Focus On: Intellectual Property

ICANN's five day money-back period for domain name buyers has created a new, highly profitable industry. Some investors collude with registrars to continually buy blocks of domain names, publish pay-per-click advertising pages, return the blocks for a refund, then buy them again. Others simply throw back nonproductive domains before the time's up. Either way, ICANN loses its fees, and those looking for great domain names can't find any.

Once again, everyone's talking about the patents aimed at Blackberry's heart. But this time, it's not just about Blackberry. Nearly everyone in the mobile industry is at risk from a slew of much tougher software patents, served up by Visto. When you see the patents, and compare them to the earlier patents that caused RIM to cave, you'll see why the cost of mobile email's on its way up.

When SONY applied for a patent for attaching scripts to messages that force email recipients to respond, it seemed like a capital idea. But by the time a patent number was churned out five years later, many email recipients were safely ensconced behind network filters designed to strip or mangle most attached scripts, which have become well-known carriers of malware. What's SONY's hot patent factory to do with a patent that's gone cold?

The developers set out to invent a method for running programs through browsers (especially Netscape), to nullify the importance of the underlying operating system (especially Windows). Instead, their invention helped Microsoft supplant Netscape Navigator with a combination of Internet Explorer and ActiveX controls. Now, with the US Patent Office and Supreme Court at its back, Eolas is enforcing its patent. Where does Eolas go from here?