Patent covers aspects of Contrib system for domain names.
Chad Folkening was on the Domain Name Wire Podcast discussing Contrib last month. At a high level, it’s a system for developing domain names by engaging contributors.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office just granted patent number 9,787,760 to Folkening for “Platform for building virtual entities using equity systems”.
The patent describes many aspects of the system, including the contribution of domain names to the system, valuation of domain names, issuing equity to contributors of both domain names and the development process (which Folkening plans to do via a cryptocurrency), and applying contributions across multiple domain names.
There are some interesting aspects of this ambitious idea. You can read the patent here (pdf).
Ron says
Proof of concept still has to be proven, I guess they will try with their own domains first.