Slashdot Mirror
Verisign Granted DNS Lookup Patent
mattgick writes "The Register has a story on how verisign was granted the DNS lookup patent (U.S. Patent No. 6,560,634). Scripts which check to see if a domainname has been taken would be in violation with this patent. A discussion on this subject is going on over here."
Now how are they gonna enforce that? Go after every single person hosting such scripts?
To me it looks like companies are going to stop offering services and just sue the shit of everyone for their IP. Scary thought, looks like the patent office needs to take a closer look at all these tech patents they are giving out these days.
It would seem that the corps are well on the way to pushing this society down a path of Doom Spiral. I don't think I exaggerate when I say every one of us is now guilty of some egregious crime against corporations, whether we wrote some patent-infringing code, looked under the hood of the copy-extortion schemes built into our gadgets, or wrote something bad about scientology.
So far as I can tell, we've essentially made being a free thinker illegal in the United States. I'm glad that the UK and Australia are following suit, so that we can have a nice global village under the control of Microsoft, Verisign, and maybe a little Union Carbide and Monsanto for your physical health.
How did things get this bad? Why aren't we meeting on a weekly basis to take action against this annoying destruction of the public domain?
Oh, look! Matrix Reloaded is out! Gotta go.
fifth sigma, inc.
So I don't have a problem when American companies get their IP rights secured by patents such that the invested taxpayers money will give some revenues
By that reasoning, all American taxpayers should reap the benefits of said patents.
Furthermore despite having to leave the U.S. and return to Canada when my H1B expired (and post-9/11/01, my Labour Cert. as premilinary step for a Green Card was in indefinite limbo), I was and am an American taxpayer, so I too should benefit. Come to think of it, there are a lot of other foreigners who are American taxpayers. (Of course, to soothe your pro-American stance, this isn't quite correct: despite paying American taxes, as a non-citizen I was not entitled to many of the benefits they pay for, i.e. state unemployment insurance, for one. The point about taxpayers in general vs. corporations is correct, though.).
You could've hired me.
And the really interesting bit - for country TLDs (.uk), it "display[s] a predetermined number of domains based on the gross domestic product of the associated countries". Wierd.
One last point - the WHOIS lookup at register.com actually doesn't meet this patent - the patent specifically says that the output is formatted into HTML, while WHOIS at register.com outputs an image (no doubt to prevent cut & pasting of the output).
This may sound like a flammable comment, but can anyone think of a *method* patent that you would deem actually worthy its patentability? Every modern method patent seems to be something that just doesn't pass the "innovative" component of the patent test (The "work" must be new, non-obvious, and innovative to be worthy of a patent, IIRC, though of course "innovative" in particular is a woefully vague term).
Conversely, a great many of these popularly "bad patents" -- e.g. one-click shopping, online auctioning/reverse auctioning, hyperlinking, and now multiple-simultaneous-DNS-lookups -- are process/method patents.
Maybe we should just scrap 'method' patents? How much of the problem would that solve? What sorts of innovation would a lack of method patents fail to protect? This is certainly (IMHO) a shining example of NON-innovation that has been awarded patent protection.
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
Perhaps we could get a new moderation category: -1: Joke made everytime topic comes up.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
So what? Whenever something like this happens, we bitch about it on Slashdot, nobody bothers to do anything about it, a couple of companies get sued, and then we hear nothing more about it because these patents are retarded and unenforceable. No need to worry.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
Oh well in that case...
;)
The world wide web was created at CERN by Tim Berners Lee, born in London England. As you also don't have a problem with American companies getting money back from their creation of 'the whole internet', then you also don't mind if Mr Berners Lee collects revenues from non-British companies?
I'd like to think you were joking. The granting of the Verisign multiple lookup patent is ridiculous.
--- Commission free trading & free stock up to $500 - use http://share.robinhood.com/kelvinp6
Patent lawyers often ask why software systems should be different than mechanical systems. Why should such software patents not be allowed? Why is software special?
Suppose that someone had obtained a patent on "drilling a hole in brass" 100 years ago. Perhaps not just "drilling a hole", but drilling a hole with a power assisted device of any sort; steam, oil, coal, horse... This is a mechanical analog of this software patent that was granted.
Obviously, the mechanical patent could have been pursued and granted, but it was not. If it had been, innovation in mechanical fabrication would have been destroyed. Progress would have been postponed for 20 years.
This is what is currently being done to software systems, and, unfortunately, mathematics itself. The question should not be "why is software different", but "why is the patent process different?"
So instead of HTML, just give your output in xml and you are not in violation.
I just don't get the idea of software patents. Sure, if I write some nifty little app that someone copies/steals and sells as their own, I can see a problem there. But I'm having a hard time saying that if I write that nifty app and patent it, then no one else can write an app like mine, regardless of whether they come up with the code by themselves.
I guess somebody should have patented 'a program for creating and modifying documents which can then be electronically saved, printed or emailed to other people' or maybe patent 'a game where the player runs around in a 3d world with a first person perspective shooting everything in sight'.
Maybe that's why it's 2003 and I still don't have my flying car.. someone patented it so the big companies like GM and Ford can't mass produce them and make them affordable.
Excellent retort. Our Constitution is one of the greatest documents written in the history of mankind. It's too bad fucktards like Ashcroft forget their job is to uphold and defend it, not rape it in a zealous fit of witch-hunting.
That's pretty much how I explained it to my wife when she moved to this country. At first she thought I was a bit to "religious" about the Constitution, but then she read it and understood why I love the Constitution.Go ahead and insult our politicians. Hell, we do. Burn our flag, it doesn't bother me one bit. Hate the influence our movies have on your culture (so stop watching them!), but don't be dis-ing the Constitution!
-- Will program for bandwidth
To me this patent is just plain stupid. If we are talking about a publicly available service, can any patent deprive any user of the right to use it in any way he/she pleases?
As I understand it US companies and citizens cannot access the DNS service in a specific order, timeframe and number of times and view the results the way they want to view it.
US Patent office is obviously helping digging the grave for US economy.
Furtunately I don't live i US.
I'm not bothering with any of your other arguments because it is obvious we won't agree. So I'll just respond to this one paragraph.
The availability of guns does not increase the likelihood of civil unrest. Just the opposite. During the "Rodney King" riots of Los Angeles (I was living there at the time, so this is first hand knowlege, not something I "heard about") rioters and looters (almost all unarmed, fyi) ran unchecked through much of South Central Los Angeles. One neighboorhood in the middle of the worse damage, however, remained completely untouched. That was because the shop owners armed themselves and patrolled their own neighborhood. Oddly enough, the police (when they finally did bother to show their cowardly asses) tried to get the shop owners to give up their weapons. Fortunately, the shopowners were smart enough to tell the police to piss off.
These shop owners had created an impromptu militia to protect themselves. But not, as you argue the 2nd Amendment is for, to fight the government. They banded together to defend themselves from thieves and treaspassers because the government had abandoned their responsibility. Shooting thieves and treaspassers is not something you can automatically do, as you presumed we can do. It is done as a last resort. Shooting a trespasser is justified if you have a reasonable belief that the person(s) is planning physical violence or property damage.
Now this point is extremely important. Some people will argue that protecting property is not as important as someone's life. The mistake is in believing the property's value is what is important. It's not. The situation is the same whether the property is valued at a million dollars or a single dollar. It is the person's right to live his life in security that is at stake. That is what is being protected.
You can not put a price on a person's life, but a thief has chosen to take his chances by conducting his activities outside the rules of civil society. Society, therefore, has no reason to extend any curtesy to such a person when he is in the act of violating its rules. We do give such a person a minimal amount of warning, however, because we are not barbarians. If the opportunity allows, we will warn the person that failure to cease their activities will result in the use of deadly force. This is what the shopowners did in South Central Los Angeles. I don't remember if they had to actually shoot anyone (I think they fired warning shots), but I have no doubt they would have shot dead anyone who failed to heed their warnings.
-- Will program for bandwidth