Honey, I patented the Internet!

Do you know about United States Patent No. 6,671,714? Well, you should. It grants one indi­vid­ual a patent for a method of assign­ing URL's and e-mail addresses to mem­bers of a group (some­thing that has been around since my mind can recall!)

Do you know about United States Patent No. 6,671,714? Well, you should. It grants *one* indi­vid­ual a patent for a method of assign­ing URL's and e-mail addresses to mem­bers of a group that we have been using since a long, long time.

First, I thought register's story was a joke. It's one of the most ridicu­lous patents you have ever seen! The patent, recently granted to one Frank Weyer of Bev­erly Hills, Cal­i­for­nia, grants the patent holder full rights to:

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.

On mail­ing lists and on IRC, I've often railed about the idi­otic screw­balls who seem to run the US patent offices, 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.

There's no love lost between myself and NSI (quite the oppo­site, actu­ally) but I hope this case is won!