On Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 02:44:01PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
Hey!
We were looking for something we came up with that we could patent,
right? And we were specifically looking for something that would make
fun of the idea of patenting itself.
Here's an idea.
For those who don't yet know, a company called Ideaflood has patented
the idea of allocating sub-domains to particular users (or user
accounts) of a website. So, for example, LiveJournal is now being asked
for licensing fees because if you purchase an account at LiveJournal,
you get a sub-domain "yourusername.livejournal.com".
How about we patent the idea of using language codes as sub-domains?
Sounds fun to me.
Next up: the idea of using the title of an article to construct
its URL!
After all, no other encylopedia has been doing this :) (had a
quick look at
britannica.com and
encarta.com)
More suggestions: simulating nested comments using wiki editing.
Hell, every source file in MediaWiki can get a patent for whatever
it implements.
Arvind
Ideaflood's patent claim is pretty weak because
there is "prior art"
(i.e. people have done this before the patent was filed), but I'm not
sure I have ever seen a website that uses language codes as subdomains
before Wikipedia did. They all seem to prefer something like
www.domain.tld/en/index.html or
www.domain.tld/index.en.html (with "en"
being the language code) rather than en.domain.tld.
Just an idea,
Timwi
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