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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."
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.
If you want to complain, go here:
http://65.205.249.60
Oh My God! You slashdotted ICANN! You bastards!
Oh, wait, they aren't that cool anyways
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
So what exactly is the difference between having a human/monkey/pigeon do something as opposed to writing a script that does it?
When both accomplish the same thing in the end.
Now to start train my legion of patent violating monkeys and pigeons. Accepting applications now.
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.
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.
Misleading topic heading.
Yes, Slashdot is/has decended to the ranks of the NY Post, no need for accuracy when you can just Troll. Its a shame because the patent is one of those blindingly stupid and obvious things. But I bet there's no prior art because this is the sort of thing a registrara needs to do, and prior to 1998, there weren't any that handled > 1 TLD besides Verisign.
I wonder if this falls under the "abuse of a state granted monopoly"
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
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.
USPTO for 6,560,634
I don't have the time, but could someone answer the above?
Perhaps we could get a new moderation category: -1: Joke made everytime topic comes up.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
That's an awfully large-sized brush you're using to paint us with, Anonymous Eurocoward.
You just made almost a dozen categorical, unconstructive criticisms of the populace of an entire country. Interesting how, if I were to write something similar about "Arabs" or "Chinese people," I'd be accused of intolerance of even racism. But it remains ever-popular and completely OK to say things like "All Americans are nuts." Incredible. This is the attitude that many Americans (myself included) find so off-putting -- that somehow intolerance and prejudice is bad, except when it's directed towards Americans.
I'm not saying the USA doesn't have problems, I'm just saying that your snobbish, prejudiced attitude is not going to help us solve them.
And your comment "and even the colo(u)rful language they've brutally raped"... I can't even begin to understand what you mean by this idiotic statement. English has always been an "open source" language -- evolving, changing, adapting and improving with its times and settings. There is no central committee regulating the English language, unlike, say, French.
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
You certainly won't find any prior art for it at the patent office.
Any spoon would be too big.
So instead of HTML, just give your output in xml and you are not in violation.
US Patent 6,368,227: Method of Swinging on a Swing I truly don't know how they didn't get busted for prior art on this, or obvousness. According to patent lawyers I know, the guy got away with it because it's an exceptionally well-written patent.
and US Patent 3,216,423: APPARATUS FOR FACILITATING THE BIRTH OF A CHILD BY CENTRIGUGAL FORCE, which I think is actually very non-obvious, and I doubt there's much prior art on it. But I'm not surprised it was never productized.
blah blah blah