Internet Patents From Ideaflood Challenged
Internet Patents in the news again.
According to a recent press release from Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in their official website www.eff.org, they are set to challenge an allegedly improper Internet patent that is threatening small businesses.
Ideaflood is a self-declared ‘intellectual property holding company’ that makes use of Internet subdomain patenting against payment from the website hosting companies, which provide personalized and virtual subdomains, such as ‘action.eff.org’ for ‘eff.org’, the parent domain.
A reexamination request had been filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), the result of which revealed by EFF and Rick McLeod of Klarquist Sparkman, LLP, proves that the method Ideaflood boasts of inventing was known prior to the issue of the patent and thus goes without merit. Furthermore, website developers were also publicly discussing the creation of these virtual subdomains on an Apache developer mailing list a year earlier Ideaflood claimed its patent.
According to Rick McLeod, the patent system must be for innovation and is not meant to infringe on the public area.