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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!)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
(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?
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."