Nix Bits

This is a truly rediculous patent. Apparently a company called ideaflood.com has managed to patent subdomains.

*boggle*

So if I decide to set up, say, Jennifer.scottharney.com, I’m supposed to pay a licensing fee to this company. How did they get this patent in the first place?

Christopher Falkowski, a legal specialist in these topic areas for Bloomfield Hills, Mich.-based Rader, Fishman and Grauer (raderfishman.com) says a number of key requirements must be met to obtain a patent, whether that patent is in the area of Web hosting operations or any other technical field: The invention must be new or novel. It must be non-obvious. The persons claiming the patent must be the inventors. And the patent application must be filed within one year of a public disclosure or sale.

The patent was apparently issued in 1999. One of the first relevant RFC’s I could find is RFC 805 dated 8 February, 1982. Here’s the introductory text:

Introduction

   A meeting was held on the 11th of January 1982 at USC Information
   Sciences Institute to discuss addressing issues in computer mail.
   The attendees are listed at the end of this memo.  The major
   conclusion reached at the meeting is to extend the
   "username@hostname" mailbox format to "username@host.domain",
   where the domain itself can be further structured.

Hmmm. Besides being an obvious idea, there’s clearly prior art. That’s just one RFC out of many and I’m certain there are hundreds of examples of this use of subdomain naming. Perhaps a search of The internet archive will provide some examples.