Re: TrendMicro goes Douchebag

[Nick FitzGerald <nick () virus-l demon co uk>]

Larry Seltzer wrote:

> Trend Micro approached me maybe a couple of years ago, after they signed
> up Symantec and McAfee to licenses, to say that they would be enforcing
> the patent. They've already gone after other vendors
> (http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/ITC-Rules-Against-Fortinet-in-Patent-
> Dispute/)

Has Trend ever tried to enforce this patent against (originally UK 
company?) Integralis (or various of the other companies that have 
subsequently owned that IP)??

As I recall, Integralis was marketing MIMEsweeper "some reasonable 
amount of time before" Trend filed for the 600 patent and MIMEsweeper 
would appear to be an obvious case of prior art, being the first (??) 
at least first successful?) commercial implementation of Email gateway 
content scanning, _including_ the ability to pass decoded Email content 
out to various (arbitrary?) third-party/client-supplied processes 
(including known-virus-scanning).  (Again, AFAIR, MIMEsweeper was 
originally mainly aimed at 

Of course, Integralis may have decided it was easier to pay some 
(possibly nominal) licensing fee to Trend rather than battle it out 
through the courts, trying to overturn the grossly obvious Trend patent 
claims with their own prior-art evidence.

Or Trend may have simply decided to not take the risk and has left 
Integralis (etc, etc) alone.

Are any of the (former) Integralis folk still around reading these 
lists?

Are any of the journos trying to get answers to these questions?

USPTO 5,623,600:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-
bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=5,623,600.PN.&OS=PN/5,623,600&R
S=PN/5,623,600


was originally filed 26 September 1995 and MIMEsweeper was definitely 
being publicly talked about in terms of using it as an Email gateway 
virus scanning service earler than that, as this archived Usenet post 
from 3 July 1995 clearly shows:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.security.misc/browse_thread/thread/7
2827a6c05f2853d/d74f6ab12ce7251e?lnk=st&q=#d74f6ab12ce7251e


Regards,

Nick FitzGerald

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