[Wikipedia-l] Patent idea

Thu Apr 1 14:04:51 UTC 2004

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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-- 
Its all GNU to me