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."
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.
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).
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.
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
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.