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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."
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?
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.
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).
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.
Perhaps we could get a new moderation category: -1: Joke made everytime topic comes up.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
So instead of HTML, just give your output in xml and you are not in violation.