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URLs Patented, Domain Registrars Sued
theodp writes "A newly formed company is suing Network Solutions and Register.com for infringing on its e-mail and domain naming patent, which covers assigning each member of a group a URL of the form 'name.subdomain.domain' and an e-mail address of the form 'name@subdomain.domain.'"
According to CNET, these were the people responsible for launching the .md TLD in the USA to represent "medical doctor" when in reality, .md belongs to the Republic of Moldova. These people are definitely not scared of ruining Internet conventions when they stand in the way of a quick buck.
.com, .net, .org, .edu, .us etc., just .name because what the patent covers is selling a 3rd-level domain for web use that equates to a username on the 2nd-level domain's mailserver. (If the registrant of john.doe.name gets the john@doe.name e-mail address... and an unrelated jane.doe.name gets jane@doe.name, and the registrar of .name is keeping doe.name, smith.name, jones.name, etc. for this kind of reselling... that's what the patent covers.)
However, the one thing we can relax on is that this doesn't affect
So, this isn't exactly a sky-is-falling situation, but it's shysters trying to make a quick buck off of patent law....
The patent's more specific than that... their patent is a TLD operator selling people not true domains, but instead 3rd level web domains paired with matching 2nd level e-mail services. It's a specific product that they developed for .md that seems to have been duplicated by .name... the good news is that this only effects those who hold .name addresses, .com, .net, .org, .us, etc. can still go to sleep tonight...
Actually.. to file a patent you don't have to *invent* anything. You just have to show "the use of an idea for a process, machine, item of manufacture, or composition of matter". The mere writing it down is considered the "invention".
On a side note.. the idea is also supposed to be "novel, useful, AND, nonobvious". This topic fails on at least two of the cases. It's neither novel, nor nonobvious. This is U.S. Patent Law. If you don't like it, talk to your congressman.
--sea
Credit of quotes: class notes (Computers and the Law.. yeah who the hell needs to look stuff up?)
From the patent documentation:
This is the precice format for e-mail addresses in DNS zone file, for the SOA record. See RFC 1034, section 3.3. Date of prior art, 1987.
MailBank (Now NetIdentity) has been doing exactly this since 1996. I don't see these cretins getting very far.
The thing is that ISPs have been selling these kind of things to customers for over 10 years now, so prior art is going to be hard to determine.
The first ISP I worked for offered customers:
www.customer.ccnet.com
and customer@ccnet.com
from about 1995 or so.
It's a silly patent.
Please send all UCE to scally@devolution.com so I can f
might there be some prior art?
when setting up a zone file with bind you specify an email address of the admin in charge of the domain in the SOA record.
an email address of joeuser@somedomain.com would be written as joeuser.somedomain.com. admittedly its not a direct prior art, but i can definately see someone making a jump from this to what the patent is about.
just my 2 cents
Ophidian
I'm sure some university way back used the same naming convention.
This is beyond belief. I don't know to be upset with these idiots that filed the suite or the US patent office which uses the same naming convention (most government agencies do). I've heard they have Ph. D. working at the patent office but come on...who signs off on their Ph. Ds?
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
Indeed. In the article they're described as "Javaher and Weyer were part of the original group that launched the .md domain in the United States in 1998. With the .md domain, physicians could register URLs ending in .md, such as www.janesmith.md."
No mention that ".md" is just another of those small countries (Moldova in this case) who've signed away rights to some scumbags who think that they can pretend the letters stand for something else. Similar ones: .la (Laos, pretending to be Los Angeles/Latin America (!)/Lousiana), .tv (Tuvalu, pretending to be television). Hopefully all these idiots get burnt when the national governments cancel their domains without compensation or unilaterally multiply the fees.