Applies for domain name management patent — Patent troll

Intellectual Ventures wants patent related to managing domain names and web hosting.

Some big firms in the domain name space have lots of patents. Despite threats, no major players have tried to extract money out of their competitors.

But registrars ought to be concerned regarding a recent patent application since of the firm behind it: Intellectual Ventures. Through its firm III Holdings 1, LLC, the firm has applied for a patent for “System and Method for Domain Management and Migration”.

The application (pdf) describes two types of systems:

1. A unified system for managing domain names registered at different registrars.
2. A way to migrate hosting to take advantage of newer equipment or better service prices.

I suspect there’s a lot of prior art on the first one.

The inventors are entrepreneur David Feinleib and attorney Alan Burnett.

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