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Possible Prior Art for Kootol Patent, dated 2001

19 July, 2011
My unimplemented technology Miski may be important prior art with regard to the Kootol patent and claims made against various internet companies, including in particular Twitter.
by Philip Dorrell

Background: Kootol Patent

A company called Kootol has recently been in the news advertising their ownership of U.S. Patent Application No. 20100030734, which will very probably soon be issued.

Kootol has given notice to various companies that they are likely to be infringing on this patent when it is issued.

The most significant alleged future infringer appears to be Twitter, and some of the other companies involved are developers of Twitter clients.

Prior Art: Miski

In 2000, I developed an idea for an internet messaging system called Miski. An important proof of priority is this copy of my original web page as captured on Wayback in February 2001.

In considering the relevance of prior art to a specific infringement claim, there is a three-way relationship between three items:

  1. The patent
  2. The (possible) prior art
  3. The alleged infringing technology

Firstly the dates have to be in the right order, in this case:

In considering the three items, the important relationships are the degrees of overlap:

Furthermore, in as much as the patent claims may be difficult to interpret, the last of those three relationships may be better defined than the first two.

Comparison of Twitter and Miski

On the one hand Twitter is an implemented technology which millions of people use. On the other hand Miski is an unimplemented plan for a technology which exists only as a web page on a SourceForge project which has since been closed.

The only advantage that Miski has over Twitter is that it appeared earlier than Twitter. In the legal world of patents, date is everything.

There are significant similarities between Miski and Twitter, which I think are strong enough to make Miski an important item of prior art with regards to the Kootol patent.

In particular:

Signficant differences are:

Comparing Twitter and Miski to the Kootol Patent

The similarities between Twitter and Miski are relatively obvious. Whether or not either of these two systems is similar to any of the claims in the Kootol Patent is not so obvious, and I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Update (3 August 2011): I recently encountered this page on the Software Patents wiki which mentions three patents held by TechRadium for contacting people in an emergency. TechRadium sued Twitter for patent infringement as Twitter was being used for the purpose of contacting people in an emergency (I don't know what the outcome of that legal action was). The three patents appear to be refinements of the same invention; the earliest one was filed 28 April 2005.
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