U.S. Patent Office has been frequently criticized for being incompetent, ill-equipped to handle modern technological notions, and quite oblivious towards what is patentable and what is not. These objections were highlighted during the patent war between Apple and Samsung. And now, by granting a rather crazy patent to the domain registration site, GoDaddy, U.S. Patent Office seems to have proved the point.
The patent that GoDaddy has been granted is titled “Announcing a domain name registration on a social website.” In other words, GoDaddy has patented an ‘action’, much like social media sharing that we often indulge in.
It is quite the same as patenting ‘sharing a photo on Facebook’, something which would be as silly as it would be absurd. Besides, patenting an ‘action’ can’t possibly lead to any legal consequences since that would be an outright infringement of an individual’s basic rights.
However, all that seems to have been ignored by the folks over at the patent office. The patent that has been granted speaks of a ‘unique method’ to connect a user’s domain registering account with his Facebook account. Eventually, when the user registers a domain, it would post an update on Facebook and thus share the event with his social media contacts.
Posting such updates to Facebook, or Twitter, is very common these days, and a number of services make use of this feature. So it baffles one to think how could GoDaddy possibly patent such a thing. But then, U.S. Patent Office never does disappoint us in awarding the most strange patents.
Source: USPTO
Courtesy: Tech Dirt
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