From kragen@dnaco.net Thu Aug 20 12:09:46 1998 Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 12:09:45 -0400 (EDT) From: Kragen Reply-To: Kragen To: vix@vix.com cc: systalk@ml.org, talkback@threepoint.com, srctran@world.std.com Subject: "push" patent covers BIND Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Keywords: X-UID: 1295 Status: O X-Status: Patent 5,790,793, which was granted a couple of weeks ago, apparently covers most "push" technologies. It also appears that its first claim covers BIND. It's available at . It says: What is claimed as new and desired to be secured by Letters Patent of the United States is: 1. A method of communicating between computers, comprising the steps of: - creating a message at a first computer, said message including a reference to a predetermined location; - transmitting, by the first computer, said message to a second location; and - receiving said message by a computer at the second location; - decoding said message by the computer at the second location by retrieving data from the predetermined location, automatically by a single application, without requiring user interaction, into the computer at the second location. Doesn't this cover DNS lookups by referral? When I've sent a request with no recursion requested to the "wrong" DNS server, the DNS server creates a message including a reference to a predetermined location (the NS record), transmits that message to my nameserver, which receives it, and then decodes it and retrieves data from the predetermined location automatically and without requiring user interaction. Interestingly, the references include the MIME RFCs. Several of the other claims don't appear so obviously invalid to me. Claim 2 specifically covers the case where the message is HTML, claim 3 specifically covers the case where the message decodes to HTML, etc. If one claim is bad, does that destroy the whole patent? Kragen