USPTO Grants CA Lawyer Domain-Naming Patent

SpecialAgentXXX writes "Geek.com reports that as of Dec 30, 2003, CA lawyer Frank Weyer holds patent #6,671,714 which is '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.' He's now, in SCO-like fashion, suing Network Solutions and Register.com for infringing on his patent. This is nonsense. My friend who ran for political office in 2000 used this exact naming scheme for his web site. All of us here can see how asinine this is. Will our legal system?"

Comments

USPTO,

[Xandu]

you have pissed us off too many times.
Prepare to be slashdotted.

Re:USPTO,

[sofar]

finally we recognize that the USPTO deserves to be trolled just as bad as they deserved to be treated like trolls. /me mods the uspto troll(0)

Re:USPTO,

[jacem]

As per yesterdays askslashdot http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/26/21 58239&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=156&tid= 187 I think tha we can see that out of work lawyers don't seem to have a problem starting there own companies

JACEM

Re:USPTO,

[nocomment]

"Slashdotted" nothin', I just released Yourdoomed.zip into the "wild". We'll see what that does.

Re:USPTO,

[Stray7Xi]

Yes because DDoSing a government institution costs money out of THEIR pocketbooks... err

Re:USPTO,

[Asprin]

Could/should a good old-fashioned slashdotting be considered a legitimate form of protest like walking a picket line in front of a business?

Probably not. I don't believe picket lines are legally allowed to conduct themselves in a manner that obstructs others, but it's an interesting question: What's the internet equivalent of picketing? Hijacking banner ads and replacing them with protest messages?

Re:USPTO,

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd guess that it send mispelled virii*

*This is part of the joke.

Re:USPTO,

[phamNewan]

I wonder if you would be able to patent that? Of course you only have one year once it is in the wild.

DUPE.

[mekkab]

And I warned the "On Duty" editor, but i guess they're just asleep at the wheel.

All we need now are:
1) references to the McDonalds coffee lawsuit
2) SCO jokes
3) a comparison to Falling down at Walmart
4) Posts bemoaning the loss of Goatse

And it'll be a typical Wednesday morning on Slashdot!

Re:DUPE.

[WIAKywbfatw]

You know, I half thought that when I was typing my post.

I'm starting to think that Slashdot is becoming its own recursive Wayback Machine. If we wait around long enough, I'm sure the Y2K bug will appear again and all those out of work programmers will be back in demand writing patches.

Re:DUPE.

[AndroidCat]

You forgot the "Who should we root for? NS/Veraslime or two (other) sleezy lawyers?" threads.

Re:DUPE.

[Rick the Red]

If *I* can remember that this worthless story was a dupe why can't they?

Ohh! I know! Let me, let me! How's this:

Because the "Editors" don't actually read Slashdot

Is that it? Did I get it right?

Re:DUPE.

[Anonymous Coward]

probably because you read slashdot.

Re:DUPE.

[mekkab]

Good catch!

Re:DUPE.

[RagManX]

I didn't think it was a dupe, I thought the USPTO had done it again. :)

While I was shocked recently to read that the USPTO awarded this patent, imagine how shocked I was today to read that they had awarded it *AGAIN* to someone. I wonder if the two guys who got it will sue each other now?

RagManX

Re:DUPE.

[Anonymous Coward]

I will oblige on the McDonalds lawsuit - to say that it seems funny but the the woman needed skin grafts. I only got coffee at McDonalds once, and it was so damn hot that I couldn't even hold the cup, I have never seen coffee so fucking hot anywhere else... - I am sure people would be laughing if they spilled that 190 degree (F) on their nutsacks.

Re:DUPE.

[Mateito]

Hey! Did you hear that some stupid woman sued McDonalds because she fell down at Walmart and spilt hot goatse all over some litigious bastards?

Re:DUPE.

[nate1138]

Did you hear the REAL reason that goatse.cx was taken down?

Darl McBride fell down in a Walmart, spilling his scalding hot coffee on his (very shrivelled) member. He got so hopping mad he called David Boies and said "SUE EVERYBODY". In the resulting shitstorm, a Cease and Decist was accidentally sent to goatse.cx.

And that's how it happened.

Re:DUPE.

[vmfedor]

How about because the editors have to look at hundreds of stories at a time and you only see what they give you?

Seeing a dupe story isn't going to do anything more than cause you 5 minutes or less of inconvenience and considering Slashdot is provided free-for-everyone I don't think that slashdotters have any right to complain.

I'm not trying to be a troll and I'm not trying to insult you, but jeez, cut slashdot a break.

Re:DUPE.

[AndroidCat]

Because the "Editors" don't actually read Slashdot

Have a heart, they're probably all sharing Cmdr Taco's (56kbps) pipe.

Re:DUPE.

[kent.dickey]

Someone should file a patent on posting the same story on Slashdot over and over. He could get a fortune in royalties. Or, it might provide financial incentive to stop dupes.

Re:DUPE.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that there is a member service that views all articles before the general public and can report dupes to the editor for removal. In theory this should never happen now. It is one thing if they are just posting blindly but it is another if they have 100's of eyes reviewing it and giving them feedback.

Re:DUPE.

[rainmanjag]

I know. I'll patent "A method of annoying Slashdot readers by publishing articles about the same exact event twice." That way, it will be illegal to have dupes!

-jag

Re:DUPE.

[pe1rxq]

Ok I'll make a quick summarry of the last few times this thread came up:

- Yes the woman is an idiot, putting a hot substance between your legs is stupid no matter if it is 150F or 200F.
- MD should have made clear that their hot coffee was hotter than the other places selling hot coffee that was not so hot.
- No it was not above boiling, if that were the case they would have sold hot coffee vapor.
- This is offtopic
- MD sucks for making coffee hotter than others to make it last longer
- MD now sucks but didn't used to because you can't get hot coffee anymore

(BTW fahrenheid sucks, you should start using celsius)

Jeroen

Re:DUPE.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure if moderating this comment as Redundant was supposed to be a slap or if it was simply an assertion of it's obviousness.

Re:DUPE.

[Valdrax]

Are you giving Darl McBride credit for doing something NICE for the internet?

Re:DUPE.

[AKAImBatman]

No it was not above boiling, if that were the case they would have sold hot coffee vapor.

Actually, it is when the coffee is brewed. When you have water under pressure, you can superheat it far above boiling (up to the structural limits of the pressurizer). As a result, the coffee is pretty close to boiling when it first hits the pot.

FWIW, I was a kid working at McD's at the time of the suit. I've dumped hot coffee on myself many, many times and didn't get anything worse than a red patch of skin. The reason is that coffee doesn't stick like grease. When you spill coffee on yourself, you wave your arms/jump around a bit from the pain, and end up cooling the coffee to a luke warm temperature. I can understand that this lady was older, but moving quickly is a natural reaction. To get third degree burns you must have either the weakest skin in existence, or the slowest reaction time I've ever seen.

(BTW fahrenheid sucks, you should start using celsius)

I agree. Fahrenheid [sic] does suck. So does celsius and kelvin. We should all move the the superior system of Fahrenheit! Instead of some arbitrary numbers like 0 for freezing and 100 for boiling, we can use easy to remember numbers like 32F is freezing and 220F is boiling (subject to change based on your altitude). Conversion couldn't be easier! Just take your Celsius temperature, multiply by 9, divide by 5, add 32, wave a rubber chicken, howl at the moon, write an essay on why Fahrenheit is better, and you're done!

Re:DUPE.

[hesiod]

> (BTW fahrenheid sucks, you should start using celsius

Yes, "fahrenheid" does indeed suck, because it's not a word. Anyway, if you think that a unit of measurement "sucks," you must have some very crippling mental disorder. No one cares, get over it.

Re:DUPE.

[Zerikai]

You forgot references to Nazis, and what happens in Soviet Russia.

Re:DUPE.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

How about because the editors have to look at hundreds of stories at a time and you only see what they give you?

They may look at a "few hundred" a day, but they don't publish "hundreds" a day.

By the way, sleeping with a Slashdot ed, are you?

Re:DUPE.

[pe1rxq]

Actually, it is when the coffee is brewed. When you have water under pressure, you can superheat it far above boiling (up to the structural limits of the pressurizer). As a result, the coffee is pretty close to boiling when it first hits the pot.

The lady got it in a plastic cup, superheating was not an issue I presume.....
Even in the case of superheating one could argue that since the boiling point itself rises it is still under it, just above the standard defined boiling point (which really is nonsense).
The reason I added that point was that one of the previous times this thread came up someone actually said it was sold above boiling......

One more point on the Fahrenheit (sorry for the spellin on the prev. post, we use Celsius):
The guy must have had a big ego using his own ass in defining the scale :)

Jeroen

Re:DUPE.

[waitigetit]

Yes, let your paying customers do *your* work, so the freeloaders like myself get a better product. bubble, meet burst.

Why yes, my grapes are on the acidic side. Glad you asked.

Re:DUPE.

[hesiod]

> Someone should file a patent on posting the same story on Slashdot over and over

Luckily, there is no patent on dupe comment posts, or you and about a hundred other people would be in trouble....

Re:DUPE.

[pyros]

When you spill coffee on yourself, you wave your arms/jump around a bit from the pain, and end up cooling the coffee to a luke warm temperature. I can understand that this lady was older, but moving quickly is a natural reaction.

She was seated in her car at the time.

Re:DUPE.

[AKAImBatman]

The lady got it in a plastic cup, superheating was not an issue I presume.....

1. It's styrofoam, not simple plastic. A plastic cup would melt.

2. When sitting, some water may remain superheated from the pressure of the water above. i.e. "Pockets" of superheating can develop.

Even in the case of superheating one could argue that since the boiling point itself rises it is still under it, just above the standard defined boiling point (which really is nonsense).

Actually, the water is already is a vaporous state, it just doesn't have the space to vaporize. Thus is remains in a pseudo-liquid form.

The reason I added that point was that one of the previous times this thread came up someone actually said it was sold above boiling......

Most certainly not. Coffee cools far to quickly for it to make it from the coffee machine to the customer without cooling to about 190-200 degrees. Most of your heat is lost in the dripping process (if you can call the constant flow of coffee, "dripping"). More heat is lost while in the pot, then even more during pouring.

One more point on the Fahrenheit (sorry for the spellin on the prev. post, we use Celsius):
The guy must have had a big ego using his own ass in defining the scale :)

No idea what you're talking about. However, the added precision of the Fahrenheit scale does allow us yanks to be better in tune with the actual temperature outside. We can do things like say "it's in the 60s" instead of worrying about the difference between 20 and 24.

Re:DUPE.

[Pope]

Needs more hot grits and stolen GUI from Xerox PARC.

Re:DUPE.

[AKAImBatman]

She was seated in her car at the time.

I understand that. But you still wiggle when you pour hot coffee on yourself. Even if you sit still, the stuff will cool *fast*. If it didn't, no one would bother with expensive styrofoam cups.

Re:DUPE.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

I didn't think it was a dupe, I thought the USPTO had done it again.

You'll make a fine /. editor!

Re:DUPE.

[Anonymous Coward]

But you still wiggle when you pour hot coffee on yourself. Even if you sit still, the stuff will cool *fast*.

And you're usually wearing clothes, which tends to hold the hot liquid in place longer, allowing its effects to continue longer. Plus the place/location wasn't conducive to removing the articles of clothing to alleviate the situation.

Re:DUPE.

[DingoBueno]

1) Post recursive story on slashdot
1)Post recursive story on slashdot
1)Post recursive story on slashdot
2) x
3) PROFIT!
[ad infinitum]
2) y
3) PROFIT!
2) z
3) PROFIT!

The x y and z should be dot dot dot, but the damn compression filter wouldn't let me post :)

Re:DUPE.

[locofungus]

When you have water under pressure, you can superheat it far above boiling (up to the structural limits of the pressurizer).

This is not so. You can only heat water and keep it a liquid up to the critical point. After that it is a vapour even if you have it under enough pressure to keep it as dense as liquid water.
Critical point of water is around 600K IIRC.

Re:DUPE.

[Anonymous Coward]

that's funny - I heard the hole in his firewall gives broadband access to all the editors.

Re:DUPE.

[AKAImBatman]

This is not so. You can only heat water and keep it a liquid up to the critical point. After that it is a vapour even if you have it under enough pressure to keep it as dense as liquid water.
Critical point of water is around 600K IIRC.

You're being overly picky. You know as well as I do that I meant it from the perspective of the structural limits being the most common limitation of superheating water. Containing water that hot would require a container far beyond anything like a coffee machine. Besides, had you read one of my other replies, you would have noted that I stated that the water is actually in a vaporous state, it just doesn't have the space to vaporize.

Re:DUPE.

[Anonymous Coward]

Redundant? No.

Re:DUPE.

[nwf]

2. When sitting, some water may remain superheated from the pressure of the water above. i.e. "Pockets" of superheating can develop.

Except that you have to pour the coffee into the cup, thereby making a fairly narrow stream of it. Being in free flight down toward the cup, gravity isn't an issue, so no pressure due to it. Thus, none of the coffee could be superheated after pouring.

However, the added precision of the Fahrenheit scale does allow us yanks to be better in tune with the actual temperature outside. We can do things like say "it's in the 60s" instead of worrying about the difference between 20 and 24.

Indeed, that is why I prefer Fahrenheit. Digital thermometers can tell me the difference between 70 and 71 F, which is a smaller differenec than between 21 and 22 C. It's worse for pounds and kilos on digital scales.

Re:DUPE.

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I remember she was wearing track pants, and didn't take them off when the coffee was spilled. It held the coffee close to the skin, and that's why the burns were so bad.

Re:DUPE.

[amRadioHed]

Sure it cools fast. But where do you think most of that heat goes? (hint: the moisture in your skin is a better conductor of heat than the air)

Re:DUPE.

[Kumiorava]

Indeed, that is why I prefer Fahrenheit. Digital thermometers can tell me the difference between 70 and 71 F, which is a smaller differenec than between 21 and 22 C. It's worse for pounds and kilos on digital scales.

My digital thermometer will tell me 20,4C... and my digital scale says 85,2kg. Both figures are perfectly fine for me, I don't need any more precision. Rest of the world can use decimals. Making assumptions like this without knowledge of reality may lead to this kind of misunderstanding.

Also before commenting something silly I let you know that desimals are separated with ',' not '.' where I live.

Re:DUPE.

[amigabill]

Sorry dude, but there's far too much prior art for your petent to be valid. :)

Re:DUPE.

[vmfedor]

I'm an avid Slashdot reader but I don't post that often except (usually) when I see something that really offends me or I can offer some sort of incredible insight on a topic.

I really could give three shits about the editors loving me or hating my guts. Who cares? It's not like I'm getting anything out of it either way. I don't moderate, I don't post stories, I just read and appreciate the effort that slashdot gives every day so that asshole nerds like yourself can sit around and spend your days worrying about Karma scores.

Chill out already, sheesh.

Re:DUPE.

[dreadnougat]

Most digital thermometers display at least one decimal place if they're in Celsius mode. Just like my scale displays one decimal place when set to measure in kg. Of course, this is more accurate than you're getting when you measure in pounds. So the metric system is actually *more* accurate in this sense.

For example - I know that the temperature here last night was -44.9C (not including windchill).

Re:DUPE.

[kgarcia]

Indeed, that is why I prefer Fahrenheit. Digital thermometers can tell me the difference between 70 and 71 F, which is a smaller differenec than between 21 and 22 C. It's worse for pounds and kilos on digital scales.

Most thermometers will tell you 70.1, .2, etc. Same for as kilos and pounds, with the added benefit that I know 10.3 kilos is 10 kilos, 300 grams, or 3.35K is three Kilos, 350 grams... With pounds... 10.3 pounds is something like 10 pounds, 4.8oz, or some other weird measure... there's no consistency! At least with metric everything divides nicely in 10's and 100's. Makes measuring easier... But it's all in what your'e used to. I've been in the US for a few years now, and I'm getting used to Lbs & Farenheit... *shrugs*

Re:DUPE.

[mrhartwig]

One more point on the Fahrenheit (sorry for the spellin on the prev. post, we use Celsius):
The guy must have had a big ego using his own ass in defining the scale :)

As opposed to Anders Celsius, the guy who developed the Celsius scale? Or Lord Kelvin, the proud namer of his own temperature scale?

What's your point?

Re:DUPE.

[macdaddy]

Did you dump the coffee into fabric that retained the hot coffee rather than it dispersing across your skin? There's a big difference between the two.

Re:DUPE.

[srvivn21]

We should all move the the superior system of Fahrenheit! Instead of some arbitrary numbers like 0 for freezing and 100 for boiling, we can use easy to remember numbers like 32F is freezing and 220F is boiling (subject to change based on your altitude).

So easy to remember, you seems to have forgotten that water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Yes, I understand your disclaimer about altitude, but boiling temperature drops as altitude rises, and I imagine you are not living on a submarine. :o)

Re:DUPE.

[AKAImBatman]

Actually, most of the heat is lost in the steam. (i.e. water cooling)

Re:DUPE.

[stephanruby]

When you spill coffee on yourself, you wave your arms/jump around a bit from the pain, and end up cooling the coffee to a luke warm temperature. I can understand that this lady was older, but moving quickly is a natural reaction. To get third degree burns you must have either the weakest skin in existence, or the slowest reaction time I've ever seen.

Nice theory, but the lady spilled it on her crotch while she was sitting in her car. There is so much movement you can do down there.

Re:DUPE.

[BigBadBri]

I think the parent troll was repeating an old canard that Farenheit used a rectal measurement for his 100 degree point.

Re:DUPE.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have expected a bong or hooka, not a pipe.

Re:DUPE.

[nwf]

My digital thermometer will tell me 20,4C... and my digital scale says 85,2kg. Both figures are perfectly fine for me, I don't need any more precision. Rest of the world can use decimals. Making assumptions like this without knowledge of reality may lead to this kind of misunderstanding.

I have a digital scale and several thermometers that will not do decimals for C, so it all depends on what you get. One can get thermometers that give you as much resolution as desired, I'm just talking about cheap ones. At least, cheap ones available on the US.

Re:DUPE.

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are you?!

Re:DUPE.

[dreadnougat]

Saskatoon, SK, Canada.

A small mining town in my province got -52.3C not including windchill... the coldest place on Earth yesterday.

Prior art has to be out there...

[WIAKywbfatw]

This patent was filed on November 23, 1999.

There has to be prior art out there that shoots this down.

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[REBloomfield]

Freeserve and Demon at the very least in the uk.... I got robb@embers-fire.freeserve.co.uk a long long time ago.....

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[mekkab]

embers-fire

Is that your last name?
That is the COOLEST name I have ever seen! (well, second to Zaxxon...) 2 points!

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[WIAKywbfatw]

Demon Internet defintely has prior art. I have a name@subdomain.demon.co.uk email address that's six years old and any Demon customer dating back a few years earlier than that will have the same.

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course there is:

US Patent # 7,043,211: Method of process of duplicating an article in an online information system.

Patente Owners: Timothy, Cmdr. Taco, ...

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[REBloomfield]

erm... yes?

I was going to change it to Max Power, but I thought, what the hell...

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[igaborf]

There has to be prior art out there that shoots this down.

Which raises some questions that perhaps someone with IP legal knowledge can address:

1. Does the patent process impose any legal requirement of due diligence in searching for prior art?
2. If so, are there any legal sanctions available for those who fail to perform due diligence or who knowingly apply for an interfering patent?
3. If not, why not?

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[YomikoReadman]

How about the US Government? This is how all .mil address are done, AFAIK. the domains are structured base.branchofservice.mil, and all email address associated with them are structured as fname.lname@base.BOS.mil. That being the case, this method of domain name assignment is as old as the internet itself, since DARPA used this method while setting up ARPANet way back in the 70s. This begs the question of 'How the hell did this patent get approved?'

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[RealityMogul]

A couple years ago the patent office lost a legal battle over their use of a rubber stamp with the word "DENIED" on it. Apparently someone had a patent on the device, and the USPTO was in violation.

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[ed]

My email account with demon dates back to 1996 and is of that form

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[jfengel]

1. No.
2. No.
3. The answer to any question starting, "Why don't they-" is almost always, "Money." -- Robert Heinlein

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[ahecht]

Actually, it would be prior art only if you had the web address robb.freeserve.co.uk and the email address robb@freeserve.co.uk

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[Avihson]

Cutler Hammer Electrical back in 1994!
username@ch.etn.com Cutlerhammer was a subsidiary of Eaton Corp, but had a seperate email and network at the time.
Eaton used username@etn.com etc. Now with restructuring, they all use username@eaton.com But I still have business cards to prove prior art if needed!

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[REBloomfield]

nearly, the email part fits(embers-fire is the subdomain), but the web address doesn't.

So mines actually subdomain.domain & name@subdomain.domain....

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[EvilStein]

When I was at NASA, machines were often assigned lastname.site.nasa.gov

So, Bob Smith at the Ames Research Center would be bsmith.arc.nasa.gov

You're right, the USPTO is on crack, and the government has been using that scheme for a long time..

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[great om]

when i was a college student (in 1998), we were given (at washington University) email addresses that matched to our divisions: therefore I was bmgoldne@artsci.wustl.edu, while a b-schooler was x@olin.artsci.wustl.edu

doesn't this cover the patent?

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[Zeinfeld]

Freeserve and Demon at the very least in the uk.... I got robb@embers-fire.freeserve.co.uk a long long time ago.....

Freeserve has done this since they started, if your email address is foo@freeserve.com you have a web site foo.members.freeserve.com.

That has to be the standard at a heck of a lot of ISPs. It means that you have to maintain a DNS link to the appropriate server but it means that it is pretty easy to do load balancing. If you give each user a subdirectory on a Web host it is pretty difficult to reorganize pages with URLs like http://members.freeserve.com/~foo.

The only imaginative step here was imagining he could get away with a patent.

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that the US Senate has used this newly-patented scheme for assigning URLs and e-mail addresses to its members for a number of years now.

However, note that the patent also embraces e-mail to snail-mail/fax translators and things of that nature. (Of course, the senators have those too... they're called interns!)

AC.

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[OpenSourceRulez]

RFC 1034 - November 1987
DOMAIN NAMES - CONCEPTS AND FACILITIES

RFC 1035 - November 1987
DOMAIN NAMES - IMPLEMENTATION AND SPECIFICATION

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[lonb]

The ISP I ran from 1996-2000 did this. We regularly provided users who were to cheap to buy their own domain with a subdomian in our domain, and with the appropriate email address to boot.

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[gosand]

A couple years ago the patent office lost a legal battle over their use of a rubber stamp with the word "DENIED" on it. Apparently someone had a patent on the device, and the USPTO was in violation.

So they obviously switched to the un-patented "APPROVED" one, and all is running smoothly...

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[chrispix]

I think I have some, There was a ISP in Dallas, that started up around '95, I had a domain http://prpu1.altinet.net to host my websites. The email address I had was prpu1@altinet.net Does this not seem to be exactly what they are talking about?

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[codegen]

This isn't actually prior art. For this to apply to the patent, you would have to have one of two things:

1. a general email address for the base "base@BOS.mil" (which matches base.BOS.mil)
2. personal web sites for the email address of the form fname.lname.base.BOS.mil

It's still a rediculous patent, but if we want to shoot it down, we have to understand what the prior art is.

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, no. If you get screwed in a court battle over prior art, that's your only sanction. But someone has to first "notice it", "prove it was theirs", and have enough money to pay a good lawyer to get the job done. This happens usually with big companies... frequently against smaller ones. A Patent Inventor only has to sign a paper saying they "looked, and did not find prior art" Due diligence? Rarely do people in this country do what they should be doing. This is America! Premption and Protectionism! "Hey I got a patent, and those shmucks at the USPTO...they haven't even a clue."

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[pyros]

I used to work at a company where the CEO was Asim Saber (the first name is pronounced awesome). But he ruined it by actually implementing a suggestion out of dilbert (he hung a bell on the wall and said people should ring it when they have good ideas that they implement, and tell the group about the idea. The girl with the triangle hair then rung the bell and said she didn't strangle the CEO over the stupid idea.)

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[codegen]

Close but no cigar. This is in fact a way arround
the patent, because to be infringing, the web site address
would have to be foo.freeserv.com. Addming 'members'
between foo and freeserve makes it different than
the claim in the patent

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[Anonymous Coward]

well.. due dilligence is an interesting suggestion, but that would infringe on American ingenuity and creativity to use really silly patent litigation as a corporate strategy....

Only in the land of the free can you get rich pretending to do something, have the piece of paper to say you did it, and not have to worry about actually doing anything at all....

My what a country!

.... if only there was an emoticon for a tongue firmly planted in a Canadian cheek... :p,Eh?

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[the eric conspiracy]

1. The only requirement is that you disclose any prior art that you know about when filing.

2. Yes. If you don't it's fraud.

3. It's up to the patent office and anyone contesting the patent to find the prior art.

If it weren't for the cost of litigating a patent this wouldn't be a problem.

But it is.

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[morcheeba]

Domain Name: MIT.EDU

Registrant:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139

Contacts:
Jeffrey I. Schiller
jis@mit.edu

Domain record activated: 23-May-1985
Domain record last updated: 29-Nov-2000

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[Shalda]

I was doing this with my family on bance.net back in 1998, about a year before the patent was filed. Subdomains and email addresses were assigned as: name.bance.net and name@bance.net for persons whose last name was Bance. Truly utterly worthless patent.

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[YomikoReadman]

While there are no actual 'personal' sites at a .mil address, all tenant services on the base do have a site which is tenant.base.BoS.mil, and that tenant organization will have an org mailbox of some sort. As for a base wide mailbox, that would be covered by the base commander's mailbox, since he IS the base, for all intents and purposes.

Does that cover enough for you?

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[Anonymous Coward]

way to explain the rest of the joke.

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[codegen]

Does that cover enough for you?

Only if the tenant service has an org mailbox with the email address 'tenant@base.BoS.mil'. If the email address is anything different that it is not relevant to the patent. Of course if the email address is 'tenant@base.BoS.mil', then it is a great example of prior art and I thank you for bringing it forward.

Similarly, if the base wide mailbox (i.e. the commanders mailbox) does not have the same name as the base in the website address, then it is also not relevant to the patent. What the patent claims to cover is the relationship between an email address and a web site address by replacing the @ character in the email address with a period.

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[squiggleslash]

That was my first thought, but actually that's not what the patent covers. Demon would have had to give you an email address of name@demon.co.uk, with a website/hostname of name.demon.co.uk. Demon however gives you emails of anything@name.demon.co.uk, a hostname of name.demon.co.uk, and a website of www.name.demon.co.uk.

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

That's OK, I own a patent on a rubber stamp with the word "APPROVED" on it. :)

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[MO-411]

The examiners, Maung, Zarni and assistant examiner Lin, Kenny should review possible prior art issues irrespective of what the application states. This is what most of their work entails and a good "reason" it takes so long to process an application.

Many choose to simply submit the patent and let the PTO verify prior art. In this case I suspect the prior art search by the examiners resulted in three sites:

• Webpage: Netfirms, Sep. 1998.*
• Webpage: Freeyellow.com, Apr., 1998.*
• Webpage: switchboard.com, Jun. 1996.*

I believe that is what the asterisk entails, I could be wrong...

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.

How this patent made it past the obvious I am not clear on. Lord knows most patents sit in the quagmire of the PTO's review system for what seems like an eternity only to be rejected on something like obviousness and prior art.

The patent (6,671,714) is a worth read.

I know I did not address your points directly but the nature of the examination is such where this is a gray area. The courts are supposed to be the final filter, seemingly making it guilty before innocents... when it comes to property rights infringements.

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[StringBlade]

I got robb@embers-fire.freeserve.co.uk a long long time ago.....

...in a galaxy far far away, right?

Don't shoot! It's only a joke!

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[YomikoReadman]

Well, as far as I can see, the DoD has been using the same basic scheme for more than 30 years at this point, most of which is covered by the patent. While the patent is more extensive, most of the extra usages are restricted for use in the DoD .mil address by the DoD Instructions governing the usage of a .mil address. As for their being a base@base.BoS.mil, those are out there, however I am unsure as to whether or not they are in use, although they do exist.

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[gosand]

I guess trolling is easy, especially for ACs. Just my little experiment, thanks for participating.

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[Anonymous Coward]

doesn't sdf.lonestar.org do that? They move your email id to a hostname at "freeshell.org".

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[Doctor Memory]

the USPTO is on crack, and the government has been using that scheme for a long time..

What, having their offices be crackhouses? Hmmm, on second thought, that would explain a lot...

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[Frizzle Fry]

Did he get the bell idea from the dilbert comic, or was that just a coincidence?

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[SampsonSimpson]

There's no due diligence requirement to search for prior art, but to answer the second part of your second question, applicants and their attorneys have a duty to prosecute applications with candor, good faith, and honesty. Otherwise, the patent may be invalidated for inequitable conduct.

Inequitable conduct can arise from submitting false or misleading information, misrepresenting information, and not disclosing information, and such information must be material and the conduct must be intended. So, if you knowingly apply for a patent that you know is not novel, it may be invalidated because of this.

As far as I can remember, the reason there aren't any sanctions for attorneys that fail to search for relevant prior art is expensive. The logic goes something like this: Prior art searches are expensive, because there are too many patents that may have some tangential relationship to your invention. Also, because it's so easy to forget that one search term that would have returned a result, it opens attorneys up to a lot of liability because so much is riding on a proper search. (Because of this, most prior art searches are conducted by a special patent search firm) Basically, it's too risky for attorneys to conduct one themselves, and it costs too much to hire a professional search company)

Because it's expensive, the USPTO reasoned that this would discourage inventors from patenting and disclosing their invention, and such a result would be going against the fundamental policies of having a patent system in the first place. "...promoting the progress of the useful arts and sciences..." It's basically a balance that the PTO struck between countervailing public interests.

On a different note, the abundance of prior art in this field will most likely invalidate this patent. It's not novel (102), and it seems obvious (103) in light of the technology existing in 1999.

I don't know what stage in the proceedings the parties are in, but if public outrage gets a lot of press, the Commissioner may order a re-examination. (For example, if this story somehow makes its way to the New York Times and the Commissioner comes across it) The Geek.com article expressed worry that the parties may settle because legal costs are so expensive, but we're talking about Network Solutions here. They're a big enough company with enough resources to fight this sort of thing.

SampsonSimpson

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[thogard]

Maybe its time to hit home.
Anyone write a letter to the Calf Bar Association?

Dear Sirs,
I'm concerneed that one of your members is breaking the law and I feel that you should investigate it. It would seem that one Frank Weyer has both lied on a patent application and then now cliams in court that he invented something that was in common use when he claimed to have invented it. As a patent atty, he has an obligation to do a proper search. Anyone that was even remotely assocatated with the Internet at the time of the alleged invention could have found prior art in about 5 minutes. I feel that Mr Weyer is either an idiot pushing the bounds of studpidity or is using the courts to extort money from other people. Either way he shouldn't be a member of your orginzation.

Pattent attys have mangaged are part of the problem of the current patent office mess. If they are optional in the system as opposed to required, then the patent office would have to change its ways and maybe hitting the largest bar association in the world might be a good start. That is unless people like the current system.

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[GimmeZeroZero]

Ah, possibly a Paradise Lost fan?

Re:Prior art has to be out there...

[coyotedata]

You have to show there is no prior art. I hate it when lawyers think they are smart.

Repost

[coug_]

Wasn't this posted some time ago?

Re:Repost

[ultranova]

Maybe, but hey, it would be pretty unreasonable to expect the editors to remember every screwup the US Ppatent Office has done recently.

scaremongering

[relrelrel]

More /. Scaremongering, this will never pass, simple as that, no need to worry, something to laugh about though at how pathetic/stupid these companies can be.

Re:scaremongering

[Anonymous Coward]

Double standards indeed.

The scum at the wheel of these co.'s are probably pump-n-dumping (or something similar) for more $$$ than I'll make in 3 years of honest work. Even in the lowest of the low cases!

Who will join me in GLORIOUS CULTURAL CYBER REVOLUTION!!?? First we take USPTO, then the White House!

Re:scaremongering

[Neurotoxic666]

The present invention overcomes the limitations of the prior art by providing a method, apparatus and business system that allow a user to quickly communicate online with a member of a particular business, professional or other group regardless of whether the member has an internet presence (e.g. e-mail address or website) and without the user needing to know or find the internet address for the recipient.

He's already refereing to prior art, and it actualy seems his "idea" is a bit different from what we already use and know.

The patented system would allow someone to write directly to some professional without knowing his email address. It would be a simpler system than to have to use a search engine and then search an email on the website to communicate.

I must agree this is a very subtle difference and the guy's interpretation is stupid. However, just because of that, I am vey curious to see how the lawsuits turn out.

Re:scaremongering

[Anonymous Coward]

I own the patent on "method for seeing how asinine things are."

Re:scaremongering

[Deraj DeZine]

"Scaremongering?" More like trolling.

This is GOOD news.

[Anonymous Coward]

Patents like this cannot be enforced. With enough of these, the feds will be forced to re-examine the system.

Don't get mad. This is good news. It means we're one day closer to patent reform.

Re:This is GOOD news.

[kbsingh]

This is NOT good news, you need to keep in mind the resources that are going to get wasted in the trial - the public money, time and resources that might be getter used elsewhere.

Just a bunch of wasters trying to make a quick buck if they can, otherwise no harm done.

But one thing i do agree on is that the system needs a bit of a revamp.

Re:This is GOOD news.

[slimme]

Someone should patent something politicians use and the sue. Then things will change.

Some internet fundraising method? Patent it and sue whoever uses your patented idea. That's what patents are all about.

Re:This is GOOD news.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever the optimist, aren't we?

Re:This is GOOD news.

[jfengel]

Sadly, you're wrong on two counts.

One, it doesn't take federal enforcement for a patent to be effective. If these guys come up to, say, a big ISP, which has better things to do than fight patents, they'll often pay rather than fight.

Two, every single patent thread on Slashdot includes somebody saying, "Hey, we'll finally get the feds to realize the system is broken." It hasn't happened yet, and I doubt this is the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Re:This is GOOD news.

[goneutt]

Don't review the broken system. Now we have a specific non-governmental "source of all evil" and can file suits against this man for permiting abusive use of HIS patent. But doesn't Al Gore already have claims to this?

Re:This is GOOD news.

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone should patent something politicians use and the sue. Then things will change.

Sure they would. Congress would pass a law saying patents don't apply to congressional activities. I'm sure they wouldn't even need to count votes on it. Just add it by voice vote onto some spending bill without any debate.

Re:This is GOOD news.

[Anonymous Coward]

The truth is, this is the same thing as patenting "names" in general. It would be the same as patenting "A way of addressing an envolope so it when it arrives at said destinatin the person will know "whom" it is address to. See Fig 1.

FIGURE 1:
Name
Address
Postal Code (zip code dummies)
City, State
Country
"

Where "name" in figure is the addressed to name. The first people I plan on bringing to trial is anyone who sends a letter to Santa. Next I plan on going after anyone with "Bush" in there name. Third, I plan on starting a new goatse site (oh shit I said goatse, Mod, I demand I be modded down to -1 Troll by the automatically "goatse" word detector, and the fact that I said Troll, TWICE!)

Re:This is GOOD news.

[iminplaya]

"It means we're one day closer to patent reform."

That's like asking for slavery reform...can't happen. Abolition(sp) is the only way.

Re:This is GOOD news.

[Anonymous Coward]

The smart thing to do is EVERYONE (and I mean everyone) go out and patent something obvious, then send out notices of violations. Don't ask for coinage or threaten legal action, just reference the patent number. Most places would assume the worst and start defending, thereby doing the work of proving the system crappy.

Junking up the whole system will require it to be revisited.

DUPE

[Anonymous Coward]

Arghh ye matey! There be a dupe!

no?

[turbofisk]

This is in the US? Probably no. Suing is your national sport...

Repeat story?

[RT Alec]

Is this the same story as posted a few days ago?

Patents/copyrights had been shown asinine...

[bc90021]

...already, when two Australians copyrighted all phone numbers way back in 2001.

Re:Patents/copyrights had been shown asinine...

[PaschalNee]

Surely in order to copyright the tune you'd need to include both the notes and their timing so if you dial ................
555 7187268 3

you'd create a different tune to ................
55 57 18 72 68 3

So the guys have only copyrighted one possible timing of the sequence? But what do I know.

Not that I agree, but READ ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The submitter says a friend used this scheme in 2000. Looking at the webpage for a few seconds will show you the patent application was filed in 1999.

Link To Patent Text

[Mateito]

Link to patent text

Its not like the patent office don't deserve a good slashdotting.

Re:Link To Patent Text

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone read this?! It's unbelievable... the "interface server" proposed in the patent actually forges e-mail headers to force every message in a doctor-patient conversation to go through its mail service.

Isn't there a legally protected confidentiality when it comes to your medical history? This sounds like an invasion of privacy just waiting to happen. (Actually, come to think of it, the feds would probably love to see such a system put in place...)

AC.

Re:Link To Patent Text

[That's Unpossible!]

Link to patent text

Its not like the patent office don't deserve a good slashdotting.

I think this is an interesting thought... One problem with these assinine patents is there are so many, the USPTO has no way to know which ones should be re-examined. However, I have thought of a clever way (and will not even patent it): slashdotted patents.

I would imagine that just about every incredibly stupid patent out there has received much more traffic from enraged folks like us than the more valid patents. How about the USPTO coordinating with their web department, and if a patent webpage reaches a certain threshhold of hits, they thoroughly re-examine it or open it up for public debate and commentary?

Oh no~

[gmiley01]

I am now in danger of stepping on his IP!! Technically couldn't this guy sue any website owner under the 'name@subdomain.domain' portion? Is it possible this person is doing this, though, for a good cause? Maybe he is sick of seeing this sort of thing happen so he worked out this scheme to make the legal system look at how rediculous alot of these patents are? It's just a theory. I sure hope that is the case though.

Re:will it what?

[mekkab]

Will it see how assinine our legal system is.

The last sentence was counting on the context from the previous sentence. When you don't read the whole headline, you miss out on the context.

Or maybe you just haven't had enough caffeine yet. ;)

quite the "innovation"

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's hope he's as successful as Howard Dean!

I'd love to see him scream in court when his patent is thrown out.

Wake the patent office up....

[MentlFlos]

Wake the patent office up and sue THEM! :)

Re:Wake the patent office up....

[Anonymous Coward]

Only in Soviet Russia.

Re:Wake the patent office up....

[meburke]

Sovereign immunity...The Feds can make as many stupidities as they want and are usually immune from the consequences. For instance: Who is the largest pulluter in the US? The US Government.

I believe continuous exposure of Federal stupidity is the best tool we have at present for change.

Prior Art

[Sir Holo]

This was pretty much standard practice in a lot of places before November 22, 1998, the date before which the knowledge would have to be "public" in order to count as prior art against this particular submarine patent.

Too bad someone has to waste a lot of resources fighting something like this.

Re:Prior Art

[WIAKywbfatw]

That hidden goatse link doesn't work on people who've got browsers that show the full URL when you hover over it.

Nice try though. Moron.

Re:Prior Art

[trezor]

Yeah. It's time people stop doing that lame-as goatse-trolling, anyway. I mean, is that even fun, anymore? I, for once, think it's the most overused internet-trolling tool of all time.

And like you said, people can check the links....

All who agree, please sign this "stop goatse"-petition!

Ehh?

[Polkyb]

"My friend who ran for political office in 2000 used this exact naming scheme for his web site"

You're friend owns name@subdomain.domain.? That's SO cool

END Internet Patents NOW!

[haplo21112]

This really needs to be a presidential election issue. I'll vote for whoever says they will end Internet Technology patents.

Re:END Internet Patents NOW!

[seven5]

I dont think the Slashdot constituents are that large.

Re:END Internet Patents NOW!

[Waffle Iron]

However, for every voter who votes against software patents, there are 1000 more logic-impaired voters who will pick whichever candidate who says they'll simultaneously cut taxes and increase government handouts.

Re:END Internet Patents NOW!

[geoffspear]

Have you seen most slashdot constituents? They sit in front of computers all day and don't get any exercise. They are that large.

Re:END Internet Patents NOW!

[I am Jack's username]

This really needs to be a presidential election issue. I'll vote for whoever says they will end Internet Technology patents.

Ralph Nader.

Re:END Internet Patents NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, now is the time. With the 50/50 split in the U.S. electorate, it doesn't take a very large swing vote to give the election to one candidate or the other.

If you're willing to be a single-issue voter, and you can get a decent number of like-minded people in a small number of key states which are evenly split and have an important number of electoral votes (Florida, anyone) you can probably wield a surprising amount of influence.

[Heck it's worked for the far-right in Israel for decades... How else do you think settlements opposed by 70% of the voting public are defended and expanded at the cost of blood and money.]

Re:END Internet Patents NOW!

[hikerhat]

Right. Because presidents make laws. Oh, wait, that's congress who does that. Also, single issue voting is a really bad idea. Look where we are today because of it.

Re:END Internet Patents NOW!

[That's Unpossible!]

However, for every voter who votes against software patents, there are 1000 more logic-impaired voters who will pick whichever candidate who says they'll simultaneously cut taxes and increase government handouts.

No, it's even worse than that... the lower income folks that want handouts will vote for whichever candidate says they want to tax the wealthy and give it back to the poor through "tax credits."

Class warfare ... ain't it lovely. (There's nothing wrong with earning a lot of money through good decision-making and hard work... someone please tell the republicrats.)

Re:END Internet Patents NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

So your platform should be that you will cut taxes and increase government handouts AND that you will pay for it by ending patents on software and internet related technology.

Since they are logic impaired anyway, they should buy this right?

A Nony Mouse

Re:END Internet Patents NOW!

[C10H14N2]

So I would imagine we'd just have to go and void all of these.

The term "snowball's chance in hell" comes to mind.

He won't get anywhere with this.

[Guyle]

It's most definitely a case of "Hey, I wonder if I can nab this now and later screw the world out of their money..." Though when it comes right down to the letter of his patent, how can he sue Network Solutions and Registrar.com? THEY'RE not the ones who's actually DOING the process - all they're doing is lining up domains with IP addresses. It's all of the individual websites and ISPs that are supposedly infringing his patent - at least, the ones that set up e-mail and websites the way he describes.

This case won't stand up in court, and for it to stand up at all, it would have to be against an ISP or organization that assigns URLs and e-mails in the precise fashion his patent states - like my old website (now defunct) guy.thetaint.org with my e-mail having had been guy@thetaint.org.

Severe eye-rolling taking place here

[DeadVulcan]

All of us here can see how asinine this is. Will our legal system?

Yes.

Next story?

Please do!

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

I'm going to patent a method of manually stimulating the male organ to orgasm. And watch out, I have lawyers.

Re:Please do!

[Linus Sixpack]

"And watch out, I have lawyers."

Are they cute? Do you have pictures????
They'd only be beating up busines.

Re:Please do!

[happyfrogcow]

SCO has prior art for "Method of using lawyers to stimulate the male organ to orgasm"

Re:Please do!

[meburke]

Yeah! You could call it a Fleshlight! OOoops! been done.... see www.pussyinacan.com.

Re:Please do!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah! You could call it a Fleshlight! OOoops! been done.... see www.pussyinacan.com.

Sooooo... Care to write a technology review of this "Pussy in a Can" you speak of? I take it you have, er, "intimate" knowledge of this device?

Re:Please do!

[Anonymous Coward]

way too much prior art dude!

Re:Please do!

[phigga]

I'm sure there's prior art.....

Re:Please do!

[imogthe]

Bah! That's nothing!

I'm going to patent "A method, or means, for achieving a goal, or a result, tangible or intangible, with or without the use, or aid, of something, or someone else"...

Re:Please do!

[ChartBoy]

watch out, I have lawyers A course of penicillin should cure that.

Pro bono publico?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, is this a cash grab, or does the lawyer in question perhaps realize the stupidity of all these registrations, and is suing the most prominent domain registrars to establish the point once and for all?

We did that back in '95...

[AtariDatacenter]

When I worked for an ISP many years ago (Galaxy Star Systems), we did that very thing with the domain "tulsa.net". We put their webpages at hostname.tulsa.net. Any email to hostname.tulsa.net was forwarded to their single email account.

We're talking 1995 technology here, and it was obvious at the time.

Re:We did that back in '95...

[adrianbaugh]

So write to them and point out that now might be a good time to submit some prior art (or do it yourself if you have enough solid evidence).

Re:We did that back in '95...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is about mail being sent to hostname@tulsa.net when the domain is hostname.tulsa.net. If you're catching-all (anything@hostname.tulsa.net), you have nothing to do with this.

Re:We did that back in '95...

[AtariDatacenter]

Actually, it did both. You're right. I wasn't specific enough. Email to anything@hostname.tulsa.net forwarded to hostname@tulsa.net. Their 'invention' is just a subset of what we did.

Re:We did that back in '95...

[Anonymous Coward]

whoa. I remember galstar back then. I went to OSU...

Actually, I owned galstar. Sorry!

Those were the days.. dial up lines from college into galstar.. cracking password files.. *sigh*

life was simple then

Well if that is the case...

[Savage-Rabbit]

...perhaps he can blackmail these guys out of their doman, it would be the perfect one for him.

USPS Needs a Major Overhaul

[pcause]

Thi is yet the latest example pointing out that the USPS is woefully ill equipped to deal with software and Internet relted papents. A completely new process and new staff are going to be required, but who in COngress will take up the cause. It will take some large companies (IBM, Cisco, Microsoft) banding together and raising a ruckus to fix this.

Re:USPS Needs a Major Overhaul

[Queuetue]

What do you have against the the postal service?

Re:USPS Needs a Major Overhaul

[FooAtWFU]

On the contrary. If the USPS did handle patents, then we wouldn't have this problem, because they'd mangle or lose all the paperwork in transit.

Re:USPS Needs a Major Overhaul

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. Overhaul.
Step#1: Drop a 1 megaton nuke on USPTO.
Step#2: Think of something COMPLETELY different.

Re:USPS Needs a Major Overhaul

[Anonymous Coward]

The United States Postal Service? I guess they could have handled the mailed applications and subsequent correspondence.

Those bastards!

Re:USPS Needs a Major Overhaul

[soulsteal]

As the grandparent posted, the US Postal Service is woefully understaffed and ill-equipped to deal with Intarweb and softwarez related papents.

Boy am I tired of these "stupid patent" stories

[hey!]

I think the message is pretty clear after all these stories: a lot of really dumb patents are granted.

Is this just a minor side effect of a basically beneficial system that will simply work itself out as the patents are challenged? Or does this have to be fought?

If this is something that needs fighting, it would be good to know who is doing this, either on a grassroots level or as elected officials.

Re:Boy am I tired of these "stupid patent" stories

[Java Pimp]

Is this just a minor side effect of a basically beneficial system that will simply work itself out as the patents are challenged? Or does this have to be fought?

This is a new business model. (I probably should patent it but there's too much prior art... Wait, the USPTO will never notice... brb!)

Basically, some company or person is granted a rediculous patent and then sues the bejesus out of everyone. Most people will settle paying up the licensing fees since it's cheaper than laywers and court costs.

It's not going to work itself out since too many people are making money at it and it costs more to fight it than it does to just accept it. Yeah, we are in desparate need of reform...

Re:Boy am I tired of these "stupid patent" stories

[Halo1]

Is this just a minor side effect of a basically beneficial system that will simply work itself out as the patents are challenged? Or does this have to be fought?

Software/business method patents are not a basically beneficial system. That's agreed upon by most people, organisations and studies, from the FTC to even the owners of several mp3 patents, the Fraunhofer Institute. Even Andy Grove (you know, the guy that runs Intel) recently said they have a lot of negative effects (page 11 of the transcript, near the bottom).

If this is something that needs fighting, it would be good to know who is doing this, either on a grassroots level or as elected officials.

In Europe, it's mainly FFII that does this (along with the majority of the European Parliament, which completetly turned around a proposed directive to legalise software patents into one that explicitly forbids them).

In the US, I guess it's mainly the EFF and FSF, but I'm not very familiar with the situation there.

Re:Boy am I tired of these "stupid patent" stories

[Anonymous Coward]

Feel welcome to leave Slashdot or you could just turn off the patent pending stories. It's not hard. Check under preferences. I bet you could turn them off in less time then you spent whining about them.

Re:Boy am I tired of these "stupid patent" stories

[AnotherBlackHat]

Is this just a minor side effect of a basically beneficial system ...

I challenge the implicit assumption that patents are basically beneficial.

... that will simply work itself out as the patents are challenged? Or does this have to be fought?

The are other options; we could learn to live with the consequences instead of fighting it.
Or we could try to mitigate the damage, or reduce the quantity of stupid patents.

I favor mitigation in the form of a law which prevents patents from applying to anything which is downloadable.
I'd also support a requirement that patents be "easy to read and understand" so they could be invalidated if you could prove they were not.

-- this is not a .sig

MUhahahaha

[Polkyb]

I wonder if the world is ready for my patent, yet. Placing one foot in front of the other repetitively and thus providing a means of forward motion

This time next year I could be a millionaire

Re:MUhahahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not scared. I've patented the important and innovative "change leg" phase between each repetition. Anyone wanting to use your IP productively will have to license mine too.

Re:MUhahahaha

[Polkyb]

But I have the telephone number of a SCO lawyer!!!!!

Re:MUhahahaha

[CmdrGravy]

All this would as nothing without paying to use my patent for "balancing on one or more legs removing the need to use one or more arms in contact with a surface when stationery or moving"

Re:MUhahahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, this idea looks good on paper....

Oh the irony

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.'

You know what's funny? the USPTO is supposed to do prior art research to grant patents. Well guess where you can find prior art for this method? at the USPTO itself. Here for example:

estta.uspto.gov is a live server, and
estta@uspto.gov is a valid email address at USPTO.

You gotta love these guys ...

Re:Oh the irony

[mr.capaneus]

estta.uspto.gov is a live server, and
estta@uspto.gov is a valid email address at USPTO.

Except that the patent this post is about would be concerned with the following addresses:
estta.uspto.gov
something@estatta.uspto.gov

The patent is still stupid, though.

Re:Oh the irony

[Valdrax]

Well, not that there isn't prior art for this out there somewhere, but are you sure that both that domain and that address existed before the patent was filed in 2000?

Re:Oh the irony

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that the patent this post is about would be concerned with the following addresses:
estta.uspto.gov
something@estatta.usp to.gov

Actually, no it wouldn't. The original poster was right.

estta.uspto.gov
estatta@uspto.gov

Re:Oh the irony

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

True enough. But then if they had known about their own pages, they wouldn't have granted the patent, since they themselves infringe it. They could have to pay damages to the guy who got the patent granted ;-)

Re:Oh the irony

[geoffspear]

estta.uspto.gov is a live server, and estta@uspto.gov is a valid email address at USPTO.

Except that the patent this post is about would be concerned with the following addresses:
estta.uspto.gov
something@estatta.uspto.gov

I realize no one ever bothers to RTFA, but if you're going to correct someone who did read it with incorrect information, you're just making yourself look stupid.

It says, right up there in the quoted part in the summary, a URL of the form name.subdomain.domain, email address of the form name@subdomian.domain.

Re:Oh the irony

[codegen]

Great pointer, but was it a valid server and email address
prior to 1999?

Re:Oh the irony

[Anonymous Coward]

"I realize no one ever bothers to RTFA, but if you're going to correct someone who did read it with incorrect information, you're just making yourself look stupid."

Actually, he's right. It says name@subdomain.domain

subdomain.domain != uspto.gov
subdomain.domain == estta.uspto.gov (estta.uspto.gov being a subdomain of the domain uspto.gov)

but the e-mail addres is estta@uspto.gov. .gov is not a domain!

Re:Oh the irony

[geoffspear]

.gov is a domain, and if you'd actually read the patent's claims, you'd see the explanation that the URL and the email address are the same except that '@' is changed to '.'.

Of course, the fact that foo.bar.baz is not, in fact, a URL, may make the entire patent completely worthless. Someone should file an identical patent but stick http:// in at the front and then sue these people.

no, i didnt rtfa

[JeanBaptiste]

Is there any chance this lawyer fellow is doing this to point out how stupid some of our patent laws are?

granted he is a lawyer and is probably just doing it for the money...

Well...

[TheSpoom]

I'll just link to my previous comment ;^)

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool ... " a method for gaining Slashdot karma on duplicate story."

You should patent it.

Date problem

[adrianbaugh]

Given your friend ran for office in 2000 and this patent was filed in 1999 that doesn't constitute prior art. It just means that your friend might have been violating the patent.

I think it's stupid and it sucks but that's the worst-thought-out "reason" for having a patent overturned I've heard since... well, for a good few days at least.

\. Duplicate Detection System (SDDDS)

[commonloon]

Danger Wil Robinson Danger.

Duplicate stories are increasing N^2, can some innovative programmer find a way to make (N-C)^2 so we all can rest peacefully in the bliss of a job well done.

Contact Info

[Anonymous Coward]

Get angry, folks, and tell these people what you think. Hell hath no fury like a Slashdotter.

Frank Weyer,
Beverly Hills patent attorney
also the founder of EveryMD.com

EveryMD.com
323/874-2567
866-EveryMD (866/383-7963)
fweyer@everymd.com

His address:
264 S. La Cienega Blvd., #1224, Beverly Hills, CA 90211

You Americans!

[CAB]

When will you Americans stand up to USPTO and the related legislation?

Not that the system is much better in EU or other places, but practice in this matter seems to have a tendency to spread from the US to EU and so forth. ;-)

Re:You Americans!

[Halo1]

Not that the system is much better in EU or other places

At this time, the legislation *is* better in Europe and if the Council of Ministers takes into account the standpoint of the European Pariament, it will get even more clear and better.

s, but practice in this matter seems to have a tendency to spread from the US to EU and so forth. ;-)

That's indeed correct, one of the biggest lobbyists for introducing swpats in Europe is the USPTO. They even admit as much on their own website:

pursue substantive harmonization goals that will strengthen the rights of American intellectual property holders

However, the "details of this action paper are by their nature sensitive and confidential, and therefore not appropriate for publication."

Re:You Americans!

[jdgeorge]

When will you Americans stand up to USPTO and the related legislation?

Never! We know our system is corrupt, but it's OUR system, so don't try to confuse us with your superiour European "logic" or "reason". And if you try to force us to improve our broken system, we'll make it worse, just to spite you.

We need a new law tool:

[Anonymous Coward]

"Case dismissed, suing party shot for being total asshole."

Re:We need a new law tool:

[tassii]

Supreme Court ruled that you can't execute the Mentally Handicapped.

Re:Oh no

[adrianbaugh]

Only if they owned the domain and were assigning the user.subdomain portion. If, however, I signed up for a somedomain.net account and got given a website at http://adrianbaugh.somedomain.net then I couldn't be sued because it wasn't me that assigned adrianbaugh.somedomain.net, it was the admin software belonging to somedomain.net; they would have to be sued.

worthwile reading

[Pivot]

While America works to protect intellectual property, everyone else is innovating.

Re:will it what?

[Luyseyal]

I missed the sentence between "My friend who ran for political office in 2000 used this exact naming scheme for his web site." and "Will our legal system?".

-l

The McDonalds lawsuit was not frivolous

[Anonymous Coward]

McFacts

Everyone thinks the McDonalds lawsuit was an example of how litigation has gotten out of control. Read the site and then tell me how frivolous third degree burns are.

Re:The McDonalds lawsuit was not frivolous

[Anonymous Coward]

I call McGodwin!

Re:The McDonalds lawsuit was not frivolous

[hesiod]

This is all offtopic, I know. So sue me (no, not you, SCO)

McLie #1: They have stated thath they did this because they received more complaints with lowered temperatures than they did with the high ones. They are in the business of pleasing the majority of their customers.

McLie #2: Same as #1, basically. 700 incidents out of the millions of cups of coffee they sell EVERY DAY. That's a pretty good record.

McLie #3: 3rd degree burns to her groin? Well, the "groinal" skin is more sensitive than much other skin, so WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU KEEP COFFEE THERE, not to mention the same coffee on, say, your hand, would not have caused the same burns.

McLie #4: Had she not been a fucking idiot (see "groin != cup holder"), she would not have had those injuries. What happened to survival of the fittest? The unfit hire lawyers.

McLie #5: Same statement as #1 & #2 -- If you are trying to make a point that is "obvious," don't use the same point three times.

McLie #6: is a statement of the result of the jury. The jury is only allowed to hear information both sides lawyers' allow to be said, so a jury's verdict does not show the reality of the case (even though its legal finality)

McLie #7: This is a counter-argument, pointing out that the old woman didn't deserve the full amount she got.

McLie #8: This isn't even an argument, it's a summary and incidental facts that only matter because the person spilled coffee in her own lap.

The last sentence basically says "be careful." If that stupid bitch had been careful at first, she wouldn't have had any problems. No, this is still a case of someone suing due to their own stupidity.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of McCrappy's, but I hate frivolous-lawsuit apologists more. Geez, use your McBrain, if you have one.

Re:The McDonalds lawsuit was not frivolous

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is not "I spilled coffee in my lap, so i should get money" the point is "McDonalds served coffee at an unsafe tempurature." What if she had *gasp* drank the coffee, you know like a normal use of the product and got burned inside her mouth and throat? I suppose since the throat is more sensitive than say your hand, it's still not valid, right? I shouldn't have to wait 20 minutes so I can drink coffee. And it's not a preference, it's a matter of safety. McDonald's served their coffee at an unsafe temperature.

Perhaps the solution is to sue the patent office

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone ever tried that? It would appear the patent office is not providing the service it advertises. In fact, one could argue the patent office isn't even providing the service at all. Of course lawyers may argue otherwise, but when the US patent office fails so miserably to catch large glaring errors like these, it is a disservice to everyone.

People were doing this in the dark Ages

[kbsingh]

hey,

i have clients who were using naming conventions like this in 1995. email add's like name1@london.domain.com and name@sydney.domain.com were being used in those days as well.

I cant imagine how someone can actually enfore a patent of this nature.

Look at most medium to large scale companies that had email working then ( lots did ) and you will find this is quite a popular naming convention. Some even had subdomains on these... eg Firstname.Lastname@prod.london.company.com

Re:People were doing this in the dark Ages

[Anonymous Coward]

I HAVE PRIOR ART ...

Back in 1997 I was working for Andersen Consulting, the then global consulting company now known as Accenture.

All email addresses (over 50,000 staff) were of the form firstname.lastname@andersen.com, or firstname.initial.lastname@andersen.com in the case of name-clashes.

For prior art you simply need to look at any Andersen Consulting business card from that time (the best way to establish "prior" would be to get the card of someone who departed before the patent filing date .. as nobody gets a NEW business card after they have quit the company!)

I am sure Accenture would gladly oblige in supporting this statement were the USPTO to get off their LAZY FSCKING ARSES and do some RESEARCH for once!

I am also sure that many thousands of corporations worldwide would also have similar prior art examples, and only one is needed, right?!

Re:People were doing this in the dark Ages

[sakshale]

Well, in 1985 people assigned to the NAS project at NASA's Ames research center received their e-mail at user@nas.nasa.gov and people assigned to Ames Research center were found at user@arc.nasa.gov.

I used to hang out on a BBS system around 1992 that had e-mail addresses in the form of user@host.city.state.us ... Is that enough levels of subdomaining for you?

Gee

[OpenSourceRulez]

Who can find prior art for this?

Gee especially since it was filed in 1999.

The USPTO needs to get their heads out of the sand.

Re:Gee

[Anonymous Coward]

How about IBM Australia, which has used addresses of the form ..

@au1.ibm.com

here for years now !

This is old.

[Random Guru 42]

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/15/234920 1&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=155&tid=95&tid=9 9

PRIOR ART: mailbank.com

[jtheory]

I missed posting on version one of this story (doing work... frustrating how that gets in the way) so I'm posting my prior art example here.

My personal email address for a long time has been with MailBank.com (now called NetIdentity.com). This is how their ENTIRE BUSINESS has been working since 1996: you pay them (yearly) to get email/web addresses using your last name; they own domains like smith.net, and they give you (supposing your name is bubba):
bubba@smith.net
http://bubba.smith.net

Again, the operative year is 1996 (I got my email from them in 97 or 98).

Re:PRIOR ART: mailbank.com

[WEFUNK]

I'm glad to see a direct example of prior art that seems to clearly invalidates this (although, I have not yet read the actual patent).

The thing is, I think an actual (logical vs. common sense) case can be easily made for obviousness, or at least one that should allow prior art examples of subdomains that don't necessarily match the e-mail name exactly (like many of the ones suggested before yours.

How?

Okay, I know its the process of issuing these names, but this patent seems to imply that it is perfectly fine to issue someone:

bubba@smith.net
and http://bubba1.smith.net

however,

bubba@smith.net
and http://bubba.smith.net

is illegal.

And what about:

www@mit.edu
and http://www.mit.edu

or

shop@ibm.com
and http://shop.ibm.com

I just can't imagine a judge that would be so stupid that they could not see how obviously stupid such a restriction is that makes it illegal for people to name their computer or subdomain the same thing as one of their e-mail addresses or aliases. Otherwise we'll have to set up a national registry of e-mail addresses to make sure you don't use the same name as your subdomain, and let's create software that doesn't allow terms like www to be used as a valid e-mail address while we're at it.

This tops the method of swinging sideways on a swing in my books...

wasn't the .name tld working by this principle?

[Anonymous Coward]

already ?

Prior Art

[djb]

www.netidentity.com have been doing this since at least 1998 when I got my account with them.

novel inventions

[dresseduptoday]

I don't know when name@subdomain.domain addresses became the norm, but my first e-mail address, from 1988, was formed just like that. Somehow I don't think I was the first one ever. _ /Bjorn.

Semicolon.

[I am Jack's username]

assigning each member of said group an e-mail address of the form "name@subdomain.domain;"

If only the spammers would use this and add semicolons at the end of all the addresses.

It is Functional NOT Innovative

[leoaugust]

As long as I can remember I got addresses from Hypermart like:

• testpharm.hypermart.net (I got it in 1998-1999)
• dthomas9.hypermart.net

and the email address was accordingly

name@testpharm.hypermart.net

Also as far as I can remember Yahoo had addresses that I could use to go directly to the relevant page rather than going via the home page - like

• finance.yahoo.com
• my.yahoo.com
• news.yahoo.com
• etc

And /. has addresses like

• yro.slashdot.org
• ask.slashdot.org
• developers.slashdot.org

These are some of the applications I remember offhand, and I am sure there has to be stuff like this that was there before this patent was filed.

As it is, it is pretty stupid to give a patent for something that is quite functional - but is it innovative ? And worse, should you be able to prevent others from using it without paying extortion money ?

Re:It is Functional NOT Innovative

[codegen]

It only impacts the patent if there are email addresses of the form:

• testpharm@hypermart.net
• dthomas9@hypermart.net

name@testpharm.hypermart.net only has relevance if there was also a website with the address name.testpharm.hypermart.net.

Similarly, the yahoo references are only relevant if yahoo also has an email addresses:

• finance@yahoo.com
• my@yahoo.com
• news@yahoo.com

Now if the latter is true and there are such email addresses at yahoo, then we definitely have a case of prior art

+1, Funny

[Valdrax]

With enough of these, the feds will be forced to re-examine the system.

*sniff* [Wipes tear from eye] Man, you're such a kidder.

The government will never reign in one of its few offices that actually has a positive revenue flow.

Stallman

[Mazzie]

When Stallman reads that he might just spontaneously combust.

Joking aside, I would be VERY interested to hear his comments about this considering the whole Amazon boycott, etc.

Yeah, what a moron

[Mr. Underbridge]

Given your friend ran for office in 2000 and this patent was filed in 1999 that doesn't constitute prior art. It just means that your friend might have been violating the patent.

I'm sure his friend will thank him for turning him in. ;)

I thought you couldn't be nailed for vioaling a *pending* patent (this one was granted in 2003).

new patent

[xenoputtss]

What we need to do is file a patent on a system of patenting different things. Of course this patent would have to be exactly what our patent office does. That way we can sue the patent office, and that will basicly force a patent reform.

Here's some prior art

[Plasmic]

I setup a service just like this in January of 1999. At first glance, it looks a lot like prior art. Here's a description from the web site (archived here):

"We can offer a free sub domain to anyone who wants it ... As an added bonus we are also giving you a FREE e-mail fowarder on the domain you choose. So if you go register http://yourname.overthelimit.com you ALSO get yourname@overthelimit.com"

Of course, we did it for several different domains for free, since DNS and MX records don't cost anything. Hmm... what to do?

Re:Here's some prior art

[REBloomfield]

We're having this argument a few sub posts up... it's similar, but not actually perfect to the patented name.subdomain.domain one. Not that it makes it any better mind....

sue the uspto

[pitc]

has anyone tried this? is it possible to sue the patent office saying they're being 'negligent in the duties' or something?

what the hell is a "method" anyways?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm getting sick and tired of people patenting "methods."

I mean honestly... all this guy patented was COMMON FUCKING SENSE.

This is like patenting the method of efficiently packing a suitcase by folding clothes to save space. When this guy loses in court he should be forced to pay lawyers fees for the other side and fined for being a moron and wasting the courts time.

New patent!

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick! Someone patent a method for assigning a person's name to a telephone number such that *if you actually dial that number, you can reach that person*.

How is this actually worthy of a patent?

Re:DUPEs @ 56K

[virtcert]

Well, Taco did you admit he was reading this over 56K, didn't he.

Who can read all the posts at 56K? :-)

- bg

What I want to patent...

[atcurtis]

What I want to patent is a method for self-identification and verification.

What is claimed

1. That an individual may identify themselves.
2. That the identity of the individual is made regardless of wether the individual is present or otherwise.
3. The individual itentifies themselves by a mark or impression.
4. The individuals unique mark or impression may be stored by another individual for verification purposes.
5. The individuals unique mark or impression may be represented on any media by either descriptive or literal means.
6. The individual may make his unique mark or impression by using a stylus or other instrument so that the mark or impression be recorded onto the storage media.

Hmm... I think 25 cents for every instance where this happens is a fair levy for such an ingenious way. Just imagine: People can promise to pay someone something without actually having to be there, they can just send the promise in the post and the bank will verify it (after sending me 25 cents for the privilege)
And instead of carrying money around, you can just hand out promises for money...

This will revolutionize consumer-vendor interaction!

RIAA

[Anonymous Coward]

I love it! What's the RIAA's phone number. Let's file a lawsuit!

D'oh!

[Decaffeinated Jedi]

Aww, man... and I just had business cards printed up with my email address.

Question

[Starji]

What if this guy just said "No, noone can use my 'invention', you all have to change the way you do things" Would we have to figure out a new method to do this sort of thing? It seems kinda damaging if that is the case (although it would probably send a big enough wake up call to fix the patent system)

USPTO and oursourcing

[axxackall]

Each time after such news I think that USPTO is contributing to job outsourcing from USA to overseas just together with labor price differences. If US citizens should blame someones then they should blame themselves for electing a gang of morons to represent their goverment.

Hey, Americans, wake up until it's too late! You should upgrade your govermental system or stop expecting any good changes in your life! Your economy is stagnating more and more, and USPTO is not the last contributor to it!

Re:USPTO and oursourcing

[LordK2002]

If US citizens should blame someones then they should blame themselves for electing a gang of morons to represent their goverment.

They didn't.

K
</semi-humour>

Are we missing something here?

[Anonymous Coward]

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;"

My understanding is that if you have a URL: john.earthlink.net then having an email address john@earthlink.net is not infringing. However, his patent states that it needs to be in the format name.subdomain.domain. IMHO, that should affect a URL like john.mail.earthlink.net with an email address of john@mail.earthlink.net.

Am I missing something here?

I've been infringing for years now I guess.

[xgdfalcon]

I've done that for family and customers for 8 years now. Haven't Universities done this since forever?

patent every rfc?

[drteknikal]

Are we reaching a point where every RFC should be submitted as a patent application, just to prevent others from doing it than suing everyone who follows a standard?

Re: bribes?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about just bribing the patent officer?

(Didn't Einstein work for a patent office? Makes ya wonder, eh?)

Only if your website was also.

[AzrealAO]

http://bmgoldne.artsci.wustl.edu.

Don't Forget

[pastpolls]

As absurd as this is, this guy is an attorney. He has the knowledge and ability to fight this as long as he likes. He can also file any number of countless lawsuits and fight them all himself thus costing millions of dollars in attorney fees to those he is sueing. He could make the arguement.. it is better to settle than fight this forever. Extorsion.

Technical

[Fryth]

I think the problem isn't so much with the number of patents, it's the lack of technical expertise on the part of the courts that allows these sorts of patents to get... well, patented in the first place. For the legal system to survive down the road, there is going to have to be a "tech court" where the judge, lawyers et al have concrete knowledge of internet and technology issues. But I'm not the first one who said that, by any means.

Terminology is wrong.

[Snags]

URLs don't come in the form "name.subdomain.domain". According to the syntax for URLs in RFC2396, a URI (or URL) starts with the scheme (like http). So the patent should be about assigning URLs in the form "http://name.subdomain.domain/". The patent should be summarily thrown out for being incorrect.

Joke?

[aprentic]

This guy can't really be serious. My bet is that this is either a joke or it's intended to make the patent office look silly.
Kind of like that "method for swininging sideways" patent.

My patent idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to patent a method for registering an idea or invention in a central location and assigning the idea/invention a unique reference ID number. I bet nobody has done this before.

Now I just need someone to sue....

Profit!

Come on...

[Xepherys2]

This guy is my hero. He's both:

a) Exploiting our lame legal system

and

b) Making a mockery of our lame legal system

Yeah, I'm impressed.

Um, Constitution says no.

[Speare]

The branch which is responsible for patents and copyrights and trademarks, according to the US Constitution, is Congress. How is Howie or "the Other JFK" gonna make a difference there?

Oh yeah, because ALL THREE branches of the US government now thumb their noses at the Constitution, and the entire system of checks and balances therein.

*groan*

[Cleon]

Maybe it's time to outsource the USPTO to India. Or at least hire them a techie or two who know WTF their ass from a hole in the ground.

Failing that, let's bring Homie the Clown out of retirement to take a little tour around the office.

*BONK* "Homie don't play dat!"

my god . . . .

[hellraizr]

I would say please shoot me, I've seen enough. but no, PLEASE SHOOT HIM! what a fucking tard! nnnGGRRRHHH I hope an army of geeks castrate's this bastard in public. fucking schiester. I know I'm trolling but man what the hell has the world come to!? post-dot-com has been one scam after another after another. extortion seems to be the only viable business model these days. Oh I can't wait for the feds to step in on this shit. I'll take regulation before I have to hear another one of these assholes trying to ruin the internet!

They HAVE!

[chaoticset]

All of us here can see how asinine this is. Will our legal system?

Didn't you read the summary? They're suing people. The legal system has noticed, and is doing all they can to get money from it.

Where do I pay my rolyalties to for...

[Anonymous Coward]

tim@the.bassetts.name
cori@the.bassetts.name

-- ridiculous

Tim Bassett

Different standards ...

[the bluebrain]

Reading this article, and the many that came before on the subject of "silly patents", the following occurs to me:

- There is hardly a workday that passes where I am not called upon to come up with several solutions to problems that, by the standards given by this patent, are eminently patentable.
- The solutions I come up with that make me happy, about once a fortnight - meaning that I drink my next cup of coffee with a smile - are pure fucking genius, and by rights ought to make me richer than Bill.
- The solutions I come up with, about once every couple of months, where I actually wave my co-workers over and go "lookit this!", and am disappointed if they don't go "neeet! ... so how's it done?", lift me into god-like status, blinding all those in a three-mile radius around me with my sheer brilliance.

The fact that the people in my immediate environment are not blind tells me either A) that, in fact, most people working in IT have gained this god-like status and are immune to the blinding light, or B) that the people who came up with those patents that do hit the /. frontpage belong to some arcane subgroup of humanity the members of which should strike through one, if not both of the "sapiens" following the implied description of their species.

/end rant

Well, at least guys like this make SCO feel less alone in the world.

Writ of mandamus

[Theatetus]

The process involves petitioning for a writ of mandamus (basically, suing a government office to get it to do its job). The court with jurisdiction would I believe be the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia.

I don't believe there is a way to file such a writ online, or indeed at all if YANAL.

Microsoft used this in their Exchange 5 tutorials

[EricTheRed]

When working in UK Local Government a few years ago, we moved from an obscure ICL email system to Exchange 5 then 5.5.

In the documentation that came with Exchange back then was an example on how exchange sites could be linked together with a domain structure identical to what you said. They even used london.domain.com and sydney.domain.com in those examples.

Manager order

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were an IT manager, would you encourage your employees to spend the day reading Slashdot?

Taco decided wouldn't as well.

Thx, Captian Obivous

[Anonymous Coward]

That sure was difficult to understand. Glad you explained it for me.

WOW!!! He Has A Website!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what the bandwidth charges are for his web site.

Only covers members of a licensed profession?

[busman]

I quote from the Patent: 6,671,714

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

IANAPL, but from the above, it appears that the patent only applys to "Licensed professionals" i.e drbob@doctors.com url: drbob.doctors.com .

and the patent does not apply to me, as the only licence I have is for driving :-)

Re:Only covers members of a licensed profession?

[rokzy]

no I think he means that the subdomain can EITHER be an actual group of people (e.g. a club) OR a "symbolic" group of people such as a profession.

Off-topic but I had to ask...

[WIAKywbfatw]

How is the Fahrenheit scale any better than the Celsius scale for weather forecasting if "it's in the 60s" is as accurate as you get? You do realise that there's less difference between 20 and 24 degrees Celcius than there is between 60 and 69 degrees Fahrenheit, don't you? (Also, you do realise that anyone familiar with Celsius weather forecasts knows the difference between 20 and 24 degrees?)

Besides, getting into a pissing contest about which is more useful when you're talking about weather forecasting - ie, when you're talking about not precisely accurate predictions of what the weather should be - is ridiculous.

Re:Off-topic but I had to ask...

[AKAImBatman]

Sorry, bub. YHBT. I just felt like poking at the original poster for knocking on Fahrenheit. When it comes down to it, it's just what you're used to. Unlike most Americans, I understand the Celsius system at an everyday use level. My wife is from Russia, so she prefers to use Celsius. As a result, I can think in both systems. My personal preference is still fahrenheit, but that doesn't change the fact that Celsius is just as viable a system. Similarly, your preference may be Celsius, but that doesn't mean that Fahrenheit isn't viable. It's not something that my wife and I argue about, and it shouldn't be something that anyone else argues about.

POA

[savagedome]

I am not sure if the following can be done but things are getting a little too annoying.

SCO still has the 250K bounty for the MyDoom creator. Let us all start digging around for clues and have a central repository somewhere for the info gathered. Finally, if we can really trace the idiot down, Slashdot.org (cmdrTaco??) can ask for the 250K check from Darl. Start an Ask Slashdot thread about the ideas that we should look into patenting that are already out there but haven't been patented yet. Highest moderated ideas get a consideration. The money can be used to file the patents/lawyer fees/misc etc.

What does this do? Give more assurance to the rest of the world that OSS is not a bad community and we did help in tracking down the creator of MyDoom sucker. Get money from SCO!! And importantly, if we do get the patents, leave them in the open to be used (not abused).

Am I talking out of my a$$? Probably yes. But SCO, MyDoom, Patent Office et al are getting too irritating.

The problem is the US legal system will work...

[iPaul]

The author asks what the legal system will do. He files suit against Register and Network Solutions. He asks for a $20,000 licensing fee, which they will agree to because their attorney's don't wipe their own ass for less than $500 an hour. They could win - after $500,000 in legal costs - and gain not much.

Even if prior art is found, patents are assumed by courts to be of good quality. So, even if someone argues, successfully, prior art, some of the patent claims could still be used against other defendants. Basically, this is legal extortion by the patent holder and a make-work program for attourneys. And guess what! Attourneys are one of the most powerful and well funded political organizations in the United States!

So yes, keep the PTO broken - so the legal system will "work" just fine. Where's my LSAT prep book?

Re:The problem is the US legal system will work...

[pclminion]

He asks for a $20,000 licensing fee, which they will agree to because their attorney's don't wipe their own ass for less than $500 an hour.

Here's something I've pondered before: what if there was some very intelligent, extremely rich (say, by birth) individual who decided to become a lawyer. Suppose this person was an extraordinary lawyer, and took on all kinds of high-profile cases, winning most of them. And this person did this all for free, because he/she was already loaded.

What would eventually happen to this person? Would he/she turn up dead pretty quick?

Re:The problem is the US legal system will work...

[multimed]

"...Basically, this is legal extortion by the patent holder and a make-work program for attourneys. And guess what! Attourneys are one of the most powerful and well funded political organizations in the United States!..."

Not that there aren't other concerns with the various other candidates, but if this is an important enough issue to you, you might be interested in knowing that there is one 2004 Presidential candidate who gets the overwhelming majority (over half) of his funding from lawyers & their lobbyist groups. As of Monday here's what the following presidential candidates had received from the lawyers & lobbyist sector:

Candidate Lawyers Total Percentage
John Edwards $7,487,740 $13,991,880 53.51%
Dick Gephardt $2,089,010 $10,840,983 19.27%
John Kerry $3,318,149 $17,225,964 19.26%
Joe Lieberman $1,597,146 $11,585,316 13.79%
George W. Bush $6,331,079 $84,596,875 7.48%
Howard Dean $ 983,981 $25,385,265 3.88%

Source: http://www.opensecrets.org/

Details

[KevMar]

The patent does not cover just name@subdomain.domain

Reading the details, the name@subdomain.domain must match a name.subdomain.domain with name being the same for a user and each user has a unique name.

With that said, I dont see how they can sue the sites that sell domains. The liability should sit with the purchasers because they are the ones that manage the subdomains.

A Dupe Story with Dupe Threads

[arrogance]

Usual /. I guess. It's kind of funny though. Complete dupe story (from almost 2 weeks ago), topped with the usual discussion of the McDonald's coffee caper. So is this recursive duping, or just plain funny?

Here are some of the selections rehashing the same tired arguments (I only took one post per story):
McDonald's Thread
McDonald's Thread
McDonald's Thread
McDonald's Thread
McDonald's Thread
McDonald's Thread

And they go on and on for pages. Is there no way to "pin" conversations on /., like in a forum? So we don't have to make the same arguments every time someone refers to some Zeitgeist thing?

USPTO is hiring computer science examiners

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at usajobs.opm.gov and type in 'patent'.

AHA! I HAVE FOUND YOU, THE PAPER

[Anonymous Coward]

One example of prior art

[BigDish]

I know this patent is obvious, but here's another example of prior art. At my college most departments give students email accounts on their own servers For example, my email account is %username%@it.rit.edu and my department's web page is http://it.rit.edu Other departments do it also, such as the CS department. Best I can tell this system was put in place in early 1999, predating this patent by 4 years.

They are hiring CS people right now

[Anonymous Coward]

go look at usajobs.opm.gov
and type in 'patent' into the search

here's another example of prior art

[Phil Karn]

Another good example of directly relevant prior art that should completely bust this patent is the ampr.org domain, which has existed since the mid 1980s. AMPR stands for AMateur Packet Radio, and domain names in that zone are all of the form "personal_callsign.AMPR.ORG", e.g., ka9q.ampr.org. Until I stopped using that name because of spam, one would send me mail as karn@ka9q.ampr.org.

Re:Microsoft used this in their Exchange 5 tutoria

[kbsingh]

oh man!

Trust me when I say this : I had nothing to do with the docs there, or for that matter, ever had anything to do with Microsoft itself!

And i dont use exchange!

.gov is not a domain?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a top-level domain. Look it up.

Just remove Timothy from your 'Author' preferences

[kramit]

Today I remove Timothy from my list of Authors.

Anyone else notice that most of the dupes and suspicious stories are posted by Timothy?

Or, is this really old news too?

YOU CAN RUN BUT CANNOT HIDE, THE PAPER

[Anonymous Coward]

Summary:
thepaper@royallibrary.gov.uk + wildcard@thepaper.royallibrary.gov.uk + selling this "feature" as a service == grounds for lawsuit.

Congratulations on patenting RFC 1034!

[mpaque]

He's managed to get a patent for RFC 1034.

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1034.html

Hmmm. That RFC is from 1987. Could it be... prior art?

I think we can safely ignore this USPTO faux pas.

Here's what we need to fix this

[fudgefactor7]

Get Congress to empower and create a department that has the authority and right to examine any patent submitted to it and if found "abusive" (defined later) then this said department would nullify the patent--with no refund of filing fee applicable.

Then all we'd need to do is submit bad patents to this department, who would be bound by charter to investigate, and then since this one is such a freaking no brainer, this patent would be nullified without problem.

Hell, all we need is to write all our Congresspeople and tell them to do just that, and pow! No more BS patents.

What it will take to challenge

[waterbear]

USPTO, you have pissed us off too many times.
Prepare to be slashdotted.

This sure does look to me like yet another patent without any apparent ingenuity at all.

But before getting ignored by the USPTO, /.ers might like to note first, that the filing date of the application leading to this wretched patent was Nov 23, 1999, so anything done in 2000 can't be relied on as prior art.

Second, the subject of the patent appears to be the coordinated allocation of email addresses and matching web addresses, such as an email address of willrobinson@physicians.org, along with a web address of http://willrobinson.physicians.org.

While I would personally agree that this is a case of 'Eureka - not!', that won't cut any ice at the USPTO. In reality, evidence of relevant prior art would be needed to take this out.

The prior art would include (a) anything that was used in the US or published in print before 23 Nov 1998, (b) anything used in the US or published in print in the period 11/23/98-11/22/99 -- except insofar as the 'inventors' don't prove that they 'invented' it first, and (c) anything 'invented' in the US before the named inventors did it, whenever that was.

-wb-

Re:What it will take to challenge

[rifter]

"USPTO, you have pissed us off too many times.
Prepare to be slashdotted."

This sure does look to me like yet another patent without any apparent ingenuity at all.

But before getting ignored by the USPTO, /.ers might like to note first, that the filing date of the application leading to this wretched patent was Nov 23, 1999, so anything done in 2000 can't be relied on as prior art.

Second, the subject of the patent appears to be the coordinated allocation of email addresses and matching web addresses, such as an email address of willrobinson@physicians.org, along with a web address of http://willrobinson.physicians.org.

While I would personally agree that this is a case of 'Eureka - not!', that won't cut any ice at the USPTO. In reality, evidence of relevant prior art would be needed to take this out.

The prior art would include (a) anything that was used in the US or published in print before 23 Nov 1998, (b) anything used in the US or published in print in the period 11/23/98-11/22/99 -- except insofar as the 'inventors' don't prove that they 'invented' it first, and (c) anything 'invented' in the US before the named inventors did it, whenever that was.

-wb-

Firstly, this story is a dupe. Secondly, as was pointed out in the first story, what you (and the patent) describe has been common practice since the beginning of DNS, so it should not be a problem finding prior art. What is a problem is that the USPTO seems so intent on allowing clueless morons make such important decisions about technology patents. They really need to be reviewed by people who are "sufficiently skilled in the art" so that patents on thinsg which are obvious to such people (or known by them to be previously done / common practice ) will no longer be granted.

I am getting really tired of this pattern of

1) Find something a lot of people are already doing

2) File for a patent describing just that

3) Sue everyone

4) ???

5) Profit!

We need to make doing this a federal crime punishable by hundreds of years in pound-me-in-the-ass prison or else we will continue to suffer the consequences.

Re:What it will take to challenge

[JofCoRe]

This patent is fucking ridiculous.. How can the USPTO actually approve something like this? I sure hope that his patent gets struck down quickly in court, because if not, I'm an infringer. I own the domain that corresponds to my last name, and I've set up email addresses for people in my family in this exact fashion.

Like, I have: wife@myname.com and she also has wife.myname.com as a web site...

Unfortunately, I didn't register my domain until a few years ago (not as far back as '99), so I can't be counted as prior art I guess.

It just baffles my mind that they can actually award a patent on something like this....

Re:What it will take to challenge

[tonyr60]

Well this appears to be an example oif prior art...

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0799.txt?number=0799

And dated September 1981!

Re:What it will take to challenge

[cptgrudge]

I think the 4) in your post is

4) Win lawsuits

Re:What it will take to challenge

[Adam9]

What about the U.S. Senate? They have senatorsname.senate.gov and the e-mail address to match that.

Re:What it will take to challenge

[Christianfreak]

Well a group of Linux geeks from my college were doing this in 1997. So this is completely ridiculous.

Re:What it will take to challenge

[lakeland]

In '99 you say? How about this...

I first started using the net in '94. My ISP was sans.vuw.ac.nz. Anyway, everyone was given a free internet account with no monthly fees, but charged by the byte for any traffic at US 10c/MB. Hmm, seems rates have dropped :-)

Every subscriber was also given their own IP (IIRC, mine was 202.20.76.83), and their own matching email address and domainname (lakeland.sans.vuw.ac.nz,lakeland@sans.vuw.ac.nz).

Re:What it will take to challenge

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite. The US Senate has name.senate.gov and senator@name.senate.gov rather than name@senate.gov. Slight difference, but possibly enough for the USPTO.

Re:What it will take to challenge

[aastanna]

We need to make doing this a federal crime punishable by hundreds of years in pound-me-in-the-ass prison or else we will continue to suffer the consequences.

That, or maybe OSPTO should be financially acountable for the damages caused by bad patents. When something rediculous like this happens OSPTO should pay the lawyer bills for the defendants, that'd teach them to be more careful.

Re:What it will take to challenge

[Adam9]

I saw that too when I made the post, I just assumed that senatorname@senate.gov would also work. Apparently not..

:
156.33.203.10 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 5.1.1 ... User unknown
Giving up on 156.33.203.10.

Next logical step...

[qeveren]

The USPTO is broken 'cause the government is using it for a cash cow, right? What I don't get is, why don't they just automate the whole thing and have done?

I mean, it seems they'll okay pretty much anything as a patent, now-a-days, so why not fire all those patent inspectors that they have to pay wages to, and just put up a website where anybody can patent anything they like, all they need is a credit card. Phat l00tz all around!

After all, it's the courts who should be deciding if patents are valid, not the USPTO, right? :P

Don't Blame the USPTO

[pbrinich]

Yes, this is a ridiculous patent, I don't think it'll have a snowball's chance in court. It's not the USPTO's job to solely determine the vailidity of a patent. That's what our legal system is for.

Re:Don't Blame the USPTO

[iPaul]

Does insanity run in your family?

Patents are not issued in a court of law and patents are generally deemed by courts to be of good quality (well researched, for example). By giving the patent holder the benefit of the doubt, courts require the defendant to do all the work of invalidating the patent. That will cost somebody a lot of money.

If the patent office does this 200 times a year, at a cost of $500,000 to defend the suit (a number that stuck in my head but can't remember the source), then that's $100,000,000 in totally unnecessary economic damage. Add to that, the number of smaller defendants who can't afford to fight the patent and wind up settling for tens of thousands of dollars - or shutting down their business. (Pan IP as an example).

Add to that the fact that courts have to handle 200 additional patent law suits, creating backlog for other legitimate cases. The incompetance, with regard to software and method patents, the USPTO has displayed is costing real people real money!

If this were an isolated event, we'd all have a good chuckle and leave it at that. But this is ongoing, habitual behavior. It shows a lack of dilligence, competance, or even an intrest in doing their job well.

Re:Don't Blame the USPTO

[qeveren]

It's not the USPTO's job to solely determine the vailidity of a patent. That's what our legal system is for. Yes it is. That's what those idiots are being paid to do, not rubber-stamp everything that's put in front of them. The courts are supposed to be a last resort.

Way Too Obvious To Be Upheld

[fiveRocketCars]

I'm using this naming convention right now for my family website. And I would have used it as soon as i got my family domain name in 1999, had i had access to change my DNS records.

I mean if you have a family website and you want to give each family member their own personal area, wouldn't http://jane.doe.com and http://john.doe.com, etc be an obvious way to do it? Of course with emails being john@doe.com and jane@doe.com???

This patent doesn't need prior art to be overturned.....a reasonable person would easily come up with this on their own as i have.

Future "Ask Slashdot"

[mopslik]

USPTO writes: "We have received an application for WidgetX from a company in California. Should we accept it?"

Surely that should cut down the time.

hasn't the kid suffered enough?

[bilbobuggins]

Dear Mr.Rowe

It has come to our attention that your email address mike@mikerowe.non-copyright-infringing-domain.com is in violation of our newly granted patent.
Please cease use or pay the fee of $1,000,000,000.

Sincerely,
CA into-the-fire dept.

Domain Name Scheme is 2000+ years old

[Anonymous Coward]

And Robert begot Jacob and Jacob Begot Lisa and Lisa begot Tommy.

tommy.lisa.jacob.robert

Or for geography nuts remember this song

I live in a house in a city, in state, in country, on a continent, on a planet.... or

1234 Main St. Saint Paul, MN, USA, Earth

I mean prior art how about this history of earth. The patent claims the organization of individual under domain and subdomain. We have that for years. Look at the military structures. How phucktarded(TM) do you have to be in order to be blind enough to award the patent.

This post Copyrighted 2004.

Innovative

[jsebrech]

Now the lawyers are getting patents. This was to be expected. If they have to wait for some semi-fraudulent IP business to hire them, they might have to wait several weeks or even months. This way, they get immediate and full benefit from their lowlife tactics. Ingenious.

Method for stopping stupid patents

[Dashing Leech]

I'm thinking of patenting:

"A Process to Patent Methods that are Obvious"

"A Process to Patent Methods that have Prior Art"

Then, all of these people will be violating my patents when they do these sorts of things. It'll stop the stupid patents and/or make me rich. Either way, I'm happy.

If it doesn't pan out, I might follow up by patenting "A Method for Patenting Inventions". That should shut the whole patent office down since they would be violating my patent each time they award any patent.

Re:Method for stopping stupid patents

[Flavius Stilicho]

I'm thinking of patenting:
- "A Process to patent Methods that are Obvious"
- "A Process to Patent Methods that have Prior Art"
Then, all of these people will be violating my patents when they do these sorts of things. It'll stop the stupid patents and/or make me rich. Either way, I'm happy.

Heh. I think you should do it. I can't see why you'd have any problems getting it through.

Re:Method for stopping stupid patents

[Desirsar]

Your idea was good until you posted it here, and killed it with 'oral disclosure'. It was nice while it lasted though... :)

Re:Prior art has to be out there... (See the RFC)

[Marble68]

Domains / Sub Domains.

That's why we have terms like TLD, nth level domain, et al.

Friggin' DNS was DESIGNED to do this. Use of DNS for Child / Parent domains should NOT be patentable. Regardless of the cutesy little twist on the application of inherits functionality.

Has no one EVER setup a server and had it handle email for sa@servername.domain.net? What's the difference between this a surname? Joe@smith.mydomain.com or Joe@smith.com?

Prior art issues aside, this is like patenting chewing when someone uses a fork. [See Icon]

The patent office, besides looking for prior art, should at least grasp the technologies that patents being applied for are based upon.

Many "No Crap, You Morons!" [NCYM} issues expressed by opponents of SW patents are because the requested patent is a direct benefit of the insight and forward thinking thoughtfulness of the online community when designing standards, protocols, and the like.

This is patently absurd.

Prior art from 1995

[kaip]

The patent claims functionality that IKI.FI, among others, has been providing publicly for thousands of users since 1995.

IKI.FI has a web page that documents the prior art for the patent 6,617,714.

What about obviousness?

[A nonymous Coward]

I thought they were not supposed to be obvious to anyone skilled in the field. This is so damned obvious that anyone in or out of the field can see it. What the hell happened to common sense?

Re:What about obviousness?

[DickBreath]

It is obvious as you say.

The problem is with the USPTO's argument. If it is so obvious, then why didn't anyone do it earlier? Thus you need prior art to invalidate it.

The USPTO is badly broken.

Re:What about obviousness?

[waterbear]

I thought they were not supposed to be obvious to anyone skilled in the field. This is so damned obvious that anyone in or out of the field can see it.

What the hell happened to common sense?

(1) True, but the obviousness argument doesn't exist in a vacuum. To make an obviousness argument you still need to start with some related (but non-identical, clearly) prior art. Then you need to show that the differences between the current claim and the art are so (generally known for themselves, common workshop variants, or whatever) that the current claims as a whole would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the field.

(2) What can I say? :-(

-wb-

Re:What about obviousness?

[ErroneousBee]

Heres some prior art.

My name is Joe Frederick Bloggs.
My userid is JFB.
My email is Joe@bloggs.com

Clearly these are a simple transform between two namespaces, and any other schemes that are just a tranform between two namespaces should be covered by this prior art.

Re:What about obviousness?

[tiger99]

That does not seem to be required in the US, if other bad examples which have been debated here are anything to go by. It should also fail as a result of prior art, however that seems to not be taken into account either.

However, this will fail in large parts of the world, especially Europe. How can you have a patent on the internet, which by definition is worldwide, vaild in one country and not any others? It is stupid.

A new worldwide patents system is urgently needed, if only to deal with internet-related issues, and it would properly be run along the lines of the bodies which already control technical standards, domain allocation, etc, all of which work very well indeed with hardly a single schyster needing to be involved. A disputed application should be put to a democratic vote, quite easy as the net facilitates that sort of thing (or is that patented?).

The politicians could save themselves a lot of unnecessary problems by learning how the internet came to be (oh, I forgot, was it not a certain US politician who "invented" it?) without politicians, lawyers or big business having any major involvment, and that is why it happened quickly and successfully. They should learn that it is capable of governing itself too, and it should be left to do so in a democratic way, making its own legislation to prevent abuse as well as controlling any relevant patents. No western democracy seems to have a legal system which is capable of acting sufficiently quickly to be of any possible use, where technology advances quickly, and in fact have proved to be of no use even where technology progresses backwards, under the control of a Convicted Monopoly. A jury of internet users could have tried M$, found them guilty by a large majority verdict, and banned the pathetic web browser which was the cause of the problem, from the net by issuing a patch for servers to reject it. Likewise they would have the power to democratically ban Lookout, and hence cripple the vast majority of email virii. If estimates of the cost of the current epedemic are in any way realistic, the world could have saved $30 billion at least.

Politicians and schysters have a long and well-established history of being utterly useless and incompetent (with maybe a dozen very honourable exceptions) when it comes to dealing with technology. They should get out of that area, and leave it to those who understand what it is about.

World Peace!

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you please list all of the topics that you and your wife both do and do not argue about? In this way, the entire world can learn which things they should or should not argue about.

Indeed!

[Anonymous Coward]

And to say the issue is really straightforward: she bought hot coffee, she spilled hot coffee on herself, she burned herself.

Whether it was *very* hot, or not, 150 or 120 or 99.256.. is not the point; she wouldn't have burned herself if she hadn't used the coffee in a way that it ain't supposed to be used.

It reminds me of that court-case (in the USA, as usual) where a model was eating in a restaurant broke her tooth on a bone of a small bird (dunno the name in english) she had ordered herself. She won that case also. Well...BULLOCKS!!

This tendency in the USA to completely ignore your own responsability is sickening. and the fact that it can get you millions is the reason that more and more people are doing it. It's revolting. It's whining and blaming others for your own faults to get rich at the expense of others.

My grandma always used to serve my boiling-hot soup as a kid, and even at 7 years old I knew that I should be carefull with it, and not set it on my croch in a moving car. And if I did play around and managed to get some soup on me, I never ever thought it was the fault of my grandma (and rightfully so).

I guess, in today's USA-mentality, I should have sued my grandma for a million bucks or so.

frivolous patents

[Anonymous Coward]

... should be punishable by huge fines and jail time for wasting people's time and money.

As an attorney, he should know that if prior art exists, he is in for an uphill battle in a patent suit.

Patent on Dupes

[Anonymous Coward]

We have a patent on duplicates. You are no infringing.

I hope the courts recognize prior art

[olivercromwell]

It should be a no brainer for the courts to deal with this one. Basically, as I understand it, a patent may not be granted if prior art exists. Given that the DNS and email have existed in some form or another for a long time now, and predating the original application date of this patent, the USPTO ought not to have granted it to begin with. However, from what I have read about the total disarray at the USPTO, it is not surprising that this amde it through. Apparently, they are so overwhelmed they just pull out a rubber stamp if no one opposes the application. Heck, I believe it was slashdotted when a lawyer, as an object example of how silly the system has become, had his child file for, and receive a patant on the swing.

Netidentity/Mailbank, since 1996 Prior Art found

[HDlife]

Here it is, exactly, in 1998 at Mailbank.

Mailbank.com at Archive.org, Nov. 11, 1998.

Just send me my reward money now. I've been using those domain hijackers for years for email/web.

Letter Sent To USPTO

[malachid69]

I am sure the letter will not do any better than my previous one to them, but I thought I would let the other slashdotters read what I sent them.

-- snip --

A few years ago, I emailed your office in regards to all of the patents you were accepting
that were already in common public usage before your accepted them. At the time, you
told me you could not discuss the matter via email.

I write today in hopes of showing you just how bad the patent process has become.

Please see Patent #6,671,714 which can be found at:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1= PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,671,714.WKU.&OS=PN/6,671,714&RS =PN/6,671,714

I found the reference to this patent from Slashdot ( http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/28/13 56214&mode=nested&tid=103&tid=155&tid=98&tid=9 9 ).

According to this patent, passed last month, YOU are now in violation of this new patent because your "Trademark Trial And Appeal Board" may be
reached by http://ttabvue.uspto.gov/

The patent you just accepted covers use of subdomains to reference a different group or subgroup of people (ie: the Appeal Board). As such, you are now in violation of this patent.

I hope this helps shed some light on the types of patents that have been getting accepted over the last few years. Your office is repeatedly accepting patents for services/software/ideas that are in common public use (ie: public domain). If you would like to see examples of others that you have misappropriately accepted, please
go to www.slashdot.org and search for "Patent".

Thank you,
A Concerned Citizen

Re:Letter Sent To USPTO

[Anonymous Coward]

Your letter is good, and hopefully many people will write to them so that they are more careful when allowing patents, specifically in the online/web services area.

In order to make yourself more credible though, I would suggest you use the correct terminology:

"Accepting" a patent - should be "granting" a patent or "allowing" a patent.
"In violation of" a patent - should be "infringing" a patent.

Good letter otherwise.

I think

[Facekhan]

I think that congress needs to make the patent office responsible for legal fees incurred by defendants in patent cases when a patent is found to be unenforceable. That would reduce the number of obviously non-original and non-novel patents being granted to unscrupulous lawyers who think they are going to hit the jackpot by patenting something that has already been done and then suing the companies that have two decades of prior art.

Re:We did that back in '95... ha

[AtariDatacenter]

No apology needed. Security sucked. A lot of things sucked. But other things just roxored about Galaxy. It was a great experience.

RFC 1034

[ski2die]

Basically, this guy just got a patent for the way in which you're supposed to convert an email address to a DNS name (RFC 1034):
"Thus the mailbox
HOSTMASTER@SRI-NIC.ARPA is represented as a domain name by
HOSTMASTER.SRI-NIC.ARPA."

Re:RFC 1034

[mummers]

In which case, the only sensible solution is for the entire Network Working Group to have their asses sued off, back dated to '87.

Jeez, the nerve of some of these bastards, grossly infringing a patent years before it even exists.

Yes, the United States Sucks ass

[Anonymous Coward]

Just in case anyone wasn't paying attention to the past 10 or so years of national socialism at work in the US, take notice. The government is being run by, for, and of the corporation. Not the small company or midsized corporation (that most of us actually work for) but large conglomerates with vast armies of lawyers that can take a commonsense meme out of the ideaspace, patent it, and then sue the pants off the people who actually gave of themselves to create it.

Express your dissatisification on July 3, 2004 - the 100 Million March - being organized by Adbusters. Check out this month's paper issue.

Re:How about November 1997?

[caldaan]

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1034.html

Governement, ISPs

[ebonkyre]

US House and Senate use this format, dunno about time frame:
http://soandso.senate.gov
soandso@senate. gov

The hosting service I use has offered "vanity domains" in this format since at least 1996:
http://[optional www.]username.pair.com
username@pair.com

Regardless of prior art, aren't patents supposed to be awarded for "non-obvious" stuff?

Hey... I know of some prior art for this.

[vaxzilla]

During the mid 1990s my college used exactly this scheme when assigning names to student systems on the school's dorm network. Each student was assigned a hostname of the form username.student.rose-hulman.edu where username would be your school assigned login name. And you'd be able to receive e-mail as username@rose-hulman.edu and username@student.rose-hulman.edu.

There's supporting evidence of this dating back to 1993 saved in Google's USENET archives.

Mailbank/Netidentity

[cwagar]

Mailbank was doing this at least two years prior to the patent application. They own common names... for example jones.com. The standard package includes, for a yearly fee, jim@jones.com and http://jim.jones.com. They are now called NetIdentity. They would essentially be destroyed if asked to pay royalties. But check out the backers: "NetIdentity was founded in 1996 as Mailbank.com after the company discovered that 70% of the U.S. population shares one of only 9,000 last names. Using a computerized phone directory, NetIdentity sorted out the most common surnames and began buying them. The company is currently owned by a small group of investors including Mark Cuban, the Texas billionaire founder of Broadcast.com."

The challenge should be Class-Action Lawsuit

[HutchGeek]

Against the USPTO. Why? For starters, someone should sue them for being a monopoly. Granted - not possible since they are a government run agency. Regulated by who? Seriously though, the people granting these patents must live in caves. While I cant speak for REGISTERING the names - if memory serves - my fiancee in college (in 1987-88) worked for a company that used a MiniVax - and high end workstations running on Unix - or the variant for those particlar machines. DEC, whatever. Their machines were named in the fashion stationname.companyname.com and each had its own email address in the form of stationname@companyname.com. And I'm sure there are hundreds of companies who back in the late 80's had their systems set up that way. Most sysadmins back then had that type of common sense to do it. And they didnt patent the idea. Why? Common Sense. It seems what the USPTO need to do is grab a lot of the still unemployed techincal people in the country , who have some sense, pay them as consultants, and use their brains to help figure out what patents ought to be passed, since its very apparent the staff there now is clueless.

Unbelievable! Patent Restrictions Broken!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is hilarious because you can circumvent it in a fairly simple manner:

1. Assigning each member of said group a URL of the form "name.subdomain.domain"

2. Assign each member of said group an e-mail address of the form "name@name.subdomain.domain"

The inclusion of the extra "name." in the e-mail address gets you around the patent restriction and hopefully helps to illustrate how stupid this patent is in the first place. As long as you configure your mail servers to accept for all subdomains of your domain, you should not have a problem with this method.

New Patents

[dgagley]

There are two patents that should be done but I do not have the disposable income at this time. Whoever does should patent the system of patenting an item and the system of copywriting an item. If they actually give these up we then we know the system has completly failed.

time for patent reform

[MoFoQ]

and you thought the DMV was bad.

we need to ban trivial patents and fine those who try to patent trivial patents with the sole intent to sue to help pay for the costs of revamping the efficiency and backlog of the patent office.

Not Entirely on Topic...

[Anonymous Coward]

But not exactly off topic either.
http://ruff.cs.jmu.edu/~ripleymj/site-mirror/Scree nshot.png

Kristopher

what next??.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Ooh, I know I'm going to patent this sentence I just wrote.

Ahhhh...

[Eric Damron]

Frank Weyer. The reason that lawyer jokes hit too close to home...

Insert scum-fucking-bag lawyer jokes

[leftie_hater]

below...

Re:How about November 1997?

[dtobias]

That cited RFC is actually from *1987*, a good ten years earlier than you stated!

But it does indeed have some direct prior art:

For mailboxes, the mapping is slightly more complex. The usual mail
address @ is mapped into a domain name by
converting into a single label (regardles of dots it
contains), converting into a domain name using the usual
text format for domain names (dots denote label breaks), and
concatenating the two to form a single domain name. Thus the mailbox
HOSTMASTER@SRI-NIC.ARPA is represented as a domain name by
HOSTMASTER.SRI-NIC.ARPA. An appreciation for the reasons behind this
design also must take into account the scheme for mail exchanges [RFC-
974].

Been there, seen that...

[Fredbo]

Yawn, another slow news day?

USPTO employed Quake III announcer for a while...

[jo_ham]

They tried to employ the Quake III announcer to shout "Denied!" whenever a patent wasn't approved instead of using the stamp, but he was paid by the number of failed patents so he had the quit because of low pay.

The poor bloke had to eat!

A summary of the patents...

[agent00log]

As with many of the patent threads on /., there's a lot of guff going around, so I'll make some comments about patents in general, and some specific USPTO comments. 1. Patentability. A patent has to be novel, inventive and industrially applicable. In the EP system it also has to make a 'technical contribution to the art', but in the US it doesn't, hence the business methods & software patents which are deemed 'non-technical', and therefore not patentable for EP. Novelty means that the features described in claim 1 have not been disclosed in that form before, taking the broadest possible reading of the claims. Inventivity is rather a harder prospect. To destroy invengtivity, the examiner starts from the best prior art (i.e. the document closest to claim 1). He then has to formulate the 'remaining problem', and then look for other documents in a similar field that solve the same problem, and it has to be obvious to the 'man skilled in the art' to know to combine these two documents to arrive at claim 1. This is hard work! 2. Prior Art: whoever said earlier that it has to be disclosed in the US for a US application is talking through the wrong hole. If it's written in ancient Chinese in a monastry up a mountain in Tibet it's prior art, provided that anyone can go to this monastary and go read it. Even if they don't read ancient Chinese. Many US search reports only contain US documents, and that's just sloppiness at the USPTO and winds me up (especially as they are often not relevant at all!). Examiners have access to all sorts of prior art, not just patents; in case you haven't spotted it by now, I'm an examiner. I've cited standard textbooks in my domain as novelty-destroying prior art. There's about 100TB of data available to examiners at the major organisations. Also, if you go into an open meeting and discuss your invention, that's also prior art against you as well, known as an Oral Disclosure. But we hardly ever use that.... Yes, your own prior art is used against you, and in fact that is often where we start to look. 3. Priority: In the US, there's an 'invented 1st' system, and in the rest of the world it's 'filed first'. Simple as that. So there's no arguing over here, unlike in the US over who should have the patent! 4. USPTO examiners, as government employees, are personally liable for any mistakes that cost applicants money, and can be sued. Hence, if something possibly patentable is denied, the lawyers take the examiner to court and prove that a patent _should_ have been granted, then the examiner is personally liable for any profits lost by the company due to loss of protection. And on a civil servant's salary, that's not good. Since these things are resolved in the courts in the US, not internally like in the European offices, there's an awfully large incentive to grant anything iffy at almost all costs. Even things that are physically impossible. And I have anecdotes, but since they relate to ongoing files I cannot discuss them. Would you like to work under that pressure? I know I wouldn't. 5. Patent examining (at least in Europe) is not a rubber-stamping operation. We work on the basis of getting a search report and a first written opinion out of the door in just under 2 working days. It's a bit quicker in the States, as I believe they're only allowed to allocate 3 or 4 hours for a search. 6. Examiners: In offices in Europe we're all technical specialists in our fields as well as being linguists, and we take a very professional attitude to our searching.

Re:A summary of the patents...

[agent00log]

Apologies for the formatting - first post, pressing the wrong button, and not discovering that carriage returns are not automatic! Sorry!

Re:A summary of the patents...

[SampsonSimpson]

Just a quick question - I don't think I've read anywhere that examiners can be sued and be personally held liable for any damages resulting from the mistake. Where can I find this?

I'm not too well versed in administrative law, but I think common law agency principles and respondeat superior will govern in such a situation. And thus an aggrieved applicant may sue the Commissioner of Patents in a District Court, and not the examiner himself. The commissioner is the principal/master, and the examiner is merely an agent/servant; and since the harm will be in the ordinary course of business, the agent cannot be held liable for any of his/her mistakes.

Although the Commissioner can be sued, I don't think a judge will grant damages for failure to grant a patent where it should have been. A patent in the United States is enforceable from its effective filing date, (with a few exceptions that can modify that) so if a decision to reject is later overturned, any infringement action will grant damages calculated from that effective date. Since the patentee will be made whole from any damages it recovers from any infringers, there is no harm that the examiner caused by failing to allow.

Also - The court system is not the only way a patentability dispute can be resolved in the United States. Of course, an aggrieved applicant can sue the Commissioner of Patents in the DC circuit court, but the other route after a Final Rejection issues is to appeal to the Board of Appeals. Then, that decision can be appealed to the courts.

Likewise in the United States, the patent examiners are technical specialists in a very distinct practice area. Some may have legal training.

Re:A summary of the patents...

[agent00log]

The thing about individual examiners getting sued was said in a presentation here to explain why US examiners will almost never file a partial search report in the case of non-unity on a world patent application (PCT). So it was rather an "oral disclosure"!

I am aware that the USPTO examiners are also specialists, but since it was late last night when I posted, I may have got my wording wrong (I certainly got my formatting wrong!) and implied that they are not.

Talking of sueing, (here's an oral disclosure again!) there was a guy who filed a US patent for a perpetual motion machine. It was turned down, so he sued, and eventually there was a hearing in Congress or somewhere and they tried to FORCE the USPTO to grant a patent for something that was absolutely unpatentable, cos it didn't work! But anyway...

Re:no thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

You're such a smart guy. I bow down before you.

This was already posted like a week ago!.

[EMR]

News about this patent was posted like a week ago..(with in a week as the link to the patent is still "visited" on my browser)..

How many decades back do we have to prove this?

[grimtoothe]

I've been using my personal email address (eg myname@myname.com - myname changed to protect the ignorant:) since around the time the world became blessed with the WWW. Before that it was my MUDding name... how far back do we need to go?

MOD PARENT UP!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

wow. this is really interesting

or...

[joggle]

Or, more commonly:

4) settle out of court (such as in the vision system patents mentioned the other day)

Hmm... but

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't :

First Name . Middle . Last Name

A pre-existing work?

The legal system?

[Anonymous Coward]

All of us here can see how asinine this is. Will our legal system?

Or more importantly, will Congress? It's not judges and lawyers who are the problem, or the solution. The solution is to have laws that make sense in the first place. Like no software patents, for example.

If you'd like to language lawyer this, you could say that lawmakers are part of the legal system. Indeed, that makes sense. But in colloquial useage, 'legal system' usually refers to the courts. Anyway, that's besides the point. We're going to continue to live in a morass of technoidiocy until we see some bright stars in Congress. Let's get Lawrence Lessig in office, for example!

This does not surprise me

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm posting anonymously so as not to directly insult anyone I might know who reads this.

I am a recently graduated engineer and a good 4 or 5 engineers I know who have graduated in the last year or two have gone to work for the patent office. To say that they shouldn't be reviewing patent applications - which they are doing - is an understatement. They are uninspired, uninnovative, linear-thinkers who should be probably be working as technicians somewhere under close supervision. Whether this reflects on the other engineers being churned out elsewhere, I cannot say - but this is why such stupid patents get approved, I swear...

Re:How about November 1997?

[MegaFur]

Careful! You could be infringing on Mr. Smarty Pants's patent even as you write.

Don't fall in...

[Anonymous Coward]

While you're peeing on your shoes, I'm learning something!

But then you might fall in the toilet and hurt your back because your wife left the toilet seat up because she felt nausious from the bad food that your manager's wife cooked.

Whaa!!!?? you can patent a bash script??!

[konmaskisin]

... even six sided pencils were merely "patent pending" in my youth.

Patent #7777777: "method for listing files in a directory".

ls$$$$$$$$$ wheee!!!

Lessig should have done this first.. Anti-patents

[jswitte]

I'm serious.. When I first read the beginning of the story, I thought that the *reason* he did this was to bring light to the absurdity of the patent system. Apparently not - he's just going to be more of the reason there are lawyer jokes..

Seriously, Lawrence Lessig *should* have done this: he should have taken out a patent on something so patently obvious (pun fully intended) that it's absurd to anyone with half a brain cell. This is something that concerned law professors should do.

I remember seeing a story a couple of years ago here about 'anti-patents'. I didn't read it, but it sounds like what this could have been. Sadly, he's just trying to make a buck after all. Maybe I'll email Lessig and suggest this course of action..

Re:VOLVO 240 MANUAL BOOST CONTROLLER IS ON TEH SPO

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume you also posted the steak one. Sir, I applaud your efforts to inform the slahsdot communtiy of what is ON TEH SPOKE this season. Sincerely,

Capt. Yancey "Buzz" Jabluntski, USMC

Job Retention Scheme

[rtb61]

Dont get to cranky with those poor fellows at USPTO, after all if they only get to keep their jobs if there are a lot of patents approved, which in turn drives a lot of patent applications, and there is the additional job security enhancement of striking of all those crappy patents (all those fees and charges do pay their salary). Tech people are just jealous that they have yet to create an equally effective job preservation scheme. Perhaps the government should consider offshore outsourceing the USPTO they couldnt do any worse and it would save tax payer money.