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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.'"
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.
Anybody can sue anyone about anything. It's only newsworthy if there's a slightest shred of the plaintiff winning.
I take issue with the term entrepeneurs, as scum-sucking bottom feeders seems more appropriate, but you get the idea.
/bow/ thank you, I'm here every Thursday night at Club Slashdot...
Reminds me of an apropos joke:
What's the difference between a catfish and a lawyer?
One is a scum suking bottom dweller, and the other is a fish.
Thank you
--
..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
"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
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.
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.
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
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).
Technically, you can apply for a patent on anything. You could even apply for a patent on someone's else's patent if you were looking for a way to burn a lot of money real quick.
The thing is, people patent stupid shit all the time. Shining a flashlight on the floor and having a cat chase it is a patented exercise system for pets. The problem is that they'd never be able to enforce it, the owner of the patent would pretty much be laughed right out of the courtroom as long as the defendant showed up. Then, they'd lose it.
The USPTO will play lip service to any idiot that can pay them. They just sort of leave it up to the courts to decide whether or not there was any intelligent driving force behind the patent or not. Fear not, this "entrepreneur" will be shot down pretty quickly. Move along, folks. Nothing to see here, just a bunch of braindead corporate lawyers.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
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.
Yeah, exactly, you think you'd ever find an Einstein working in a patent office?
The fact that having a lawyer is often necessary does not in any way make lawyers good.
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 /. 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?
Cripes, man, what are you talking about? If I vote, which lawyer (most politicians are lawyers) should I vote for? The entire root of the problem is that lawyers have been allowed to make law. Voting is a sham. It's a way for us citizens/children to make token gestures and claim "look Mommy, I'm helping!"
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?
That paragraph doesn't even make sense. Are you saying people are stupid and therefore shouldn't complain, or that complaining about bad laws is like a sand beach house?
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
So the voters' continually elect lawyers to write law, and it's the voters who shoulder all the blame because they should know better than to elect lawyers?
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.
People make lawyer jokes because such a huge percentage of lawyers are scum. The law is a parasite on society. It's an arbitrary game of devised by an intellectually inbred subculture that has, by virtue of their power, made themselves necessary. Necessary is not the same thing as good. Lawyers are a necessary evil, and little else.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.