Wanted: Ideaflood/Hoshiko
Description: This is a system for allowing users of a network to create and retrieve information from a personally-named subdomain, such as "action.eff.org."
Patent Name: System apparatus and method for hosting and assigning domain names on a wide area network.
Patent Number: 6,687,746
Critical Date: August 6, 1999
Crimes against the public domain
- Ideaflood billed itself as "an intellectual property generation and
holding company," with their entire business model built on bullying
smaller companies into paying licensing fees for overbroad software
patents
- Threatened many small website hosting companies, such as
Freehomepage.com and T35 webhosting (www.t35.com)
- Threatened community site LiveJournal, whose 3 million users each
have their own subdomain, and thus standing in the way of LJ users'
ability to speak freely in groups
- The patent has since been reassigned to a company called Hoshiko,
LLC
