An already tested method to defeat the online gambling companies started to act again, after Bodog.
1st Technology made a complaint against several companies including Digital Gaming Solutions SA, Costa Rica International Sports, Action Poker Gaming Enterprises and SBG Global; two Norwegian companies: Playsafe Holding AS and eCom Enterprises; and Digital Gaming Network, Ltd., which is based in Curacao, for the inftingement of a US patent. The result could be the confiscation of the domain names and default judgements.
Gambling 911 tells us that the complaint, filed in a Missouri Supreme Court, is considering the U.S. Patent No. 5,564,001, titled “Method and System for Interactively Transmitting Information Over A Network Which Requires Reduced Bandwidth”.
What is interesting is that this kind of action is taken against companies that are not under the jurisdiction of the US. But, in order to be able to fight against the online gambling, it is used an intermediate for the complaint and the fact that many international institutions that are implied in the domain name and Internet regulation are based within US, so they are considered as being under the US jurisdiction.
I do not know if this US patent it is a legal and enough argument against the online gambling companies. But why they didn’t act before the UIGEA, when US was accepting the online gambling?
And more than this, it seems to me that during the last years the US patents grown in a such manner that soon there will be very few activities on Internet that will no infringe a patent or another (in an insurance related web site, I was forced some time ago to change the metatag “farm insurance” because it is patented by an US company).
And they have even the power and the tools to impose their own rules, as long as the most important specific institutions are under the US jurisdiction.
So, it seems that the Internet is no more a “worldwide, publicly accessible series of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol”, but a patent where we are accepted temporarily, as long as we do not bother the owner.
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