does differently from the spec and then glossing over the claims in the patent application. I put this stuff online myself years ago, because I have nothing to hide and want nothing more than to ensure the software is valid and novel. Please feel free to prove otherwise, because either way you are contributing to a software project.
- hosay123 13y ago
  Yes I saw it, it's some crazy XML schema for an e-mail message that nobody has ever used. That's like me patenting some bus ticket design I got carried away making on a rainy afternoon. So that's why I'm asking, what makes your approach worth protecting? It looks like just another XML schema from this angle
  - austincheney 13y ago
    Anybody can protect an invention. The average 8K-18K in average lawyers fees is trivial. Building a team and acquiring the necessary funding to launch a business investment based upon an invention is a far greater challenge. Not everybody is at a stage where quitting their job to work on such things full time to build a product complete enough to present to angle investors is a viable option. If it were so simple then every software developer would be a successful start up founder.
    - hosay123 13y ago
      That's what I find so perplexing about this patent in particular – email is only useful due to interoperability, so patenting the underlying representation of an email is a non-starter for general purpose use. I really hope you don't have general purpose use in mind, I'm guessing you're hoping it's more for something along the lines of EDI applications between governments, or something else. I just don't get what it's for. At risk of going blue in the face, where is the value in this patent that I'm not seeing?

austincheney 13y ago

Did you bother to even open the spec or were you too busy making assumptions? Here is a link in case the you missed the one on the site: http://mailmarkup.org/mail-documentation.xsd http://mailmarkup.org/mail-documentation.xsd I am going to make the baseless assumption that your intentions were well placed, and happily await a contribution of prior art. EDIT: My lawyers have deliberately asked that I not transcribe the claims in the patent application, but its really not hard to figure out from looking first at what the language does differently from the spec and then glossing over the claims in the patent application. I put this stuff online myself years ago, because I have nothing to hide and want nothing more than to ensure the software is valid and novel. Please feel free to prove otherwise, because either way you are contributing to a software project.

hosay123 13y ago
Yes I saw it, it's some crazy XML schema for an e-mail message that nobody has ever used. That's like me patenting some bus ticket design I got carried away making on a rainy afternoon. So that's why I'm asking, what makes your approach worth protecting? It looks like just another XML schema from this angle
- austincheney 13y ago
  Anybody can protect an invention. The average 8K-18K in average lawyers fees is trivial. Building a team and acquiring the necessary funding to launch a business investment based upon an invention is a far greater challenge. Not everybody is at a stage where quitting their job to work on such things full time to build a product complete enough to present to angle investors is a viable option. If it were so simple then every software developer would be a successful start up founder.
  - hosay123 13y ago
    That's what I find so perplexing about this patent in particular – email is only useful due to interoperability, so patenting the underlying representation of an email is a non-starter for general purpose use. I really hope you don't have general purpose use in mind, I'm guessing you're hoping it's more for something along the lines of EDI applications between governments, or something else. I just don't get what it's for. At risk of going blue in the face, where is the value in this patent that I'm not seeing?