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Electronic Frontier Foundation
Podcast Episode: Antitrust/Pro-Internet

Ideaflood/Hoshiko

PATENT BUSTING OFFENDER

Ideaflood/Hoshiko

Patent Busting Project
An EFF Initiative To Protect Innovation and Free Expression

Ideaflood/Hoshiko

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
Patent 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."

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

Prior Art Description

PDF icon ideaflood_prior.pdf
PDF icon 6687746_final_rejection.pdf

Currently available only in PDF format.

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