[registrars] Patent Litigation

["Michael D. Palage" <michael@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Bob:

The California Central District is within the Federal Court system, see
http://www.cacd.uscourts.gov/. And you are correct that patent infringement
(35 USC) is the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal courts under US law.

I have not had a chance to read a copy of the complaint, however, anyone
that gets their hands on one first please forward me a copy.

The patent at issue is 6,671,714, see
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&Sect1=PTO1
&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&r=1&l=50&f=G&d=PALL&s1=6671714.WKU.&OS=PN/6671714&RS=PN/66
71714.

The "filing date" of the patent was Nov 23, 1999. Under US law 35 USC
102(b), any prior art publicly available one year prior to filing would
constitute prior art capable of invalidating the patent. Therefore, the
magic date for any prior art would have to be before Nov 23, 1998.

After reading Bhavin's original posting (kudos to Bhavin) me and some of my
IP buddies engaged in a little prior art searching. However, the first
potential smoking gun was found by John Berryhill, Esq. He was able to
reference one of his first web pages that he developed and maintained at -
http://sinnerg.vrx.net. The still functioning email associated with this
website is sinnerg@xxxxxxx and thus would appear to be on all fours with the
claims of the invention. Although John is checking his log files and other
archival information it appears that this service was available in the
Spring of 1998.

As usual and based upon prior practices, I would urge discretion among the
registrars with regard to postings concerning this or other litigation as
these postings are archived and publicly available.

Hope this information provided a little insight to everyone. However, please
do not rely upon this information as legal advice. Contact your attorney
should you require legal advice.

Best regards,

Michael D. Palage



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-registrars@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-registrars@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Robert F. Connelly
Sent: Monday, January 12, 2004 2:15 PM
To: Registrars Constituency
Subject: Re: [registrars] Anyoen hear of this


At 10:46 AM 1/12/04, Bhavin Turakhia wrote:

>Register.com and netsol sued for selling .name domains
>
>http://news.webhosting.info/t-835/
>
>Best Regards
>Bhavin Turakhia
>Founder, CEO and Chairman
>DirectI

Dear Registrars:  This is a mere layman speaking. I thought that patent
infringement suits are to be filed in the Federal District Court, not in
other district courts such as California Central District.

Regards, BobC