At 09:41 AM 1/16/2004, you wrote:
According to the article, somebody maanged to patent the selling of www.something.somethng.com. Which seems a bit assanine to me, since the ISP I worked for in 1993 offered custoemrs www.customer.ccnet.com.
Uh, no, that's not what the article said and it's not what the patent, which is linked from the article, says. The patent is on the tiny tweak of selling matching e-mail addresses and domains (it says URLs but their examples show domains) of the form argle@bargle.tld and argle.bargle.tld.
I agree that's obvious and trivial, and there's debatably prior art from about 1980 in the way that the contact address is encoded in an SOA DNS record, but it's not about selling third level domains per se.
We have been doing the same thing since 1995. R Tellurian Networks - The Ultimate Internet Connection http://www.tellurian.com | 888-TELLURIAN | 973-300-9211 "Good will, like a good name, is got by many actions, and lost by one." - Francis Jeffrey