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."

Comments

Hard to believe

[sardonic2]

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.

Re:Hard to believe

[MillionthMonkey]

Scary thought, looks like the patent office needs to take a closer look at all these tech patents they are giving out these days.

Gee, you think?

I have a feeling that somebody in the patent office has got the idea in their head that handing these out is helping the "economic recovery". It's like the cargo cults that Richard Feynman talked about, that arose in the South Pacific after the end of WWII. The planes during the war came with all this wonderful cargo, and then suddenly they disappeared. The people on the islands didn't understand why. So they made fake imitation runways with fires lit along the sides, along with a wooden hut that a man can sit in, with two wooden sticks for headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas. He's the air traffic controller. And they wait for the airplanes to land. But the planes don't land.

They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. They're handing out stupid patents like mad, with no attention paid to anything resembling common sense at all. Just like during the bubble when nobody had a lick of sense. But the bubble is gone. The planes don't land. Handing out patents like mad isn't going to help.

Re:Another example of overstepping logic

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not interested in protecting what is covered by the patent, they're interested in making money. Sue the big players like Register.com, GoDaddy, eNom, BulkRegister, Tucows, etc. Who cares if people without money are infringing?

We live in interesting times...

[philovivero]

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.

Re:This might be a good thing.

[renehollan]

The whole internet was developed by American taxpayers dollars - the TCP/IP/UDP etc protocols, the everywhere used BSD stack and many more things.

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.).

Re:Does anybody actually know how to read?

[arkanes]

The "specific method" is both obvious and non-inventive. The claims section more or less reads exactly as I would sketch out a DNS batch query lookup. Interestingly, though, the claims also specifically refrence "a data processing system comprising: a plurality of DNS servers", implying that you're only in violation if you operate your own DNS servers and run the script against them.

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).

What a mess.

[Xentax]

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

New moderation?

[M.C. Hampster]

With everyone going out and patenting EVERYTHING, I'm going to take out a patent to patent the patent getting process.

Perhaps we could get a new moderation category: -1: Joke made everytime topic comes up.

Re:This might be a good thing.

[chiller2]

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.

Re:Does anybody actually know how to read?

[sunbane]

So instead of HTML, just give your output in xml and you are not in violation.

Re:Another example of overstepping logic

[jc42]

Not only that, but we'll have to modify the nslookup and host commands so they no longer tell you that a FQDN wasn't found, since that would be contributory infringement.

Also, all those browsers that have done URL completion for years will have to stop doing it, because it's also a (retroactive) violation of this patent.

So you'll have to specify whitehouse.gov or whitehouse.org; your browser won't be permitted to guess whether you want politics or porn.