URLs Patented, Domain Registrars Sued 650
theodp writes "A newly formed company is suing Network Solutions and Register.com for infringing on its e-mail and domain naming patent, which covers assigning each member of a group a URL of the form 'name.subdomain.domain' and an e-mail address of the form 'name@subdomain.domain.'"
Newsflash (Score:5, Insightful)
No longer will I blame Lawyers. (Score:2, Insightful)
Only the money ladden will survive.
Patent System Gone too far (Score:3, Insightful)
Right (Score:1, Insightful)
Whay hasn't MS done an endrun yet? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Stop the World i wana get off (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though NS and R.com are both companies who screw people royally, this group of f*ckwits is even worse. I will take the lesser of the 2 evils thanks.
Re:Not as bad as SCO. (Score:3, Insightful)
Please, read the patent... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think there ought to be penalties for the use of these nuisance patents. A judge then could not only strike down the patent's validity (which will obviously happen here), but could also impose a heavy fine to deter this kind of litigious crap from happening.
US Laws (Score:1, Insightful)
It's a joke, folks (Score:5, Insightful)
My guess is this is someone trying to prove how idiotic the USPTO is.
I can't believe this patent was granted (Score:2, Insightful)
The patent abstract just screams "email addresses", which were (IIRC) widely popular & known about prior to 23 Nov. 1999.
This is why I hate the language used in patents & other legel documents - they are purposly obfuscated so that the patent is granted, when if it clearly stated "email addresses and URLs", it wouldn't get a second glance. And then we get more stupid litigation.
Re:Slightly funnier take (Score:2, Insightful)
Because obvious stuff isn't patentable?
this is a GOOD thing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Prior art, DNS zone files (Score:5, Insightful)
It explicitly covers email addresses for subdomains, and even how some older software (pre-87) will break with it. (Thus the Request For Comment, to set a standard).
There needs to be some kind of punitive damage for people who attempt to patent things that are not only covered by prior art, but are in the Public Domain, for over 20 years before the application.
Re:Slightly funnier take (Score:5, Insightful)
Nevermind the fact that a great majority of people don't feel that something should be patentable, much like people who think their programs should be open source. What's the easiest way to allow an idea to be unpatentable? Think of it, do it, don't patent it. Apparently that doesn't work so well.
Finally, do you honestly believe that any of the ISPs who started offering this service have ever read this patent before, even if it was after the patent was filed? No? They came up with it on their own? Well in that case, even though these guys may officially own the rights, it is pretty clear that the patent is OBVIOUS. And therefore VOID.
Let me put it to you this way. I have noticed they're sending a lot of landers and such to Mars right now. Well, perhaps I should patent sending a rover to Pluto. NASA has never done that, no prior art, they have not patented it so clearly it's not obvious and they've never thought of it... Sure...
Nonsense (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Slightly funnier take (Score:2, Insightful)
Examiners Used to Be Allowed to Reject Patents (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes, when someone files claims as blindingly obvious as these, the Examiners would be permitted to reject the claims as an "obvious design choice". This was something appropriate to do when the choice made by the "inventor" did not add any new functionality to the thing sought to be patented, but was merely shuffling around design features that did nothing in and of themselves.
That is exactly what is happening here with these claims. The naming scheme here is no more functional than is a scheme of naming your own children.
Hey, here is a patent claim for ya that I just made up!
1. A method comprising: a set of parents naming their first child Thomas, their second child Zebedee, and their third child Squeamish.
Since a patent examiner looking at such a claim could not find a "motivation" in the "prior art" for one to name their children those precise names in that exact order, one could easily get a patent.
Time to name the Enemy: the Court of Appeals, Federal Circuit. They are the malfeasors who have tied the hands of the US Patent Examiners so that they can no longer apply the laws of obviousness, but instead have to jump through absurd hoops looking for "motivation" to do that which take zero mental effort, like.... naming URLs (or kids, for that matter).
USPTO reforms will occur... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's like the Iraq WMD situation... except this time they're waiting for someone to drop the Big One before doing something about it.
Of course if I'm the one with the patent, then everything will be OK.
Re:Who really needs to be sued... (Score:2, Insightful)
And so on...
Re:Suing is evidently a business model (Score:1, Insightful)
> When did the business model "I created a patent just so I could sue you" a socially acceptable business practice?
Isn't that the American Dream? To sue someone who has money and become filthy rich yourself?
Re:Newsflash (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stop the World i wana get off (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Frothing at the mouth (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:USPTO reforms will occur... (Score:1, Insightful)
Won't happen.
The goal of a successful parasite is not to kill the host, but live off it such that the host lives for a looooooooong time.
Expect a company holding such a widespread patent to offer reasonable terms for its yearly licensing, guaranteeing both a neverending revenue stream and the continued health of the host industry.
Also, buy stock in that company when the patent is announced.
Re:Stop the World i wana get off (Score:1, Insightful)
They're just describing proper domain usage (Score:5, Insightful)
I completely fail to see how one can patent the use of domain names in this fashion. That strikes me like patenting the concept that a "record" corresponds to a physical object, citing an employee table as an example.
Obviously this patent was never examined by anyone with enough neurons to spark a thought.
Maybe it's time companies affected by these nonsense "patents" start suing the patent office to recover costs and damages for defending against such garbage.
Re:Please, read the patent... (Score:5, Insightful)
LS
Re:Slightly funnier take (Score:1, Insightful)
Lowest I've ever heard is $3,000. Typical for someone doing their own prior art research is $20k - $40k. Patent lawyers doing the research is $200k.
Re:Slightly funnier take (Score:2, Insightful)
You see, by the USPTO basically passing their work off on to the Court system. They are tying up our courts from doing the real work that needs doing for the justice department and at the same time basically leeching off of public funds by simply not putting the effort into their own work.
And on top of this, they are charging people who have reasonable patents for this complete lack of service.
Patents should not be abolished, but the USPTO should be made into a smoking crater, it's staff fired en masse, and then we can restart with some people in there who actually give a damn.
Re:Slightly funnier take (Score:5, Insightful)
One had a lawyer to defend him after he was busted by Constitution-shredding RIAA private investigators after forgetting to load PeerGuardian while he downloaded the Complete Led Zeppelin off Suprnova, and the other one didn't.
As to the argument that "if the laws weren't so messed up, then the RIAA goons couldn't come after me" I'd ask
And to keep this on point, when you look at the broken patent system and you see that the USPTO is backlogged with frivolous patent applications that take advantage of examiners' overburden, underpay, and (perhaps) ignorance of the technology, and when you see that this broken patent system allows the issuing of patents like this one that allows some over-egoed plaintiffs lawyer to see his big payoff day by filing a case that would be frivolous if it were based in equity rather than a letter patent issued by the US Government, do you write your representative or senator? Do you write the president? Do you organize a get out the vote campaign to support candidates who will fix what's broken?
Corporations control America today not because the American system is broken, but because people bitch and bitch and bitch but aren't willing to do the hard work necessary to make sure the system does what it's supposed to. You wouldn't fill your car's gas tank up with water, right? And you wouldn't use a 10-year-old rubber band in place of a bike chain? You wouldn't build your beach house out of sand, would you?
You forget that abusive plaintiff's lawyers (the ones you're really griping about) only survive because the system is currently so chaotic and broken that they're able to make loads of money working the nooks and crannies of the broken system, just like a few college students and VCs made wads of money off of ignorance and exuberance in the mid-to-late 1990s. They went where the money and the opportunity to take it were.
This patent mess makes me sick. Why isn't there a good-faith requirement in the patent code?
Arg, sorry... People make lawyer jokes, and they're funny, I suppose. But just remember something someone who was in prison after having a crappy court-appointed lawyer lose his case for him told me: the only lawyer you ever wished you could have is the one you realized you needed after a lifetime telling yourself they weren't wanted.
As for the author of the parent, I apologize, you just got caught in a drive-by...
Re:Stop the World i wana get off (Score:3, Insightful)
I find that the respect that I have for people with Ph.D.'s is inversely proportional to the time until I recieve my own Ph.D.
Re:Slightly funnier take (Score:4, Insightful)
What's more likely, is that some huge faceless corp will blatantly steal your invention and then rack up millions of dollars in legal fees and crush you like an ant. When it's all over, you'll have no money, be bitter, deranged and living under a bridge.
Your best bet, is to partner with a cash rich mega corp with tons of cash, and go around either squishing peons and stealing their patents, or, as in this case, using bogus patents to extort cash from others for no purpose at all.
Finally, the reasons patents and copyright were given legal standing was that they were to enrich the public commons.
Since it's clear that copyright isn't doing that at all anymore, as virtually nothing under copyright gets released into the public commons, and patent law seems to be fashioned to make *only* lawyers loads of money, then perhaps we ought to get rid of both.
Either reform them, and do them as the framers of the constution intended, or simply scrap them. Their cost to society is huge, and IMHO, outweigh the benefits provided.
Cheers,
Greg
Prior Art Before 1998. Like BIND and IAHC :-) (Score:3, Insightful)
Fortunately, BIND treats name.subdomain.domain as an email address for name@subdomain.domain, and I'd be really really surprised to see these Bozos get away with claiming that they were doing this prior to BIND's existence, since it's the canonical DNS server implementation since about a decade before their alleged invention. Also, the IAHC IETF Ad-Hoc Committee, which was trying to do a set of new TLDs (unsuccessful politically) before ICANN was formed to pretend to address the same problem, had proposed a ".nom" gTLD which is substantially similar to ".name" - Their report was in February 1997, and it had been discussed widely in the mailing lists that many of the skilled practitioners hung out in for a while before that.
Prior Art - The DNS SOA field "RNAME" (Score:3, Insightful)
At least one specific recommendation by a governing body for using hostmaster.example.com. as a DNS label to represent "hostmaster@example.com" can be found here [ripe.net], published well before this patent was filed.
This can also be seen in RFC 1912 [ietf.org] (section 2.2), published in 1996.
These muppets have patented something published in one of the very standards they should be familiar with.
- J
Re:Prior Art - The DNS SOA field "RNAME" (Score:2, Insightful)
Forgot to paste in; of course, also RFC 1034 [ietf.org] (section 3.3), published in 1987.
The patent itself is effectively fraud. Most of the document is occupied with long-winded noise designed to disguise the claim in a torrent of drivel by describing, in excruciatiating, irrelevent and confusingly-numbered detail, a webmail and fax system. The claim itself is only tangentially related to what is written.
Stealing the ideas in a decades-old technical standard? This is yet another embarrassing failure by the USPTO. - J
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)
The first one is ridiculous enough, and obviously the one that they're getting uptight about, but the second one shows a far scarier thing.
"Exactly the same as 1, but different when doctors use it"
The proffession of the members of the group should have no bearing on the technical implementation of something like this, so why the hell is it in the list of claims?
Re:They're just describing proper domain usage (Score:2, Insightful)
Amusingly, patent reform in the EU has been predominated by the meme that it should avoid becoming like the US system, and any proposal that even resembles something the US is doing gets a lot of opposition.
only now you notice.. (Score:1, Insightful)
* go to another country, say, India or Burma
* take some folk remedy, or an agri product or seed they have been using for ages - like turmeric, or rice.
* patent it in US, whose patent office wil grant the claim the company discovered it, because according to them the other country is nto a part of the universe.
* wait for the other country to join some WTO treaty which forces them to honor this patent from US.
*start demanding royalties for every villager using turmeric as a medicine or cooking rice - in eality from every seller of rice in that country.
in short, these companies have been taking advantage of the fact that patent office employment in US requires only highschool diploma or something similar for yeaaars. only now it becomes news.
Re:patents reduce unemployment (Score:1, Insightful)