Invalidity dossier
US 6574612
License management system
Current assignee: International Business Machines Corp
Added 9/23/2026, 7:51:57 PM
Active provider: DeepSeek · deepseek-flash
Patent summary
Title, assignee, inventors, filing/issue dates, abstract, and a plain-language overview of the claims.
Patent Overview: US 6,574,612 B1 — "License Management System"
Bibliographic data (as supplied): US Patent 6,574,612 B1; Application No. US09/342,555; filed 1999-06-29; priority date 1999-02-19; granted/publication date 2003-06-03. Inventors: Paolo Baratti and Paolo Squartini. Original and current assignee: International Business Machines Corporation. Status listed as "Expired – Lifetime," with anticipated expiration 2019-06-29. Classification: G06F21/105 ("Arrangements for software license management or administration").
Purpose: The invention addresses availability in license management systems. A license management system lets a user install a software program on N nodes but acquire only n licenses, so at most n copies run simultaneously; when all licenses are allocated, further requesters must wait. Because an outage of one or more license servers can block many users from running critical applications, the patent applies clustering (a set of independent, networked nodes acting as a "black box" providing services to end users) to license serving. The stated problem is that ordinary clustering redundancy cannot be applied straightforwardly: a redundant license server cannot simply take over another failing server's licenses, because it must ensure the total number of concurrently served licenses never exceeds the licensed total.
Plain-language scope: The license management system permits concurrent use of a maximum number n of copies of a software program across client workstations, each requiring authorization from one of a plurality of S license servers. The system requires that at least the integer majority of the license servers be active at any time. Disclosed embodiments describe servers each holding a license database, servers acting as active or backup (e.g., three servers, twenty licenses, two active plus one standby), and flexibility to add or delete servers. The excerpt also describes a malicious scenario in which a user copies a database, increases the server count, and splits the LAN into non-communicating sub-LANs (text truncated mid-sentence), which the invention seeks to thwart.
Not established by this excerpt: The full text of the claims, the complete specification, the outcome of the malicious split-LAN example, and any prior-art references are not fully provided. No litigation, ownership-transfer, validity, or prior-art analysis is offered here. Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6574612/en
Generated 10/1/2026, 9:41:45 PM
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Litigation summary
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PTAB challenges
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Assignment history
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Prior art
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Obviousness
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Extensions
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Derivative works
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