Verio Trademarking 'Whois'?

thaJungle was the first to pass along the buzz. "Looks like owning all the bandwidth in America isn't good enough for Verio; they apparently want to own WHOIS as well. In fact, they trademarked it..." Well, not exactly. I talked to Verio PR and legal. They own "whois.net," and when they filed to trademark that, they filed for the standalone name too as a matter of course. Since there's just a bit of prior use, the registration was rejected; aware now of its history, they're dropping the application. Update: 02/05 by J : Brian McWilliams has a more informative and skeptical story at internetnews.com.

Comments

No penalty for attempting to scam the USPO

[kevin805]

One of the problems with the patent office is that there is no penalty for trying to trademark or patent something that isn't eligible. There should at least be some really hefty fine, like 10% of the revenues you would have gained from having a US government monopoly on someone else's idea.

--Kevin

Registering Domain Names

[jd]

This should require a licence. Qualifications to obtain a licence would include:

• A positive IQ of more than 1 digit
• The ability to read
• Understanding the acronym FAQ
• Understanding the acronym RFC
• Understanding why said acronyms are relevent
• Knowing at least one place to get them
• A working knowledge of how the domain name system works

OR

• Being able to recite The Parrot Sketch, and
• Being able to recite The Penguin Sketch

Fsck'ing Whois Leeches

[pb]

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Thank you for fact-checking

[HMV]

This bit of news could have quickly turned into the latest knee-jerk "they patented WHAT?!?!?" story. Instead, with a bit of checking, you were able to hopefully circumvent at least the most ridiculous part of the submission and let readers know what the real issue of the story is. Hope to see a good bit more of that.

True story

[ucblockhead]

Back in the dinosaur ages, oh about 1988 or thereabouts, there was a company that created a really cool compression tool which created files with an "arc" extension. (This was on those icky old DOS systems, Unix guys.) Everybody loved this tool. Everybody used it for everything.

Then came along another company. This second company released a knockoff that could also decompress "*.arc" files as a shareware program. The first company went ballistic. They sued. They got a judge to agree that they, and only they, had legal rights to the ".arc" extension.

So what happened? Well, the second company was forced to modify their program to not decompress ".arc" files. Instead, it demanded that the file be named ".zip".

The first company went out of business. The users were so pissed off by the intimidation tactics they employeed that almost overnight, it became "uncool" to use the ".arc" extension and sales plummetted.

And that, boys and girls, is why we call archives "zip files".

So remember, the law can control who gets to call their products certain things, but it can't control who you buy from.