ISRI SEMINAR SERIES

The PhD Program in Computation, Organizations, and Society Presents:

Your Books Might Cost A Little More Now:
The Role of the Computer Expert in Software Patent Litigation

Michael I. Shamos, Distinguished Career Professor, ISRI

Thursday, September 8, 2005, 12 pm, NSH 1507
Lunch will be provided


Abstract:

On August 10, 2005, Amazon.com agreed to pay $40 million, almost its
entire profit for last quarter, to Soverain Software LLC to settle a
patent infringement case involving the shopping cart model of
eCommerce and the use of session identifiers in URLs.  Soverain's
patents were widely criticized in the software industry when they were
granted in 1998-1999 as being invalid for obviousness.

The speaker was Soverain's expert witness in the case.  In the talk we
will discuss the role of the computer science expert in patent suits.
We will cover the patent litigation process, claim interpretation,
patent validity and infringement and see what an expert as "one
skilled in the art" has to contribute to each of these topics.  This
necessarily involves a look at how patents are issued, what
constitutes prior art, how the relevance of prior art is established
and why so many patent litigants bring suit in Tyler, Texas, as
Soverain did.

To prepare for the talk, consider the following claim of one of the
litigated patents (Levergood 5,708,780):

1. A method of processing service requests from a client to a server
   system through a network, said method comprising the steps of: 

[a] forwarding a service request from the client to the server system,
wherein communications between the client and server system are
according to hypertext transfer protocol; 

[b] returning a session identifier from the server system to the
client; and 

[c] appending as part of a path name in a uniform resource locator the
session identifier to the request and to subsequent service requests
from the client to the server system within a session of requests.

Amazon contended, but was unable to prove (as it was obliged to do),
that this claim was not novel at the time the method was invented in
May 1994.  To see how tricky claim interpretation can be, try to come
up with unambiguous definitions of "session," "session identifier,"
and "appending."


Bio:

Michael I. Shamos is Distinguished Career Professor in the Institute
for Software Research International and has been associated with CMU
for 30 years.  He is a member of the Pennsylvania Bar and the Bar of
the United States Patent and Trademark Office and frequently serves as
an expert witness in computer-related cases, particularly eCommerce
patent and electronic voting litigation.