Frank Schilling’s Defensive Patent

[mj]

Legendary domainer’s patent-pending system could fend off ISP redirects.

On April 24, 2006, domain name portfolio owner Frank Schilling filed a patent application for “Generic top-level domain re-routing system” with the help of attorney John Berryhill. This patent, if granted, could end up being very important to the domain name industry. Patent application 20060265516 describes a system for redirecting typos of domain names, such as a typo of the .com portion or the actual name

http://domainnamewire.com/2008/05/14...ensive-patent/

.

[yanni]

Interesting. I had to leave a remark.

[npcomplete]

I would *not* be surprised to see this patent go through, although I think it should fail. Not that I don't think that it is a good idea (it is an excellent idea), but that the technology is trivial, and absolutely nothing new. Putting other "typo" tld's into the root with the same info takes minutes at most.

It is a problem though. As mentioned in "the other forum", I was involved in the "alternate root" efforts to set up alternatives to the ICANN root. There is enough traffic from the alternate root efforts to show up on the ICANN root radar as unresolved tld's. (ICANN hates the alt-root). The point is that the mod is trivial, and only uses existing technology.

OTOH, JB is as good as it gets as far as lawyers go, and the patent people are usually swamped. It also wouldn't solve the .cm / .com problem... Kevin Ham cornered that market for typos.

[phio]

Would it be possible to redirect some eee. or wwww. to my sites? hmmm....let me think about it a while.... Actually, I'd be happy just with some ww.'s...

[Drewbert]

Some dudes in Israel actually had a kick-arse patent regarding the serving of adverts to typo DNS traffic and they LET IT EXPIRE.