Multilingual DNS Patent Roadblock For IETF

Xanni writes "Intellectual property claims have blindsided the Internet Engineering Task Force and could derail the group's efforts to develop a common scheme for supporting foreign-language domain names across the Internet. NWFusion is carrying the story."

Comments

God Bless America!

[The Dodger]

Fortunately, the United States of America, as well as allowing it's citizens to patent stuff they shouldn't, also allows it's citizens to carry weapons.

Now, I would be the last to suggest that someone should find out who the majority shareholder in this 'Walid' company is, go up to him whilst he's walking down a dark alleyway, put a gun to his head and explain to him that he should really drop the whole patenting-DNS thing.

That would be illegal. Tut tut...

Having said that, of course, one could question the validity of laws which stifle the development of technologies such as the Internet and encryption, and, instead, line the pockets of corporations and lawyers.

As Cicero said "Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto" - The Good of the People is the Highest Law.

But, of course, you Yanks went and elected a President who cares more about the US economy than combatting global warming. God forbid that American companies' profits should be threatened by refusing to allow them to continue to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

George "Dubya" Bush. You know why he pronounces it "Dubya"? Because he can't say "doubleubleiminable"....

Y'know, our motto used to be "Information wants to be free!"

We might have to change it to say "Innovation and Ideas want to be free!"

D.
..is for Don't fight the Chaos!

Er...

[Greyfox]

Isn't attending standard group meetings and patenting the ideas presented at those meetings a patented business model owned by RAMBUS?

What a load of crap

[Decado]

They patented a method to convert text from an arbitrary charset, to UNICODE, and then convert this to plain text as U+XXXX where XXXX is the hev version of the unicode charset. Thats a basic first year programming assignment and definately not an innovation. The first part is obviously crap as converting from one charset to another is not a new idea (Hell java does it for nearly every charset in existance for years). As for the rest does outputing a unicode character in hex count as an innovation? Is there anyone here who works with unicode and hasn't done the same thing as part of debugging an application?

Whats next, patent a method for converting from an arbitrary number set to decimal and then outputting it in hex? The stupidity of the USPTO boggles the mind.

Re:Another solution

[SVDave]

So, why don't we let them have their bullshit patent and design DNS 2.0, which uses unicode throughout. Just throw it on a different port, and supercede RFC 1035. Since the whole patent hinges on this particular RFC, a new system that's not backwards compatible with the old one would not violate the patent.

Good idea! I'm glad I thought of it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to make a quick trip to the Patent Office...

(and while I'm there, maybe I'll trademark "DNS 2.0")

Prior art

[Dancin_Santa]

If the IETF has been working on this solution for so many months, they must have some evidence to show for it. Couldn't they just cite their own research as prior art and have Walid's patent tossed out?

And on another note, who exactly would pay the licensing fees that Walid is asking for?

Dancin Santa

Stupid patent laws

[nate1138]

This is a perfect example of why you should not be allowed to patent software. Here's a group trying to create a more universal internet, and they get knocked back by a software patent. This is a prime example of patenting software and stifling innovation. I wonder how much sooner the internationalization would be complete if not for this roadblock.