Where Do They Come Up With These Patents?
from the please,-make-it-stop dept
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have a day go by without one of these silly patent cases where a “company” (usually consisting of one or two lawyers) gets a patent on something that shouldn’t be patentable, doesn’t do anything with the patent, and then sues companies that are doing something similar? How is it possibly a “patentable” idea to take the domain name john.smith.name and assign the user an email address john@smith.name? Why is that something that should be patented? Apparently, though, it is patentable, and because of that, Network Solutions and Register.com are being sued. Of course, it’s Global Name Registry that runs the .name registry – so it’s not entirely clear as to why the suit is focused on the other two players (except, of course, that they probably have a lot more money). I’m curious if someone can explain to me how this patent (and the resulting lawsuit) encourages “innovation”?
Comments on “Where Do They Come Up With These Patents?”
No Subject Given
Can we use the DNS RFC from like 20 years ago as prior art? You know, the one where the email address in the SOA uses a ‘.’ instead of an ‘@’ to specify the admin’s email?
The whole patent office should be lined up against a wall and shot.
What we really need
What we really need is something that punishes people who even TRY to obtain ridiculous patents.
If you were fined instead of just losing the patent, maybe some of these things never would have been applied for.
BTW, why is it that Congress seems so uninterested in this?