Tom Farley --- privateline@delphi.com 1. General Info on private line: ISSN No. 1077-3487 A. private line is a hardcopy magazine about the telephone system. It's published six times a year by Tom Farley. It's been reviewed well in Factsheet5 and Nuts and Volts. Copyright (c) 1994 It runs 28 pages. It's done in black and white. B. Subscriptions: $24 a year for subscriber's in the U.S. $31 to Canada or Mexico. $44 overseas. Mailed first class or equivalent. (1) Make checks or money orders payable in US funds to private line. (2) Back issues are five dollars apiece.Specify Issue Number 4 if you want this issue. (3) A sample is four dollars. (4) The mailing list is not available to anyone but me. C. Mailing address: 5150 Fair Oaks Blvd. #101-348, Carmichael, CA 95608 D. e-mail address: privateline@delphi.com E. Phone numbers: (916) 978-0810 FAX F. Submissions: Go for it! Anything semi-technical is strongly encouraged. I don't run any personality pieces. I pay with subscriptions. G. You may post this file to any site or BBS as long as the whole file is kept intact. H. This 'patent issue' is well illustrated. It may be hard to follow as a text file but I intend to keep posting the text of each issue no matter how they come out. PRIVATE LINE NUMBER 4: JANUARY/FEBRUARY I. About The Front Cover II. Editorial Page III. Updates and Corrections IV. Hacking Patents -- A How To Guide A. Introduction B. Sidebar -- Quick Start Guide C. Patent Numbering and Classification D. Sidebar -- A Tale of Two Classes E. The Patent Document F. Patent Bibliography Example G. Tools and Resources H. Background and Summary Example I. List of Patent and Trademark Deposit Libraries J. Class 379 -- Telephonic Communications V. Who's Bugging You?: An Interview With Chris Hall VI. Federal Toll Fraud Law: Section 1029 ----------------------------- I. About The Front Cover 1. "3,142,522 COIN TELEPHONE HOUSING: Norris R. Hall and Richard K. Thompson, Jr., Indianapolis, Ind., assignors to Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated, N.Y., a corporation of New York Filed Dec. 18, 1962, Ser. No. 245,567 10 Claims. (Cl. 312--199)" The front cover depicts the housing of the 1A1, the first single slot payphone used in the Bell System. Note the large circular hole for the rotary dial. The patent for the housing itself was granted in May, 1964. The 1A1 was introduced in 1965 after seven years of development by Bell Labs and Western Electric. I found this patent by making a list of developer's names from articles in the Bell Laboratories Record. I then looked for those names in many year's worth of the Index of Patents. See my article on patent searching for information on the different kinds of indexes. 2. Want to know more about early payphones? Check out Stokes, R.R., "A Single-Slot Coin Telephone" Bell Laboratories Record (January, 1966) 20 and W. Pfred "A New Coin Telephone" Bell Laboratories Record (December, 1959) 464. Please note that the Record is not the same publication as the Bell System Technical Journal. The B.S.T.J. is widely available. It is dense, intimidating and hard to read. It is also indispensable. The Record, on the other hand, is user friendly. It is well illustrated and easy to read. It was published until 1984. Look for it. You'll find valuable background information on how the Bell System set up phone service for about 75% of America's population. ----------------------------------------------- II. An Introduction 3. Welcome to the fourth issue of private line. This is the first national edition! private line is an open, questioning forum about all things telephonic. It's written with the beginner in mind, but I hope that everyone can find something interesting here. Readers are encouraged to submit articles and to forward corrections. I pay with subscriptions. private line focuses on the technology of the information age, rather than on the personalities. How did all this get started? The magazine 2600 rekindled an interest in telephones that had laid dormant with me for over fifteen years. I read about blue boxing as a teenager but I didn't know anyone who did it. Many San Francisco Bay Area people were involved in hacking but there was no way to get in touch them. Everyone quoted in The San Francisco Chronicle used a fake name. I experimented a little with coin first phones but that was by myself. I tried reading telephony books but they were very difficult to understand. I didn't apply myself and I eventually gave up. That was a mistake. I graduated from high school, went to work and got involved in other hobbies and pursuits. And then last year I saw a copy of 2600 for the first time. 4. What a revelation. I sent for back issues and got a look at what I had been missing. People were still experimenting with the telephone system and still having fun doing so. What's more, the technology of communications was rushing ahead at an incredible speed, producing more fascinating equipment that I could begin to understand. But I still didn't know the basics. I hit several libraries and was discouraged to find that most of the books were as difficult as before. I resolved, however, to apply myself this time. I started taking notes since I learn better when I write things out. The first two issues of private line were a result of that loose collection of notes. 5. I could tell you more about the past but I want to write about the future. I look forward to sharing what I learn about telephones and telecommunications. I look forward to seeing anything you have to contribute. Maybe we can learn together. Thank you! Tom Farley (Sherman) KD6NSP ---------------------------- III. Updates and Corrections 6. I discussed California Penal Code Section 502.7 in the first issue. 502.7 covers toll fraud. I had a question about subsection (3). It says that avoiding lawful charges "[b]y use of a code, prearranged scheme, or other similar stratagem or device whereby the person, in effect, sends or receives information" is illegal. I wasn't sure what this was about. I asked if anyone could give me an example of what the legislature meant. 7. Tom (8STRANO_T@spcvxa.spc.edu) clears this up nicely. He writes, "Perhaps they mean trying to avoid collect call charges. For example, let's say I'm in Jersey City, and I want my mom, who lives in Bayonne, to pick me up to take me home. I don't want to put $.20 in the phone to make a call, and I don't want her to get the collect call charge. So, we prearrange this idea: I'll call her collect, and when the operator asks who the call is from, I give a fake name that we have prearranged to mean that she should pick me up to drive me home. Then my mom simply refuses the call, saying 'I don't know who that person is,' she hangs up, then goes to Jersey City to get me. Neither my mom or I have been charged for the call, but the information was passed successfully. In real life, though, I'm not THAT cheap... I CAN spare 20 cents... I guess some people see small change in terms of cheap transistors and resistors. But anyway, that what the law seems to mean." 8. I think Tom provided a good example. It takes on even more importance with new services such as 1-800-COLLECT. You can leave code names that stand for different things. Biff Barker, for example, to stand for "Call me back." Interestingly, the technology is so good these days that phrases like "Call me back" or "My number is . . ." may result in an operator intercept if you try to record them. True, this process is a hassle and it takes a long time to do. But it is possible. I suppose they would charge you with that code section if you had, say, a thousand '800' calls from your residence that were never completed. And your long distance company does keep track of those calls . . . 9. In issue 3 I talked about a program that came from Thipdar's Custom Software. I said it hunted for modem tones. Not so. It's actually a normal scanning program. It notes modem tones but does not look for them exclusively. --------------------------------- IV. Hacking Patents: A How-To Guide (Patent Searching & Telephones) by Tom Farley A. Introduction B. -- Sidebar -- Quick Start Guide C. Patent Classification D. -- Sidebar -- A Tale of Two Classes E. The Patent Document Itself F. The Search Process G. Tools and Resources H. Example of a Background and Summary of the Invention H. Example of a Patent Bibliography I. List of Patent and Deposit Libraries J. Class 379 -- Telephonic Communications A. Introduction 10. Patent searching is a great way to find out about telephones. It's low cost and fascinating. Got a question about AT&T's True Voice? Tired of the hype? Read the patent instead. Interested in pay phones? You'll find more information in patents than from any other free, public source. Need telecom clip art that's copyright free? Patents provide. Too good to be true? Well, you must not expect too much. You will not find, for example, operating procedures like those in a manual. But you will find some detailed information that a manual may be based on. Using patents with other information will get you closer to the goal. You may find that patent searching becomes a compelling, hypnotic hobby. 11. A patent is a written document with illustrations. Hardcopy versions of the entire patent are only available at the Patent and Trademark Office in Washington, D.C. Patent and Trademark Depository Libraries or PTDL's have microfilm copies of those originals. See page 18 for a list. In addition, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office gopher has the texts of 1994 patents online. See the Quick Start Guide if you want to start looking at patents right now. For the rest of us, let's start the search process by looking at patent classification. . . (go to paragraph A. Sidebar -- Quick Start Guide The Conventional Approach 12. Go to a Patent and Trademark Deposit Libary listed on page 18. Pull out the microfilm roll for any of the following patents. Thread roll on viewer. Read the patent. a) 3,142,522 Payphone housing b) 3,86,3036 Ground circuit c) 4,310,726 Early 911 network d) 4,924,496 COCOT info e) 5,311,582 Current COCOT The Internet 13. Do you have net access? Preferably an .edu account? Full text of all 1994 patents were on line as of 12/01/94. The Patent and Trademark office has a gopher. It pulls files from a database at town.hall.org. True keyword searches of more than 90,000 documents are possible. You can enter phrases such as toll fraud, COCOT or paystation and get a list of relevant patents. You can then select which patent you wish to view. Check out paragraph B. Patent Numbering and Classification 14. Each patent gets a permanent number once it's approved. These go in chronological order. You can get an idea, then, of an invention's age without looking up its patent. The payphone housing on the front cover, for example, has patent number 3,142,522. That dates back to mid-1964. The patent number for the 1994 COCOT we discuss later is 5,311,582. Tables exist that match dates to numbers. Two thousand patents on average get approved weekly. More than 5,000,000 patents have been assigned already. Organizing these patents is a major task. 15. All patents are first put into one of several hundred broad classes. Some examples are Class 119 for Animal Husbandry, Class 102 for Ammunition and Explosives and Class 380 for Cryptography. Most telephony related stuff is put into Class 379: Telephonic Communications. All classes, including 379, are broken down into subclasses. 16. Take a look at class 379 at the end of this file. See how everything is arranged? Every conceivable piece of telephone equipment gets a subclass number along with its class number. Payphone patents start at subclass 143. So, the COCOT we'll talk about later has the reference number 379143. That patent deals with other subclasses as well. But 143 is the one that that patent impacts most. 17. The chief problem with subclasses is that the headings are non- intuitive. That's because the descriptions use 'patenteese' and not telecom lingo. The Patent and Trademark Office defines these subclasses but you have to go to a PTDL to look up the vague descriptions. Who would describe, for example, a toll fraud prevention device with language like this: "189. Fraud or improper use mitigating or indication (e.g., 'blue box', 'black box'). Huh? This category is actually quite broad. It includes equipment that deals with fraudulent tones of all kinds. It may be a payphone that's designed to deal with red boxing, or it may involve central office equipment that's designed to detect blasts of 2600 Hz. Don't rule out a subclass because the wording of a heading doesn't match your search exactly. 18. Other classes contain other telephone related products. Not everything is in 379. Telephone booths are in Class 52. Coin collectors for pay stations go in Class 194. You can look up these related things with The Index to the U.S. Patent Classification System. I list it under resources at the end of this article. It is essential for anyone dealing with patents. Let's now look at the patent document itself. . . (go to paragraph 20) C. Sidebar -- A Tale of Two Classes 19. Classifying telephone equipment used to be simpler. Telephony inventions were in another class altogether: Class 179: Telephony. It had nice, friendly headings like 'Systems', 'Telephones', 'Switches', and 'Testing Devices.' It contained 190 subclasses. The breakup of the Bell System opened telecom to an avalanche of new products, inventors and companies. This diversity of inventions caused the old class to collapse after only a year. In 1986, Class 379 was introduced to replace old 179. The amount of subclasses doubled. Simple headings were replaced by cryptic ones. Parenthetical statements were devised to explain the headings. Most don't work. You may get a better understanding of the new class by photocopying the last revision of 179. At the very least, you will need a copy of it to do a telephony search before December, 1985. D. The Patent Document 20. Many, many parts make up a patent. I'll cover the main ones. The first part is the title. Something complex like, "An Integrated COCOT and Regulated Paystation Telephone System." Or, "Automatic Telephone Answering System Using a Single-Tone Signal For Various Operations." Only rarely will you see a simple title like "Modem With Call Waiting." The first title is about a payphone that can be a COCOT or a telco payphone. Two in one. What's more, the phone can be dialed up and set into either mode with just a few commands. It takes some reading to make sense out of these titles. Your best bet may be to always look up a patent that has the right class and subclass number, despite what the title says. 21. The second interesting part of the patent is its bibliography. It gives you clue after clue about the invention as well as the entire field that it belongs in. You'll quickly learn the companies, people, documents and patents that are important. Use any large libary with business directories to get names, addresses and phone numbers. 22. The third important part of the patent is the abstract. It is a legalistic summary of the invention. The abstract is the most widely accessible part of the patent. That's because each new patent has its abstract printed in the Official Gazette, a weekly publication of the Patent and Trademark Office. Hundreds of libraries carry it as well as some companies. You can look up the abstract in the Gazette, even if you don't have access to a Patent and Trademark Deposit Libary. An entry in the Gazette also gives you the patent's number, its title and an illustration. Correctly interpreting abstracts saves you time. Certain abstracts grab your attention. In those cases, you know immediately that a patent is worth the time and effort to get to a Patent and Trademark Deposit Libary to look it up. Many abstracts, though, leave you wondering. Relating an abstract to its patent is a matter of practice through more reading. 23. The background of the invention is the most engaging part of the patent for general readers. It gives you a technological summary of the subject involved. For example, a patent about telephone handsets will contain a background that summarizes handset history and operation. I've reprinted the background of the COCOT patent on page 10 to give you a good idea of what they contain. This short summary is a great introduction to pay phone operation 24. The summary of the invention tells you how the invention works in fairly non-technical terms. It also provides good details about how the invention relates to other things in its field. The COCOT we discuss, for example, has a specific procedure to deal with credit cards. The summary gives details of calling card principles in order to relate the invention's claims to everyday practice. I reprint the COCOT summary on page 10 as well. 25. The body of the text provides the nitty gritty details. It is the longest part of the document. The text is always linked to illustrations. It is next to impossible to figure out a patent without seeing the whole thing. Here's one quotation that shows you the problem. Each number represents a diagram or a part of diagram: "Assuming the voice message system is collect/return, control relay 93 is provided in co-pending application Ser. No. 07/740,576 incorporated by reference above. The coin refund inhibit relay 73, coupled in series between the collect/return relay 93 and the coin relay 100, includes a pair of control windings 75, 76. One end of each of windings 75, 76 is coupled in common to receive a coil energizing voltage. The other ends of control windings 75, 76 are respectively coupled to receive "relay off" and "relay on" signals from the microprocessor 45, to delineate the position of switch 74 in series with the coin relay 100. As shown in FIG. 5, switch 74 is closed so as to complete the circuit between the collect/return control relay 93 and coin relay 100 allowing for a firing of the coin relay 100. If the microprocessor 45, however, issues a relay off signal, then the switch 74 opens (as noted by the phantom line) to turn off the coin relay 100. . ." You can tell that the body provides enough information to do some serious reverse engineering. I hope this article persuades you to visit a Patent and Trademark Deposit Libary so that you can look at what is available. Or at least to look up a few abstracts at your local libary. Let's now turn to the search process itself. F. The Search Process 26. Go to the nearest patent and trademark deposit libary if you are impatient and you know what patent you want to look at. These are the only places that have the complete, illustrated patent on microfilm. Not sure what to look for? Then you have to choose a subclass to investigate. Let's say you've picked subclass 189, the one about detecting toll fraud. What then? Well, again, the easiest answer is to tell you to get to a Patent and Trademark Deposit Libary. It has the most tools and you'll waste the least time. But I can make a case for not going to the PTDL first, even if you have one near you. 27. PTDL's can be intense, intimidating and somewhat crowded. Why not start with a lower key setting first? I'd recommend a beginner go to a state college or university that carries the Official Gazette. You'll usually find it in the Government Documents section. Such a libary will have some supporting materials as well. You can get familiar with patent publications and the microfilm reader there, rather than at a PTDL. Let's go through an example of using a libary that has just the Gazette. 28. Okay, you're now in the Patent section at your libary. Find the Manual of Classification. It's in two loose leaf binders. This is your key to the whole classification system. It's a compilation of all the different patent classes. You'll find Class 379 in there along with everything else. No pictures but very compelling. All of technology is categorized in one work. A libary may keep only the current Manual in the Government Document section; older ones may be kept out in the open stacks. 29. Let's say you're sticking with subclass 189 in telephonic communications. You need to make a list of the recent patents in that field. How? Look for the Index of Patents Issued From The United States Patent and Trademark Office. A long title for some small books. You'll find them near the Manual. The Index of Patents is put out every year in two parts. Stronger libraries have more back issues. 30. The first part of the Index of Patents lists patent holders by name. Organizations such as Bell Laboratories, Protel and Motorola are listed by name as well. Next to the patent holder's name is the class and subclass number of their invention. But no description of the invention is given. A more useful tool is the second part. It lists patents by Class and subclass. What it calls subjects. A list of all patents issued in the last ten years may take only a few minutes to look up if you have a quiet subclass. Classes like 149, "Post pay coin collection", however, may not have had a single patent issued as far back as you can search. Don't be discouraged. Developers may be producing equipment in your field but they may not have decided to go through the patent process. Remember, too, that Class 379 changed in 1985. 31. Well, now you have a list of patent numbers in your subclass. The next step is to look up their abstracts in the Official Gazette. You'll want to see if it's worth it to look up the entire patent at a PTDL. Smaller libraries take the Gazette on microfiche or microfilm. Microfiche is easier to use since you don't have to thread a machine. The disadvantage is that the image produced on the reader is smaller than that with microfilm. A small paper envelope holds each issue of the Gazette on fiche. A single issue may consist of 10 or 15 individual pieces of film. The issues themselves are arranged by date and patent numbers in a file cabinet with shallow, wide trays. Class 379 is usually 2/3d's of the way back in the packet. It's a laborious process to look up several abstracts but it's okay to look up a few. And you'll get motivated to get to the PTDL where the hardcopy volumes are. 32. Microfilm is a different story. Looking up several abstracts is very time consuming. Threading the film onto the microfilm reader takes time, patience and practice. Don't be afraid to ask for help. I've had librarians admit that they have problems threading the machines. I do most of my film reading on the microfilm readers that double as copiers. These machines tend to be in good repair since they make money. It is really silly to thread up a conventional reader, only to have to thread another machine to make a copy when you see what you want. Looking up abstracts this way gives you an insight into the patent process and gives you practice for the PTDL. Patents are on 16mm film but it threads the same as the larger film of the Gazette. Let's now look at what the Patent and Trademark Deposit Libary has to offer. 33. A few PTDL's have every patent ever issued on microfilm. Most don't. Much of what we are interested in, though, goes back no more than 30 years. Every PTDL should have at least that many patents on file. Start viewing the patents on your list in case you want to get going. You'll see shelf after shelf with thousands of small boxes of microfilm. Most PTDL's allow you to grab the roll yourself and start threading. You'll also see the Gazette in hardcopy. You'll appreciate immediately how much faster it is to search those instead of looking at film versions of the Gazette. Speaking of speed, every PTDL has a CD ROM machine that's great for doing recent patent research. It's called CASSIS. 34. CASSIS stands for Cla