Re: [idn] i-DNS.net Patent Filing

[bill@mail.nic.nu (J. William Semich)]

At 08:53 PM 9/20/00 +0800, James Seng wrote:
>Dear all,
>
>In this note, I am representing i-DNS.net International Inc.
>
>i-DNS.net has filed for a patent which has been published by US WIPO wrt to
>multilingual domain names. A notice as below has been sent to the IETF
>secretariate as per RFC2026 rules last week. This is already been
reflected on
>http://www.ietf.org/ipr.html.
>
>The claims in the applied-for patent involve using and detecting multiple
>native encodings for IDN. Since the WG has not move towards that
direction, no
>discussion, emails, I-Ds in the WG is related to the patent.
>
>If there is any further questions, please email me and I will try to answer
>them to the best of my knowledge.
>
>James Seng
>Chief Technology Officer
>i-DNS.net International Inc.

James:

I have read with great interest the I-DNS Patent Application at:

http://l2.espacenet.com/dips/viewer?PN=WO0050966&CY=ep&LG=en&DB=EPD 

MULTI-LANGUAGE DOMAIN NAME SERVICE 
Publication date: 2000-08-31  
Inventor(s): SUBBIAH SUBRAMANIAN; TAN TIN-WEE; LEONG KOK YONG; LIM KUAN
SIONG; SENG CHING HONG; TAN JUAY KWANG;
TAY EDWARDS; DE SILVA DON IRWIN TRACY
Applicant(s):: I DNS NET INTERNATIONAL INC (US)  
Application Number: WO2000US04519 20000222 
         ************

After reading the full document, I strongly disagree with your comment that
the patent has nothing to do with the discussions or work of this IETF IDN
working group.

Here is an excerpt of more than a dozen claims to "inventions" made by
I-DNS in the patent application, which specifically deal with items under
discussion in the working group, in particular discussions about a RACE
standard being approved, for which it appears I-DNS makes multiple patent
claims:

CLAIMS

What is claimed is:

1. A method, implemented on an apparatus, of detecting the linguistic
encoding type of a digitally represented domain name ... 
<snip>...

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising receiving a DNS request
containing the digitally represented domain name.

<big snip> ...

9.. The method of claim 2, further comprising:

Identifying a root level DNS server responsible for resolving root level
domains of the identified encoding type; and

Transmitting the DNS request to the root level DNS server.

10. The method of claim 9, further comprising, prior to transmitting the
DNS request, converting the domain name's digital sequence from the
identified encoding type to a DNS encoding type compatible with DNS
protocol. [AKA, ASCII ENCODING or RACE - BS]

11. The method of claim 10, wherein the DNS encoding type is ASCII or a
universal linguistic encoding type [AKA, From UNICODE/ISO-10646 OR UTF-7 OR
UTF-5 TO RACE - BS].

12. The method of claim 10, wherein converting the domain name's digital
sequence comprises:

Converting the domain name's digital sequence from the identified encoding
type to a universal linguistic encoding type {AKA, to UNICODE/ISO-10646 -
BS]; and

Converting the domain name's digital sequence from the universal linguistic
encoding type to a DNS encoding type compatible with the DNS protocol [AKA,
>From UNICODE/ISO-10646 TO RACE - BS]."
[End of Excerpts]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

Item 12, in particular, sounds an awful lot like
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-idn-race-01.txt:

"Abstract

This document describes a transformation method for representing
non-ASCII characters in host name parts in a fashion that is completely
compatible with the current DNS...."

<snip>

..."The input name string consists of characters from the ISO 10646
character set in big-endian UTF-16 encoding. This is the pre-converted
string". [This would equate to "the domain name's digital sequence from the
universal linguistic encoding type" from the I-DNS Patent Application,
claims 11 and 12 above]

<snip>

"2.2.3 Encode the compressed string with Base32
The compressed string MUST be converted using the Base32 encoding
described in section 2.5. The result of this step is the encoded string."
[this would equate to "Converting the domain name's digital sequence from
the universal linguistic encoding type to a DNS encoding type compatible
with the DNS protocol" in the I-DNS Patent claim 12 above.] 

Again, from http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-idn-race-01.txt:

"2.5 Base32
In order to encode non-ASCII characters in DNS-compatible host name parts,
they must be converted into legal characters. This is done with Base32
encoding, described here."

Note how closely the language "DNS compatible host name parts ... into
legal characters" from the RACE ID parallels the I-DNS patent language, "a
DNS encoding type compatible with the DNS protocol" above.

James, considering the close similarities between the language used in the
I-DNS claims in your patent application, and the language of the proposed
RACE mechanism, your statement that "Since the WG has not move towards that
direction, no discussion, emails, I-Ds in the WG is related to the patent"
is an astounding assertion.

In fact, the reverse seems to be true - almost all the discussion WRT ACE,
RACE, BRACE, TRACE, UTF-5 and any other transformation mechanism between
the "non-DNS compatible" [sic] "universal linguistic encoding types" of
UNICODE/ISO-10646/UTF-8/UTF-16 and an ASCII encoding method ("a DNS
encoding type compatible with the DNS protocol") is embraced by the claims
in the I-DNS patent application.

IN SUMMARY:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in simple terms, claims 10, 11 and 12 would
grant I-DNS a patent on any technology which accepts UNICODE/UTF-8/UTF-16
queries and converts them to any ASCII encoding method and submits that as
a DNS query. 

Isn't that what RACE is all about?

So I guess we should all be reassured that, as you said in your email
disclosure, "i-DNS.net is willing to grant a license to such patent rights
to the extent it is necessary to the implementation of the standard" under
RFC 2026.


Bill Semich