] On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, David Goldstein wrote:
] 
] > Patent flap slows multilingual domain name plan
] > Intellectual property claims have blindsided the Internet Engineering
] > Task Force and could derail the group's efforts to develop a common
] > scheme for supporting foreign-language domain names across the Internet.
] >  http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2001/0326patent.html

Doug Robb wrote: 
] It seems at first blush to be something that the patents
] office should have knocked back as being an obvious
] application to someone reasonably "skilled in the art". For
] some reason they don't seem particularly hard on the
] "obviousness" part of the patent awarding process these
] days - particulary for software.

Perhaps very little of what happens on the Internet is "obvious"
to the USPTO...

__________________________________________________________________________
 David Keegel <djk&#167;cyber.com.au>  URL: http://www.cyber.com.au/users/djk/
Cybersource P/L: Unix Systems Administration and TCP/IP network management