Slashdot Mirror
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?"
you have pissed us off too many times.
Prepare to be slashdotted.
--Xandu
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!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
This patent was filed on November 23, 1999.
There has to be prior art out there that shoots this down.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Wasn't this posted some time ago?
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.
--- any post that takes longer than 20 seconds to write, isn't worth writing
Don't get mad. This is good news. It means we're one day closer to patent reform.
Is this the same story as posted a few days ago?
...already, when two Australians copyrighted all phone numbers way back in 2001.
libertarianswag.com
Link to patent text
Its not like the patent office don't deserve a good slashdotting.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
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.
"All it takes to fly is to hurl yourself at the ground... and miss." -D. Adams
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.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Wake the patent office up and sue THEM! :)
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.
"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
I've never shoed a horse, but I once told a donkey to piss off!
This really needs to be a presidential election issue. I'll vote for whoever says they will end Internet Technology patents.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
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.
All of us here can see how asinine this is. Will our legal system?
Yes.
Next story?
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
I'm going to patent a method of manually stimulating the male organ to orgasm. And watch out, I have lawyers.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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.
...perhaps he can blackmail these guys out of their doman, it would be the perfect one for him.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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...
I'll just link to my previous comment ;^)
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
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.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
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
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.
Best regards,
Steen Suder
-- for email: send to
"Case dismissed, suing party shot for being total asshole."
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.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
While America works to protect intellectual property, everyone else is innovating.
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
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
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.
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.
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
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.
"Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must first set yourself on fire." -- Fred Shero
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/15/234920 1&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=155&tid=95&tid=9 9
Christopher S. 'coldacid' Charabaruk -- coldacid.net
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).
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
www.netidentity.com have been doing this since at least 1998 when I got my account with them.
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.
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 accordinglyname@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
AndThese 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 ?
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
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.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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.
Having a bookmark to Google does not make you an expert on everything.
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).
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.
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 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!
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
Aww, man... and I just had business cards printed up with my email address.
DecafJedi
my weblog: apropos of something
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)
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!
Less is more !
I've done that for family and customers for 8 years now. Haven't Universities done this since forever?
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?
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
http://bmgoldne.artsci.wustl.edu.
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.
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.
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.
main(O){10<putchar((O--,102-((O&4)*16| (31&60>>5*(O&3)))))&&main(2+ O);}
LN2 is cool!
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.
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!
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.
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.
[
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!"
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
-----------------------
You are what you think.
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"
Reading this article, and the many that came before on the subject of "silly patents", the following occurs to me:
... 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.
/. 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.
- 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!
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
/end rant
Well, at least guys like this make SCO feel less alone in the world.
yes, we have no bananas
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.
All's true that is mistrusted
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.
Java gaming nut - http://www.retep.org/ or for the rail http://uktra.in/
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
__
Sigs are like arse-holes, everybody has one
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.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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.
Free XBox, PS2
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?
Leave the gun, take the cannoli -- Clemenza, The Godfather
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.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
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?
/., like in a forum? So we don't have to make the same arguments every time someone refers to some Zeitgeist thing?
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
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
USPTO, you have pissed us off too many times.
/.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.
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,
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-
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?
:P
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?
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
/me sips his coffee and ponders a new sig...
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.
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?
Infuriate left and right
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.
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.
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.
= 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
3 56214&mode=nested&tid=103&tid=155&tid=98&tid=9 9 ).
-- 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
I found the reference to this patent from Slashdot ( http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/28/1
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
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
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.
No apology needed. Security sucked. A lot of things sucked. But other things just roxored about Galaxy. It was a great experience.
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1034.html
US House and Senate use this format, dunno about time frame:. gov
http://soandso.senate.gov
soandso@senate
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?
"Time is an abstract concept devised by carbon-based lifeforms to monitor their ongoing decay." - Thundercleese
There's supporting evidence of this dating back to 1993 saved in Google's USENET archives.
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."
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.
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.
I can't use my sig - my computer can't read my handwriting.
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.
Frank Weyer. The reason that lawyer jokes hit too close to home...
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
But it does indeed have some direct prior art:
--Dan
Web Tips
Yawn, another slow news day?
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!
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.
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)..
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?
4) settle out of court (such as in the vision system patents mentioned the other day)
Isn't :
First Name . Middle . Last Name
A pre-existing work?
Careful! You could be infringing on Mr. Smarty Pants's patent even as you write.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Patent #7777777: "method for listing files in a directory".
ls$$$$$$$$$ wheee!!!
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..
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.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen