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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