EFF Busts Illegitimate Subdomain Patent 96
eldavojohn writes "Unlike a lot of community support protection programs, the EFF's Patent Busting Project is starting to bear real fruit instead of just leveling the finger at offenders. The USPTO is revoking an illegitimate patent granted in 2004 that sounds like automatically assigning subdomains. Sites like Wordpress, LiveJournal, or basically anyone with generated subdomains have been doing this for quite some time. If you have some extra cash, now's the time to pony up a few bucks so the EFF can carry on as one of the few organizations genuinely protecting your interests."
Re:Is it just me... (Score:3, Informative)
Is it just me, or is this essentially a fundraising article?
As a regular submitter, I assure you that when I wrote the fourth sentence as nothing but a request for donations I had no idea anyone would bother to read that far into the summary.
Disclaimer: I do not work for the EFF but I do send them a twenty every now and then.
Donate to us, because we got a patent revoked.
I was hoping it would sound more like "Donate to us because we can get more patents revoked." And really, who else is working towards that? Once the USPTO grants a patent, it's done. They don't get as much from me as I give to public radio or open source software but I'll give them some change to fight that fight.
The list of the shameless "inventors" is (Score:5, Informative)
Brian Shuster, Johnson Leong, Matthew Price, Brian Lam, Desmond Ford Johnson.
So that their names show up in this /. post every time somebody googles them ...
Re:The EFF isn't entirely protecting our rights (Score:5, Informative)
I'm giving up mod privileges to post this. But nobody has made this point, so I need to.
The flaw in your argument is your failure to recognize that the spam "solutions" that the EFF have opposed were worse than the spam problem. Solutions that restrict rights online or which are so vague as to permit abuse in non-spam situations are more dangerous than a few hundred pen!s oil ads.
The EFF are one of the few NPOs that I give to, because they actually are effective and coincide with my values. If they don't coincide with yours, fine. Don't give. I also advise that you don't trash talk them either, at least not here...
Re:The list of the shameless "inventors" is (Score:2, Informative)
If you actually do a google search for "Brian Shuster Ideaflood Inc" you find this article about a porn-baron with a patent for pop-up ads. Truly a modern day Nikolai Tesla...
(From http://www.out-law.com/page-3551 [out-law.com]):
Ideaflood Inc. is an intellectual property holding company owned by Brian Shuster. He previously ran porn web sites that were accused by the Federal Trade Commission of deceptively charging customers. While he is said to have made millions from internet porn, with which he is still involved, he now sees Ideaflood's patents as his best potential revenue source.
His pop-up ad patent application was filed in 1998 and granted in 2002. Last week, Shuster modestly told MSNBC news, "I apologise for being a pioneer."
Re:The obvious question. (Score:4, Informative)
will the patent examiners who approved this one be fired for incompetence?
Probably not because they probably weren't. The patent was issued in 2004 under the guidelines that obtained at that time. KSR v Teleflex [wikipedia.org], which redefined the rules for determining obviousness, was only decided in 2007. If they issued this patent today (or at any time post-KSR), then we might be able to make a case for gross incompetence, but as it is, I think the examiners were just doing their job as it was defined at the time. Blame for the messed up state of affairs we used to have goes much higher up.