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by chessgecko 805 days ago
My read of patent one is that they basically created DNS for storage. But DNS was invented in 1983 so I'm not really sure what was novel here other than pointing it at data, which uses a few extra headers, ala my comment.

Even if there was nothing closer to this than DNS I don't think this patent should be valid.

1 comments

I think that in general, "use solution A to problem X to solve problem Y instead" is, in principle, a valid patent - assuming that it's not obvious that solution A would help with problem Y. After all, patents are about "how do I solve problem Y", not about the general algorithms themselves.

However, the "it's not obvious" part is very important. Not working in the field, it's not at all clear to me if using DNS for data was an obvious idea in ~2000 for building a distributed DB or not.

TXT records were specified an rfc published in 1987. SRV records in feb 2000.

This sounds to me like the web. You make a connection, you request a resource, it returns content and references to further resources that are required to get the full content of the resource you originally requested.

You are literally describing software engineering.