Not only is there plenty of prior art for the below claim, but quite incidentally Register.com was briefed thoroughly by Ascio employees (I was on the call) in early 2000 on some of these exact methods. /n -----Original Message----- From: Michael D. Palage [mailto:michael@palage.com] Sent: 1. juni 2004 22:05 To: registrars@dnso.org Subject: [registrars] New US Patent - 6,745,248 Hello All: This patent was just issued today by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, a number of you may find it worth a read. Best regards, Michael D. Palage United States Patent 6,745,248 Gardos , et al. June 1, 2004 -- Method and apparatus for analyzing domain name registrations Abstract Downloading an authoritative zone file and performing searches within the zone file can identify all of the domain names registered to an entity. A method of identifying all of the domain names registered to an entity may including downloading a root zone file from a registry or from a root server and storing the root zone file as a text file with alphanumeric character strings associating each domain name with a registrar and at least one domain name server. A search characteristic is established corresponding to a character string comprising a significant part of one of the entity's domain names. A string search is performed in the download root zone file for the search characteristic to identify one or more domain names matching the search characteristic, as well as a registrar corresponding to the matching domain name and at least one domain name server associated with the matching domain name in the downloaded root zone file. Each matching domain name is stored in a data file, so that the data file associates each extracted domain name with the corresponding registrar and the at least one domain name server. The method continues by repeating, at least once, the successive processes of establishing a second search characteristic, extracting from the registry at least one additional domain name on the basis of the second search characteristic and storing each additional matching domain name in the data file. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Inventors: Gardos; Robert D. (New York, NY); Burstein; Adam D. (Brooklyn, NY); Hsian-Yeh; Chia (Flushing, NY); Rothman; Jonathan (New York, NY); Calandra; Mark (Hoboken, NJ) Assignee: Register.com, Inc. (New York, NY) Appl. No.: 631171 Filed: August 2, 2000