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."
That is exactly what's happening. I've got a friend who has worked for many years in the patent office, and he tells me that the senior management appointed by the Bush administration has made it known that you can be disciplined and potentially fired for rejecting too many patents (presumably because patents are "good for business."
The person I know told me a tale about having to go to the mat to reject a particularly bad application, but he still got serious grief for it, and was on the road to being disciplined until his supervisor stepped in and supported the rejection on the merits. This was a ridiculously bad application, BTW, but if his supervisor hadn't decided to stick his own neck out, that would have likely been one more bad patent on the books...
Is it any wonder that so many bad patents are showing up?
About two years ago I got into the "game" of buying up expired domain names, simply for fun. THere was an expired name I wanted and I got hooked on watching http://www.namewinner.com/ and other such ebay-style domain name bidding services. Over the last two years the big stink seems to be Verisign was pouty because namewinner and other such services (enom, snapnames, etc.) were making some big $$$ of of expired names. AFAIK, it was something like a grand to get into enoms "expired domain name club" just to be able to bid on names. I think playgirl.com went for something like 25k on namewinner.com.
Another thing verisign was pissed off about was that these clubs knew when domain names would be released, so you'd have a few servers *pounding* verisign for a certain amount of time, trying to get the domain names. Also, the various individual attempts by doing a who query every 5-10 minutes to see if it expired couldn't have helped either.
On one hand, I don't blame them, for the good of everyone. On the other hand, Verisign owns snapnames (or is affiliated with), and signed some of the bigger domain name contracts (ultsearch.com transferred his names over if i recall correctly) for what I'm sure amounted to special privilieges when registering domain names.
I stay away from Verisign. Them being a "trust provider" is a joke. I don't trust them enough to do my whois lookups on their site just because I'm not 100% certain they're not monitoring all the domain names that people search for (and that they won't sell that list to the highest bidder).
jay