Today’s Nikkei Sangyo front page has an article, “Digital Arts Improves Browsing Restrictions; Patents in Japan and 22 Other Countries.” According to the article, it seemed to imply that using both whitelists and blacklists for web filtering could infringe this patent. If true, that would be serious. It is far too broad. Unless someone challenges it as invalid, it could become a troublesome patent.
So I obtained the patent. I have only been reading it for about 1 minute, but Claim 1 appears to me to make the essential point of the patent filtering on a computer equipped with 4 databases: a blacklist-site database, whitelist-site database, blacklist-keyword database, and whitelist-keyword database. If so, would use of 3 or fewer not infringe?
If that also infringed, prior art would be easy to find: router and proxy allow/deny lists. They had existed long before the patent application of March 31, 2000.
So wait for a later report!
Update
The report has arrived. Apparently it does not infringe after all. That makes sense. If so, was it really an article worthy of prominent front-page coverage?
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