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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.'"
The World has gone mad. Beam be up i am out of here.
So when is amazon going to sue them for violating their sue-for-something-obvious-and-not-patentable patent? Not that they were the first to do such a thing, but hey, that never stopped them from getting patents before, right?
[sigh]
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Just when you thought they'd run out of silly patents to sue over, here comes another one. According to the good folks at News.com, a couple of Nizzas (the name of their company) have sued Network Solutions and Register.com. As Marguerite Reardon so eloquently puts it, "Two Internet entrepreneurs are suing Network Solutions and Register.com for allegedly infringing on their e-mail and domain naming patent." I take issue with the term entrepeneurs, as scum-sucking bottom feeders seems more appropriate, but you get the idea. Basically, they patented the method of assigning an email address of fake@name.com to the guy with the website fake.name.com. This might be the lamest excuse for a patent ever granted; a 2-year old could have come up with this idea.
A good two and a half months before 1st April. Go join the queue. Behind SCO.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
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....
I just patented freaking letters and numbers. So I am going to sue everyone! Sheesh!
I've already patented the letters U, R, and L! After Microsoft patented 1's and 0's [http://www.theonion.com/onion3311/microsoftpatent s.html], I had to find a way to get even! Now, they can't even spell their own name without paying me.
Oh yeah, and CmdrTaco owes me $0.10 every time he says "CmdrTaco". And $0.50 every time the name "slashdot" appears.
OK since when can we patent how URLs and email addresses are assigned? That is the most bullshit non-sense I've ever seen to this day! Whoever is approving these patents needs to be taken out back of their home and shot!
This space is not for rent.
I think that the next patent that ought to be pursued in court is the symbolic representation of language as phonetically derived characters. 'Twas recently discovered to be the proerty of a company forming just next week, to assume such rights.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
hen I first saw this, I thought it was a hoax! But its mentioned a few times on google already.
A brief check on the authors shows that there isn't much on the web about these guys.
Troy Javaher is listed as being at ICANN 99 here, and the other guy here.
Dotmd is a strange site
Either way... When did the business model "I created a patent just so I could sue you" a socially acceptable business practice? I have no love for register.com, but I don't think that this is an acceptable thing to do to anyone.
Anybody can sue anyone about anything. It's only newsworthy if there's a slightest shred of the plaintiff winning.
What is claimed is:
1. A method for assigning URL's and e-mail addresses to members of a group comprising the steps of:
assigning each member of said group a URL of the form "name.subdomain.domain"; and
assigning each member of said group an e-mail address of the form "name@subdomain.domain;"
wherein the "name" portion of said URL and said e-mail address is the same and unique for each particular one of said members such that an only difference between said URL and said e-mail address for said member is that in said URL the "@" symbol of the e-mail address is replaced with a "." and wherein said "subdomain" portion of said URL and said e-mail address is the same for all members of said group.
2. The method of claim 1 wherein said members of said group comprise members of a licensed profession.
Now... I'm going to try to remain calm here but HOW THE FUCK WAS THIS PATENTED?! Nothing is *invented* here, it's a method of organizing a system which ALREADY EXISTS (email and DNS). This just further shows the US Patent Office's stupidity.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Unless all computers in the world switch to Roman numerals soon, India will become the world's wealthiest nation soon!
All your favorite sites in one place!
..and I feel fine.
Seriously, old fat women that go to Wal-Mart and fall on the wet floor have made their way to IT.
Just they are now heads of companies, heads that somehow rocketed up the company's ass so far that they cannot see reality.
*sigh*
STEEEEMPY, YOU EEEDIOT
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.
These guys are morons. They patent a technology and sue with groundless accusations. Usually when a company claims patent infringement, they try to find a small defenseless company in hope they can set precident. These guys? They go after NetSol and Register.com, two companies with enough legal firepower to make just about any company disappear.
This will be a fun one to watch.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Also be a great example to the EU of what not to allow.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
"GNR manages the registry, and they're also potential infringers"
G'nR ?? I thought they broke up when Slash went solo.
Take me down
To the paradise city
Where the grass is green
And the girls are pretty
Bush: Saddam Hussein must be stopped.
You: Hussein wouldn't have any affiliation with Microsoft would it???
Someone: Hitler was one of the most evil men alive.
You: Hmm. Hitler wouldn't have any affiliation with Microsoft would it???
So I guess what I'm saying here is that you are truly a nerd, my man. A bit of a kook in that you seem to think MS is out to get you, but nerdly none the less. I salute you.
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.
...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
So, anyone have a website log or e-mail from before November 23,1999?
:)
Damn, and this whole Slashdot thing starting on Nov 24th. We're hosed!!
End Sarcasm.
MailBank (Now NetIdentity) has been doing exactly this since 1996. I don't see these cretins getting very far.
With apologies if it's been posted before..
The Prior-Art-O-Matic
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
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 I NIHIL I I NIHIL NIHIL I I NIHIL
;)
DEFECTVS SEGMENTATIONIS
Svre, i can manage that. Lvcky that I, as one, live in Italy
Once we've settled the prior art dispvte vvith the Greeks (damn their alphas and betas, by Jove, vve'll have to invade them again), ovr nation shall rise again!
All your ascii are belong to vs.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
URLs start with the "http://" prefix, or probably more correctly "|protocol|://" prefix.
They have a domain name there, that is all, not a URL.
If they get the terminology wrong in a patent, does that mean it is invalid, because the "inventor" doesn't understand the topic well enough to be explicitly correct ? I would have thought patents have to be explicitly correct, as the government is granting the patent holder a monopoly, and therefore, the patent must be very clear and correct.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
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.
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