RE: [VANILLA-LIST:3019] technical question

["Chawla, Jay" <jchawla@cooley.com>]

Dave, you know a lot about intellectual property!  

Trent, the newspaper digest analogy, while both apt and *striking*, is
'nonanalogous art'.  Furthermore, it can't be used as a reference because it
does not 'enable' the practitioner to practice what is claimed in the
patent.  (The opposing counsel will say ''sure, you can do it with a
newspaper, but doing it with communications networks is another thing
entirely.'')  

Also, a person who authors a patent is his own lexicographer and grammarian.
So, as Dave writes: 

	They are specifically laying claims to high level aggregate 
	messages sent over a high level protocol at the application 
	level.  

Yes, the patent disclosure says

	A key concept in the present invention is the aggregation of 
	multiple messages in a message queues into a single ULP
	receive message to a host that maintains multiple
	payload items in the payload.

So the definition to be used is that 'aggregation' is done at the ULP level,
not the transport level.  We have an ability to argue in court that
'aggregation' is a term of art and could mean concatenation on the transport
level, but the opposing attorneys have a strong argument against us since
aggregation is defined in the patent's disclosure.

What I really need to do right now is send to the court a list of all the
'prior art' I will be using against the claim.  Is there anything you
haven't told me about that could prove that Netrek is doing what's in the
claim prior to 1995?  You gave me the location of the source code (
ftp://ftp.netrek.org/pub/netrek/ ).  Is there any other source code, design
documents, or instructions that I don't know about?

As Dave says, I'm not a TCP/IP guru.  Can I ask you guys a novice question?
Please correct any mistakes I make and help me out here with my transport
layer ramblings:

TCP is a connection oriented protocol -- mail servers use it to send mail
and IRC servers use it to send messages.  TCP sockets are point to point and
one-way between two transport-level entities.  You write things to a socket
whenever you want, and what you're writing goes into a buffer.  So if I send
3 IP packets to the socket in a short enough time, they'll all be buffered.
Periodically, the buffer is emptied.  So the three IP packets will be
'aggregated' into one 'packet'.  But this makes no sense to me!  Are these 3
IP packets encapsulated in a single IP packet and sent through the socket?
Do routers along the path from source to destination see them as a single
packet?

UDP is a connectionless protocol -- real time applications use it to send
keystrokes (for telnet sessions), audio information (you can lose some of it
and it's OK, but you need the low overhead of UDP to minimize delay and make
it isochronous), and gaming information like periodic updates from Netrek or
Xpilot servers.  If you want aggregation with UDP, you need to do it
explicitly yourself, so Netrek does it explicitly, i.e. in its own source
code.  

Thanks for all of your help!

Jay

p.s. Trent, I will definitely look up the message digest stuff you
mentioned.  We will make the assertion in court that 'aggregation' can apply
to the transport level, but I don't know whether it will fly for a 'literal'
reading.  It does, however, strengthen our 'obviousness' argument.

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Dave Ahn [SMTP:ahn@vec.wfubmc.edu]
> Sent:	Wednesday, March 22, 2000 2:51 PM
> To:	vanilla-list@us.netrek.org
> Cc:	Chawla, Jay
> Subject:	Re: [VANILLA-LIST:3019] technical question
> 
> On Wed, Mar 22, 2000 at 11:35:36AM -0800, Trent Piepho wrote:
> > 
> > What do you mean by, "I DON'T SEE IT"?  When small pieces of data are
> > transmitted by TCP, they are usually aggregated into larger packets, to
> make
> > more efficient use of the network.
> 
> This attorney is probably not a TCP/IP guru.  Besides, the body of the
> patent
> indicates that the claims do not emcompass the lowest protocol layer.
> They
> are specifically laying claims to high level aggregate messages sent over
> a high level protocol at the application level.  Although the claims are
> the most important, the body of the patent is used to substantiate the
> breadth of the claims.  If someone takes your patented idea and builds
> something else that is sufficiently original and beyond the scope of your
> idea, the second person can patent the derived idea as long as they
> reference
> yours.  For this reason, the NAGLE algorithm (and probably hundreds of
> patents on networking algorithms) do not apply here.  And neither do most
> of the other good examples you gave about postal mail, newspapers and
> other print journals.
> 
> -- 
> Dave Ahn <ahn@vec.wfubmc.edu>        |  "When you were born, you cried and
> the
>                                      |  world rejoiced.  Try to live your
> life
> Virtual Endoscopy Center             |  so that when you die, you will
> rejoice
> Wake Forest Univ. School of Medicine |  and the world will cry."  -1/2
> jj^2