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Subdomains Part Of The Patent Frenzy
Colonel Angus writes "Web Hosting Industry is carrying a story about a company called Ideaflood that has been sending out letters to web hosting firms claiming that they own a patent on subdomains and are claiming a license needs to be purchased to continue to use them. This is reminding me of the hyperlink patent from a couple years back." Maybe Frank Weyer will ask them to wrestle.
prior art = November 1987
And in other news, tomorrow, I'm patenting the misspelling of referrer in electronic comunication.
Looking at the "patents" they have and I'm really confused. On their (or really Steven's) page they have listed a patent for: PATENT NO: US 6,270,409 - Method and apparatus for gaming
If you actually look at the text of the patent though, it reads completely different and the patent number is also different. It is patent 6,304,788 and relates to a patent for "Method and apparatus for controlling medical monitoring devices over the internet".
And now that I look at it, the first patent link is incorrect too. The text states that it is patent #6,389,458 but it links to patent #6,687,746.
WTF?
I think this guy is trying extortion, plain and simple.
Casual Games/Downloads
whois.net says:
I say:
(PS. We're so big we don't even run our own nameservers!)
well, since .com and .org are considered "top level domains", it's possible that even just yahoo.com or slashdot.org could be considered subdomains.
http://www.ideaflood.com/apps.asp
There's an article on the Foundation for Programming Freedom by Richard Stallman titled 'Anatomy of a Trivial Patent'. Read this and you will see how people sneak these patents past the PO.
http://www.ideaflood.com/patent_this
h tm l6 3,5 13020,00.html
h ttp://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/ntbugtraq/2 003-q4/0282.html
or any other 404 generating string.
some select quotes...
o The 458 patent is generally described as covering "exit traffic."
o hundreds of thousands of web sites (millions by some estimates) have adopted this technology
o generated several hundred million dollars in revenues
o Advertising applications...trade visitors with other web sites
o new offers once they have decided to exit an e-commerce site
o market segments, online casinos and adult entertainment
o site operator
o derive revenue...from just 50% of infringers across the sectors
o The content of this document is confidential
which explains the open posting of it on their website.
http://www.klixxx.com/stories/web/patentthenet.
http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,178
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3078633/
Shuster, Brian Mark
Shuster, Gary Stephen
etc, etc, etc, rtfm, seek and ye shall find.
but ya know, who wouldn't like to be on the receiving end of a porno money stream...
They also look at the references you provide. I know; I got hammered because I provided lots of references, and had to spend months explaining how my work was novel over the referenced documents. If I'd just skipped doing the prior art myself, I would have saved myself a lot of time and legal fees.
Obviously, the submitter didn't bother any more than any of you to follow through to the source...
The patent is for an automated procedure for licensing sub-domain names via an Internet portal , not on subdomains - the submitter's claim is considerably more absurd than the patent claim, no matter your views on software and business model patents.
"We're an apex predator with the fecundity of a base level herbivore... We're a virus with shoes..." RazorJAK
They list only two patents that have actually been granted, "Method,apparatus and system for directing access to content on a computer network" (which seems to cover cross-linking between web sites where there's some sort of traffic-exchange system in place, such as ad banners) and "Method and apparatus for gaming" (guaranteeing a minimum payout for gambling.)
The article doesn't say what patent the letter refers to, if indeed it references an actual patent at all. They have an _application_ for a patent on Method and apparatus for conducting domain name service, whose idea seems to be that ICANN doesn't control subdomains, so you can sell your subdomains yourself as long as you manage it.
That is, if you own foo.com, you can't really sell "bar.foo.com" to somebody else, at least not using the standard domain registries, because they just don't do that. The solution (running your own domain name server and providing a web site to control it, basically acting like your own TLD) is pretty damn obvious, but not a whole lot more obvious than lots of other patents that have been granted.
But the thing is, at least as far as I can tell, they don't have a patent yet. They only have an application. Suing people is WAY jumping the gun. It might even be illegal, but IANAL. That patent is over two and a half years old, so it's about time the thing got approved. Maybe it is approved and the USPTO hasn't updated its web site, and ideaflood is being quick off the mark.
As far as I can tell, the usual advice seems to apply: it's a pointless patent with lots of prior art, so don't cave in and don't send these idiots a penny.
No, it's just a shared server, and that's the 404 page of the server.
Both actually...
Why do people insist on putting spaces in hyperlinks?
I see this question too often. So pay attention children, cause I don't want to repeat this 9000 more times.
Slashdot inserts random spaces intentionally to prevent the "wwwwwwwide" exploit on their system, and the parent didn't post an actual hyperlink so much as an IRL. A hyperlink would look like this:
<A HREF="http://whatever.com">link</A>
And it would show up like this: link
But most people don't bother to do that when they cut and paste IRL's into their text, and Slashdot has to insert the spaces or else you get a hideous side-scrolling effect that messes up the format of the page.
Now you know.
didja check out the rest of their patents? ya, sounds like these guys are gonna be a ton-o-fun
The thing is that _even_ if you did get around patenting that stuff, you would not really stand a chance because just about everyone else will go ahead and use it. What are you going to do? Sue half the population of America for using 7?
No - a la Compuserve and GIFs you would identify and sue/threaten to sue a big customer or facilitator of the patent infringement. Compuserve (owners of the compression algorithm in GIF files) ended up with a deal with graphics program manafacturers and BT (supposed inventors of the hyperlink) were going after an ISP rather than each individual author of a web image/page.
But in the case of the number 7 they'd have to count on 7 really being a lucky number.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
You mean this guy?
When their numbers dwindled from 50 to 8, the dwarves began to suspect Hungry.
Link to patent here.
If I'm not mistaken, its pretty darned hard to patent facts - the only exception I know of is the patenting of genome sequences.
But you can have the copyright on databases - collections of facts.
I think it's true for the EU and that the US also recently introduced it.
If this method is truly novel, it could be patentable. It wouldn't be a patent on "9, and any number divisible by 9" but rather a Method for Detecting Transposition Errors in Arithmetic.
Of course slashdot would say that you had patented arithmetic, period.
Unfortunately, many patents issued these days fail the "high school kid" test. I'm sure they know exactly where they are going when they type in markhammil.geocities.com. While in theory a patent should be non-obvious... Can you say, 1-click shopping?
The site you reference is out of date, as methods of doing business have been declared patentable, as have mathematical formulas and many medical treatments. Again, 1-click shopping springs to mind. The Patent office has declared that it will accept patents on integer numbers. Apparently floating point numbers are not precise enough for the protection of the law. And while I can't think of a patent on a new revolutionary way to do CPR, there is a thriving industry on patenting drugs and devices for medical purposes.
Furthermore, as friends in law school have told me an this site repeats, only about 1% of patents are ever litigated, and as such only about a thousand patents per year are thrown out. That's out of 20,000 or so that are filed. Which means that the average patent has a 99.5% chance of holding as true.
Remember, Bezos' Bozo* one-click patent held up in court.
*I'm sure he's never heard that one before. Well, consider it a form of punishment Mr. We-must-have-business-process-patents.
The ______ Agenda
See the following:
Motivation
Hindsight
Non-Analagous Art
They aren't claiming wildcards in general, nor even wildcards in DNS. They're claiming DNS wildcards used to host multiple user's domains on one virtual IP address.
Why then is the patent office so moronic when it comes to patenting ideas that are general knowledge?
Actually I don't even think it is an issue of things that are general knowlage. The issue is this is how the system was designed. More and more patents are coming out, patenting use of a facility as it was designed. Its kind of like if I created a car, heck even pantented it, then some one comes along a patents the process of putting fuel in the car. Other classic examples are patents on hypertext, use of static frames, etc.
Pretty much who ever thought it was a good idea to patent business processes, (which is what creating subdomains really is) should be shot for treason.
Shameless self promotion : The Misadvetures of the in
You can't sue the government generally, or it's agents, unless Congress gives you permission.
Am I the only person who was on the internet pre-1998? Every day I see a patent relating to things that were plaguing us in 1995, and a company that honestly believes they can claim "2% of... the $9.5bn income this method generates".
Puhh-lease.The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
(IANAL but...) I'm not sure where this comes from. It's quite easy to sue various forms of government and government agents, such as the police (false arrest, rights violations), prosecutors (prosecutorial misconduct), Congress , and various federal agencies.
The patent is primarily for what has been used in CGI redirectors to simulate subdomains (not just user subdomains, but any subdomain). This is fairly common in some virtual servers.
They are not patenting subdomains per se; they are simulating subdomains using domain subdirectories!
Here's how a typical implementation works:
It sounds fairly trivial to me, but obviously didn't to the PTO. It seems pretty obvious this is close, if not the same, as what a web server does for supporting virtual domains on a same shared IP. Has anybody any other prior art on redirecting by code a *.domain.tld?
IANAL but, its the federal government which you can not sue without permission. Its not quite easy, but the government does quite often extend this permission.
When is the last time you heard of an inmate suing for false imprisonment and getting a dime?
Actually, this is a true statement. The doctrine of sovereign immunity protects the government from being sued unless it allows the suit. This is a pretty complex subject, so I'll try to make this as "user-friendly" as I can. The Federal Government and the governments of the individual states are protected from suit unless they allow it. In order to allow the suit, the legislative body (Congress, state assembly, etc.) has to pass a law allowing the suit. Most states and the Federal Government have passed statutes that allow you to sue them under specified circumstances, i.e., for specified types of claims (civil rights violations, tort claims, breach of contract claims), but only if you comply with strict notice requirements. If you don't comply with the requirements of the statute, your case gets thrown out because of sovereign immunity. So I guess the answer really is "You can sue the government, but only if they let you."
Actually you still pay the fees even if the application is rejected. But the USPTO has tended to allow everything because rejected applicants are allowed to sue them while the victims of maliciously invalid patents are not.
The way to rectify this is to start suing malicious applicants for perjury.
The particular patent in question is not simply for subdomains, it is for mapping subdomains onto email addresses so that alice@example.com has web site alice.example.com.
This is an old, old convention that was widely used long before 1998. the patent was filled in 1999, under the idiotic rules the 'inventor' is allowed to effectively claim to have invented it a year earlier. But even so, there is plenty of prior art.
One of the many reforms that is urgently needed at the USPTO is to make the filing date the date for prior art. At the moment a malicious applicant can go to a meeting, listen to a good idea, and file an application claiming to have invented it a year earlier. This goes on all the time.
Another overdue reform is publishing all applications for a challenge period of a year before they are issued and requiring the examiners to consider all prior art objections raised. At the moment the USPTO has deliberately tried to prevent the publication of applications being used as a challenge period, the examiners are not allowed to see arguments about prior art.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
"He patented the idea - and retired."
This is exactly the sort of (ab-)use of the patent system that needs to be highlighted: people that use the system to innovate once in their life and then retire on the licensing fees they collect from the patent. Nature and the Real World don't function this way at all... there is no free lunch and everyone should be encouraged to engage in a process of CONTINUOUS innovation. In such an environment the threat of copy-catters is insignificant because continued improvements - change - create a continuous process of obsolescence. IBM, Intel, and some other technology companies have learned this lesson quite well, and even abuse it to bankrupt some competitors by creating various "standards" and then abandoning them after the competition has become heavily vested in them.
Now we have "intellectual property holding companies" like Ideaflood, who don't actually produce any tangible product at all and often don't even originate or innovate anything, but instead merely traffic in IP and patents, buying "low" and selling "high" to the highest bidders as if it were nothing more than a stock market commodity.
In what twisted alternate-reality Earth is this supposed to be conducive to competition, innovation, and incremental evolution? I'd thought the patent system was originally intended to protect the little-guy garage inventor from being raped; perhaps that was never the reality in the first place and it just wasn't obvious until now, but it's creating an environment of corrupt and dishonest tactics that is especially injurious to the Little Guy, who is now being horse-whipped by the system, e.g. freelance or Mom-and-Pop programmers and developers. It's not good for business, definitely not good for consumers, and bad for overall productivity; the only people who seem to benefit from this system now are IP and patent lawyers and their deep-pocketed ligitious clients.