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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.'"
Anybody can sue anyone about anything. It's only newsworthy if there's a slightest shred of the plaintiff winning.
Am I the only one that thinks the patent system is out of control. I thought patents were designed to further scientific knowledge for the betterment of mankind or something like that. Now there are cases where research is being hindered because you're not allowed to use prior patented research. Patents helped a lot of scientists in the early days make a living but now it is just a way to strengthen megacorps. It disgusts me when a big company is sold not because of anything produced by it or because of it's quality of it's employees but because of the size of it's patent library. Changes need to be made.
I would like to salute the ashes of american flags, and all the fallen leaves filling up shopping bags.
I know this is going to sound wrong but I really hope Network Solutions and Register.com win this and then countersue their asses.
Even though NS and R.com are both companies who screw people royally, this group of f*ckwits is even worse. I will take the lesser of the 2 evils thanks.
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
IMHO the prior art is in the proposal to create the .name TLD since the use of second and third level domain names for owners' names was implicit in its creation
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
...and see for yourself how techno-jargon and a tremendous effort at obfuscation through over-complexity passed this patent through the filter. CowboyNeal's pithy sentence describes the near totality of the patent yet the patent itself spews reams of steps, trivia, and jargon to hide as well as possible the actual application of the patent. What a bunch of bullshit!
I think there ought to be penalties for the use of these nuisance patents. A judge then could not only strike down the patent's validity (which will obviously happen here), but could also impose a heavy fine to deter this kind of litigious crap from happening.
Hacking articles at http://www.geocities.com/chroo
The patent application was filed in 1999. Reading through the text of the patent, it describes something completely different: an email-to-fax/telephone/snail mail gateway and not the idea of having blah@foo.bar
My guess is this is someone trying to prove how idiotic the USPTO is.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Wish I had a mod point for you. I knew this existed, although I thought it was older than this. You are absolutely correct, this RFC is much more descriptive of the process than the actual patent is, and describes in better detail the exact same contents of the patent, 22 YEARS before the patent was applied for.
It explicitly covers email addresses for subdomains, and even how some older software (pre-87) will break with it. (Thus the Request For Comment, to set a standard).
There needs to be some kind of punitive damage for people who attempt to patent things that are not only covered by prior art, but are in the Public Domain, for over 20 years before the application.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Do you have a couple hundred bucks to spend on patenting every idea you've ever come up with? If so, you're either one of the richest people in the world, or earth-shatteringly stupid, so I'll assume the answer is no and let my point stand.
Nevermind the fact that a great majority of people don't feel that something should be patentable, much like people who think their programs should be open source. What's the easiest way to allow an idea to be unpatentable? Think of it, do it, don't patent it. Apparently that doesn't work so well.
Finally, do you honestly believe that any of the ISPs who started offering this service have ever read this patent before, even if it was after the patent was filed? No? They came up with it on their own? Well in that case, even though these guys may officially own the rights, it is pretty clear that the patent is OBVIOUS. And therefore VOID.
Let me put it to you this way. I have noticed they're sending a lot of landers and such to Mars right now. Well, perhaps I should patent sending a rover to Pluto. NASA has never done that, no prior art, they have not patented it so clearly it's not obvious and they've never thought of it... Sure...
Random and weird software I've written.
Back in the days, before the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals was created by corporations and Reagan, Patent Examiners used to be able to reject patent claims.
Sometimes, when someone files claims as blindingly obvious as these, the Examiners would be permitted to reject the claims as an "obvious design choice". This was something appropriate to do when the choice made by the "inventor" did not add any new functionality to the thing sought to be patented, but was merely shuffling around design features that did nothing in and of themselves.
That is exactly what is happening here with these claims. The naming scheme here is no more functional than is a scheme of naming your own children.
Hey, here is a patent claim for ya that I just made up!
1. A method comprising: a set of parents naming their first child Thomas, their second child Zebedee, and their third child Squeamish.
Since a patent examiner looking at such a claim could not find a "motivation" in the "prior art" for one to name their children those precise names in that exact order, one could easily get a patent.
Time to name the Enemy: the Court of Appeals, Federal Circuit. They are the malfeasors who have tied the hands of the US Patent Examiners so that they can no longer apply the laws of obviousness, but instead have to jump through absurd hoops looking for "motivation" to do that which take zero mental effort, like.... naming URLs (or kids, for that matter).
...when someone obtains a ridiculous patent, gets some goofy Federal judge (and there are plenty of those) to uphold it in such a way to completely devastate an industry or even adversly affect the whole American economy.
;-)
It's like the Iraq WMD situation... except this time they're waiting for someone to drop the Big One before doing something about it.
Of course if I'm the one with the patent, then everything will be OK.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I completely fail to see how one can patent the use of domain names in this fashion. That strikes me like patenting the concept that a "record" corresponds to a physical object, citing an employee table as an example.
Obviously this patent was never examined by anyone with enough neurons to spark a thought.
Maybe it's time companies affected by these nonsense "patents" start suing the patent office to recover costs and damages for defending against such garbage.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
What's the difference between a geek with a perfectly normal rectuma and a geek with a disatrously distended rectum?
/. collectively, when was the last time those of you who live in democracies voted? Do you vote eagerly? Do you wake up (in the US) on Primary Tuesdays and cast a vote so you won't be stuck with party candidates you hate?
:)
One had a lawyer to defend him after he was busted by Constitution-shredding RIAA private investigators after forgetting to load PeerGuardian while he downloaded the Complete Led Zeppelin off Suprnova, and the other one didn't.
As to the argument that "if the laws weren't so messed up, then the RIAA goons couldn't come after me" I'd ask
And to keep this on point, when you look at the broken patent system and you see that the USPTO is backlogged with frivolous patent applications that take advantage of examiners' overburden, underpay, and (perhaps) ignorance of the technology, and when you see that this broken patent system allows the issuing of patents like this one that allows some over-egoed plaintiffs lawyer to see his big payoff day by filing a case that would be frivolous if it were based in equity rather than a letter patent issued by the US Government, do you write your representative or senator? Do you write the president? Do you organize a get out the vote campaign to support candidates who will fix what's broken?
Corporations control America today not because the American system is broken, but because people bitch and bitch and bitch but aren't willing to do the hard work necessary to make sure the system does what it's supposed to. You wouldn't fill your car's gas tank up with water, right? And you wouldn't use a 10-year-old rubber band in place of a bike chain? You wouldn't build your beach house out of sand, would you?
You forget that abusive plaintiff's lawyers (the ones you're really griping about) only survive because the system is currently so chaotic and broken that they're able to make loads of money working the nooks and crannies of the broken system, just like a few college students and VCs made wads of money off of ignorance and exuberance in the mid-to-late 1990s. They went where the money and the opportunity to take it were.
This patent mess makes me sick. Why isn't there a good-faith requirement in the patent code?
Arg, sorry... People make lawyer jokes, and they're funny, I suppose. But just remember something someone who was in prison after having a crappy court-appointed lawyer lose his case for him told me: the only lawyer you ever wished you could have is the one you realized you needed after a lifetime telling yourself they weren't wanted.
As for the author of the parent, I apologize, you just got caught in a drive-by...
That's the idealist take on "how it ought to be."
What's more likely, is that some huge faceless corp will blatantly steal your invention and then rack up millions of dollars in legal fees and crush you like an ant. When it's all over, you'll have no money, be bitter, deranged and living under a bridge.
Your best bet, is to partner with a cash rich mega corp with tons of cash, and go around either squishing peons and stealing their patents, or, as in this case, using bogus patents to extort cash from others for no purpose at all.
Finally, the reasons patents and copyright were given legal standing was that they were to enrich the public commons.
Since it's clear that copyright isn't doing that at all anymore, as virtually nothing under copyright gets released into the public commons, and patent law seems to be fashioned to make *only* lawyers loads of money, then perhaps we ought to get rid of both.
Either reform them, and do them as the framers of the constution intended, or simply scrap them. Their cost to society is huge, and IMHO, outweigh the benefits provided.
Cheers,
Greg
At least one specific recommendation by a governing body for using hostmaster.example.com. as a DNS label to represent "hostmaster@example.com" can be found here, published well before this patent was filed.
This can also be seen in RFC 1912 (section 2.2), published in 1996.
These muppets have patented something published in one of the very standards they should be familiar with.
- J