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The Patents Are Coming
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Obviousness is a question of fact under 35 U.S.C. 103. Nothing is obvious in a vacuum. In this instance, you are going to have to produce a piece of prior art, such as a printed publication or evidence of use or sale from one year prior to the application date, which shows the invention substantially as claimed. Then, you are going to have to show that any differences between the prior art and the claimed method are modifications that would be made by one of ordinary skill in the pertinent art, in accordance with a known motivation to make such modifications.
Proving obviousness is more than a matter of having two parties asserting "tis" and "tis not".
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There's *shedloads* of prior art for this. I mean, just take a look at CentralNic's 'Ferret' application which we've had since late 1999 (see here [centralnic.com]). --
CTO, CentralNic Ltd. [centralnic.com]
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Personally, I'm getting pretty much fed up with intellectual-property people of all sorts... they've all taken enormous liberties with the scope of their claimed property rights, to the detriment of freedom and true innovation.
* COPYRIGHTS: Congress has steadily extended their duration (recently upheld by the Supreme Court), so that works created in the 1920s and later might never go into the public domain. This is being done largely to protect Disney characters (some of which were created in the '20s and would be public domain by now under the laws in effect at that time), though, ironically, Disney has benefited greatly from the availability of public domain stories from earlier centuries which they can adapt into movies (e.g., Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid). Meanwhile, laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act criminalize reverse-engineering around protection measures, even when it's done to enable fair use protected by law.
* TRADEMARKS: Originally intended to protect consumers from marketplace confusion and deception, they have been expanded to the point where companies can claim to own common English words in all of their possible uses, and gain a pre-emptive right to grab them in any new namespace that is devised.
* PATENTS: The USPTO has been granting patents to the most mind-numbingly obvious concepts, as long as they involve computers or the Internet. The true innovators of the Internet have mostly let their inventions be used freely without attempts at claiming IP rights to them; now a whole swarm of parasites has descended to try to profit from gaining proprietary rights to things that ought to be free for all, and the government has gone along with them.
Is there any solution to all of this, other than lining up all IP lawyers against a wall and shooting them?
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DNS resolvers have been doing what this claim claims for a long, long time (since at least the mid 1980's.)
If one looks in the Unix/Linux/BSD configuration file /etc/resolv.conf one will often see a list of possible suffixes. If you try to do something that uses a non-fully-qualified domain name (FQDN), for example you say "ping foo", then the resolver will try out the various suffixes to see if it can find a domain name lookup that works. To my eye, that mechanism does what the claim claims. (The patent claim makes no statement about whether the search is in parallal or serial.)
(By-the-way, it is this search mechanism that new.net used.)
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If you've worked with an "IP lawyer" on your own patent application, you know they aren't the ones driving this.
"IP lawyers" are just the folks that help you get protection such as patents or trademarks. If you have an invention, you will need one.
The problem with overbroad patents and patent blackmail originates with
1. vanilla scumbag trial lawyers, who are the ones who actually bring suit, considering a patent suit exactly the same as a slip-and-fall (not "IP lawyers", who just deal with the government).
2. So-called inventors and companies, who don't give the patent office all of the earlier work they are aware of, even though they have the duty to do so. Obviously, they know the state of the art and have access to materials.
3. The activist patent appeals court, who change the law every 10 minutes so you can't tell what the damn things are supposed to do. Half of the law suits rely on loopholes and conflicts created by the stupid appeals court.
On the other hand, I don't consider the lack of competence of the patent office a problem, because it is like considering the weather a problem. The problem with the patent office will never get better. They will always be underfunded and semi-competent at best.
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The BIBLE was CREATED by parallel processing!
The BIBLE was created by compiling, and formatting same!
This concept is REDICULOUSLY obvious! Most processors INTERNALLY process thigs through various pipelines.(Is verisign still using 80286 computers? As I recall INTEL started using the THEN popular pipelining technology in the 80386.)
MANY networking programs do this. Metasearch searchengines, like dogpile, have been doing this for YEARS!
M/S domain directories(almost EXACTLY what verisign patented.) have done this BEFORE the internet went public.
This patent, like most lately, violates EVERY requirement for patents! Verisign should be FINED for wasting the governments time, rather than awarded this patent!
What's NEXT? Are they going to patent a device where every edge is equidistant from the center thus making it revolve easily? HEY FOLKS, I just invented the WHEEL!
BTW, forget about 1999. What of all the apps created even BEFORE the WWW, and even BEFORE the internet went public! HECK, what about before computers themselves!
Could you imagine where this world would be without formatted compiled information aggregated in parallel? NO computer, not even CARS! Heck, there wouldn't be a patent office!
Steve
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It's Funny, I'm 20 years old and a programmer; And with all the patents that are being handed out I don't see how I can ever make a program and sell it with out being sued!
Let's Break Down What I can't make:
"One Click Shopping"
"Any Thing with popup adds"
"Anything to search DNS Records"
"Any thing that Stores a medical record in a 'portable' fashion"
"Software that brings back search results that are similar and sell well"
and that's just the ones that were issued in the last 6 months!! and im missing alot!
How is this helping any-one.. I Thought (and I could be wrong, im only a 20 year old) that the purpose of patents were to spawn creativity and growth in markets by protecting inventors.
The keyword is INVENTORS.
I guess to sum up my rant;
I am a 20 year old programmer that in 5 to 10 years will be lucky if I can write a 'hello world' program with out stepping on a patent or two.
Very, Very... Very Sad.
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If I read the claims correctly, each one of them involves the user specifying not only a domain name, but a list of domains. If the user doesn't specify a list of domains, it's not covered by the patent. IANAL, but it looks to me like any web site that does not ask the user for a list of preferred domains (or maybe countries) is not covered by the patent at all. Looking up the domain name in all TLDs is the loophole.
Chrischeck out Center for Responsible Nanotechnology http://CRNano.org
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Let me try to set the record straight on this one. This was NOT a VeriSign-original initiative. The patent inventor reads "Larry Joe Broadhurst." Joe Broadhurst was an employee of idNames.com, a ccTLD search and registration business I led along with my business partner, Marc Ostrofsky from 1996 to 1998. Some of you may recall that Marc Ostrofsky is the guy who purchased business.com for $150K and then sold it in 1999 for a reported $7.5 million. (Well that's another story for another time.) Anyway, one day Joe, myself (Pinky Brand) and Marc were sitting in our lawyer's office in Houston on a very hot summer day, because we were thinking of selling our ccTLD search and registration business to Network Solutions after they went public. We told our lawyer about this "worldwide WHOIS" search tool script we had written and were using to sell lots of ccTLD searches when he stopped us in our tracks and told us that we should immediately file a process patent on the thing. We spent the next 12 hours literally writing out the art on a piece of paper several times to get it right. The sole purpose of doing that was to create something valuable/tangible that could be sold in a transaction to an acquiring party...not to mention that by some wild chance we could later reap the benefits from such a patent should by some slim chance it be actually granted. To make a long story short, we assigned the patent appliation to Network Solutions when we sold idNames.com to them in 1998. I don't recall anyone at NSI being too concerned about it or even putting the application on the fast track with legal et al. The thing sat on the shelf for most of the next 2 1/2 years. As everyone knows, VRSN purchased NSOL in mid-2000 and unfortunately things went downhill from there as far as the idNames business goes...not too mention a lot of other stuff. --MORE LATER WHEN I HAVE TIME. -Pinky Brand www.arcemus.com
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