[Enum] My prior art published in august 2000 to abusive US Patent 6, 347, 085

I was the personal author of a discussion we had on the ICANN discussion list (during its reform in its “At Large study” and election process) about the convergence of telephone and Internet

You (IETF, and ITU) seem to have problems with US Patent 6,347,085 that was disclosed in 2002.

But the basic concept behind the claimed apparatus, and the way ENUM was finally adopted in 2002 was exactly what I proposed in the public ICANN discussion list in 2000.

Proof:

If people are making money from my idea that I filed in a public discussion at ICANN for free, then they are abusing my right. I want to give you a possible proof that the claims in this patent against the whole ENUM project that was really finalized in a working model in 2002 may be wrong, because it covers prior art.

I described an example with a French phone number like +33.1.23456789 that would be simply managed by:

* Creating a root subzone (I just gave .phone as an example, but the IETF proposed .e164.arpa, which is equivalent)

* giving the authority of this zone to the ITU who is in charge of the portable international phone numbering plan.

* making sure that the phone number is written in international form, and removing + and all separators.

* reversing the digits

* separating each digit by dots, so creating as many zubzones as necessary to match the numbering plan delegations

* and having each country manage its own registry for the numbers they have in charge, with the ITU…

My proposal was simpler than having to parse phone numbers and discovering howmany digits are needed to route a call to any network, because the DNS is flexible enough. I also proposed using dynamic DNS.

Although my message was short, and not the complete document that would make the policy needed to run the ENUM registry. All the core concepts were exposed in my message. In fact, even the simplified alternative (without reversing the whole number and with less dots) was also described. I gave the choice…

See ICANN discussion archives (my message is signed there, by my name and my (still valid) personal email address, and I was registered at ICANN as a valid subscriber at this time, for the ongoing ICANN reform):

http://forum.icann.org/adhoc/

More precisely this message:

http://forum.icann.org/adhoc/39948C41000000DA.html

posted on August 11, 2000 (so weeks before the US Patent was filed in September 2000)

Username:

verdy_p

Date/Time:

Fri, August 11, 2000 at 11:29 PM GMT

Browser:

Microsoft Internet Explorer V5.01 using Windows 98

Score:

Subject:

Convergence can be done within a DNS

Message:

Assume you want to translate a phone number to an IP address (chould it be IPv4 or IPv6), this can already be done using DNS:
Example: you want to translate a phone number in France, say:
+33.1.23456789
You could think it can be done by requesting a domain name like:
123456789.33.phone
(This assumes that phone is a TLD, in which each international phone code is registered and operated as a sub-TLD, and then the number is solved appropriately within that country registry.)
However there are issues, such that renumbering schemes (how many digits have to be searched ?)
Another solution is to use the reversed phone number and cutting phone number in individual digits:
9.8.7.6.5.4.3.2.1.3.3.phone
That way, you do not have to parse the phone number to find the minimum set of digits that successfully resolves a domain name, and the numering plan can be changed by distributing sub-DNS in each country. Because this domain name is algorithmicly implement, it lacks of readability. So each country could decide on the usual format to give to phone numbers so that they can be easily parsed.
Requesting the DNS could then return additional information, such that the kind of information that can be returned by reversed phone number searchs, however there are some privacy issues that should restrict the information returned by DNS requests.

What I mean here, is that converging numbering plans to IP is not necessary, because this process can be automated within dynamic DNS servers operated by country phone registries and ITU.

So it seems that the US Patent applicant just copied exactly what I said in the ICANN discussion list, and secretly filed a patent with many abusive verbose claims, and that patent that was only disclosed in 2002 when the ENUM project was made concrete, and they want to make money with an idea that they did not have and was publicly disclosed to ICANN before them.

I won’t claim a patent myself (I can’t pay an advocate for that to defend in US), but at least us Patent 6,347,085 can be proven invalid !

Philippe Verdy.

verdy_p at wanadoo.fr

At the time of publishing I was living at this address:

17 rue Jean Dussourd,

92600 Asnières-sur-Seine,

France

Now I live here :

15 rue Jean Perrin, Appt. 7

79000 Niort

France

My current phone number: +33(0)5 47 73 67 12