>>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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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. -- John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 330 5711 [EMAIL PROTECTED], Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl, Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail
