Fast-rising Centraal Corp, purveyor of the RealNames system to provide natural language mappings to internet domain names was always extremely bullish abut its prospects of prevailing in a patent infringement lawsuit brought against it by its rival Netword LLC, with good reason (07/23/98). Last Friday the US District Court for the eastern district of Virginia threw out Netword’s claim, which it filed in July 1998, granting Centraal’s motion for a summary judgement of non-infringement, finding that Centraal had not infringed any Netword patents. However, Netword has the right of appeal and it intends to pursue that option. Netword’s request for summary judgement was dismissed by the court and the appeal will now be heard in a higher patent court. Both technologies offer a system whereby users can register meaningful names, either for personal or commercial use that are then mapped on to domain names. The court ruled that the two systems worked in fundamentally different ways, which Centraal has always maintained. RealNames is based on distributed XML objects, while Netword’s is a database-driven system and Netword’s patent was too general to be applied anyhow. Netword disagrees. It says that there are specific details about the RealNames architecture that infringe on its patents and that the company believes strongly that the summary judgement is wrong and will be overturned on appeal. Netword says it still concentrating on getting free personal Networds registered in the hope of creating a critical mass so that paying corporations will be tempted to adopt them. Netword’s rule is that a person can register a Netword for their own use, but if a company comes along and offers money for it, the individual has to give it up. Following a deal with GeoCities last month, some 1,000 of its users have registered Networds and the company says we can expect similar deals over the next few months. Centraal didn’t return our calls.
