[Wikipedia-l] Patent idea

Thu Apr 1 13:44:01 UTC 2004

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?

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