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

Link To Patent Text

[Mateito]

Link to patent text

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

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?'