Company Claims Patent On Subdomains

Legal Issues

from the stop-laughing,-they're-serious dept

I thought we’d already had our silly patent of the day story, but it appears I made that decision a bit too soon. Apparently, a number of web hosting firms have received legalgrams from a company that actually has the guts to claim they own a patent on the concept of assigning subdomains. That’s right, if you dare to put up a domain at http://subdomain.myisp.com, they say you’re violating their patent. Well, I hate to say it, but it looks like we’re guilty right here at Techdirt. Of course, this also sounds like a similar patent we discussed back in January which focused on taking a subdomain and automatically assigning it an email address. How many of these ridiculous, innovation harming patents do we need before someone decides to reform the system?