OT USPTO grants Calif. lawyer patent over entire WWW naming scheme
How could Albert Einstein have ever been one of these cretins?
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posted 8:43am EST Tue Jan 20 2004 - submitted by J. Eric Smith
NEWS
Do you know about United States Patent No. 6,671,714? You should. The patent, recently granted to one Frank Weyer of Beverly Hills, California, grants the patent holder full rights to: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;"
Sound familiar? Well, it should, because the patent describes what is essentially one of the most basic, most crucial underlying structures of the World Wide Web, namely the domain naming system.
The concept of domains and subdomains, as well as the e-mail addresses associated with them, has been around for a long time but apparently has escaped being patented prior to now. Meyer, a lawyer by trade, has capitalized on that oversight, and as of December 30, 2003, Meyer owns it. And now he's using it where it'll do the most good--in court.
On January 17, 2004, Meyer brought suit against Internet heavyweights Network Solutions, Inc. and Register.com, claiming the two services are infringing upon Meyer's newly-granted patent. In the suit Meyer claims damages of an unnamed amount and requests an immediate injunction against the two companies. Meyer states that he hopes to "work with" NSI and Register.com to license his patent. NSI and Register.com don't seem to be cooperating thus far, however.
You can read the text of the patent at the USPTO.
ERIC'S OPINION
I've often railed about the idiotic screwballs who run the USPTO, and now they've gone and made my case for me. What kind of fool granted this patent? Clearly, whoever reviewed it has no working knowledge of the World Wide Web, otherwise the obviousness of the patent would be clear to all. Must we go out and patent breathing lest someone decide to license the technology to us poor humans?
Now comes the real test. Will Register.com and NSI fight this patent, or will they settle? Legal experts seem to think that, if fought, Meyer would lose. However, such fights cost money, and if Meyer's thinly-veiled extortion plot "requests" only a small license fee, the registrars may decide to pay him off and save themselves the trouble.
I sincerely hope they do not. Already, our very way of life has been irretrievably altered by companies that settle rather than fight; the cumulative effect is that everything everywhere comes with warning labels, and everyone who slips and falls immediately thinks not of bruises but of dollar signs. Lawyers have bred a business generation of appeasers, and like all appeasement, giving in once leads to giving in more and more often.
I'm not a big fan of NSI (quite the opposite, actually), but I hope it and Register.com put up a good fight.
