Whitserv says it’s coming after domain registrars for sending renewal notices
Friday, August 10th, 2012
Company claims it has patents related to sending renewal notices.
Whitserv, a company suing Go Daddy for alleged patent infringement related to sending renewal reminder notices, says it has put other domain registrars “on notice” as well.
Last year Whitserv filed suit against Go Daddy for how it sends reminder notices to renew domain names.
The company apparently got a victory related to the same patents against another company, so it just sent out a press release:
[Whitserv founder] Mr. Whitmyer stated that the Federal Circuit’s confirmation of validity and claim construction for WhitServe’s Professional Service Reminder Patents strengthens WhitServe’s position in its
pending litigation against domain registrar GoDaddy.com, Inc. for infringement of these same
patents. In addition to GoDaddy, WhitServe has put many other domain registrars on notice of
their infringement, as well as companies in the field of electronic subscriptions (Amazon, Zinio
and others) and the field of medical appointment software (RelayHealth, AthenaHealth and
others).
What a pile of rubbish (not your article, Andrew, just the lawsuit). Patents are being granted for the most trivial things these days, and the trend is not benefiting the general public at large. I’m not a big fan of Godaddy’s endless renewal reminders, but I’ll stand by their right to send them out unless, and only unless, I ask them not to.
Wow, that’s staggering.. So no one is allowed to send out renewal notices cos this group has a patent on it? I can’t see them winning this, it’s like having a patent on sending people paper bills.
Aussie Domainer: Please stop replying to this post without permission. I just patented replying to posts.
Registrars are required by ICANN to notify registrants about expiring domains.
IF the patents are legit, any burden for licensing should be on ICANN, with licenses automatically and uniformly extended to all registrars as part of the RAA.
Its going to take them a long time to sue every single registrar.
What’s next? What’s to preventing them from sueing insurance companies for sending renewing notices for auto, home policies? Totally outrageous.
Any updates to this case? Or is there a site that we can get updated information on this?
This sounds very concerning to registrars and could affect entire industry with increased registration fees if whitserv wins.
See this:
http://www.whitserve.com/patent_families/view/website-comment-management
“WhitServe technology enables user comments to be added to user data records in web-served reports.”
This is ridiculous, their whole website is about patents they’re trying to secure. “We know there are ripe opportunities in other vertical markets, such as cloud computing, healthcare,
manufacturing, financial and other professional services.”
And people keep saying Apple is bad…