Against the USPTO. Why? For starters, someone should sue them for being a monopoly. Granted - not possible since they are a government run agency. Regulated by who? Seriously though, the people granting these patents must live in caves. While I cant speak for REGISTERING the names - if memory serves - my fiancee in college (in 1987-88) worked for a company that used a MiniVax - and high end workstations running on Unix - or the variant for those particlar machines. DEC, whatever. Their machines were named in the fashion stationname.companyname.com and each had its own email address in the form of stationname@companyname.com. And I'm sure there are hundreds of companies who back in the late 80's had their systems set up that way. Most sysadmins back then had that type of common sense to do it. And they didnt patent the idea. Why? Common Sense. It seems what the USPTO need to do is grab a lot of the still unemployed techincal people in the country , who have some sense, pay them as consultants, and use their brains to help figure out what patents ought to be passed, since its very apparent the staff there now is clueless.