ENS developers urge Unstoppable Domains to drop patents or face lawsuit

cointelegraph.com:

Founder and lead developer of Ethereum Name Service (ENS) Nick Johnson is urging blockchain domains company Unstoppable Domains to drop a recently awarded patent or face a lawsuit, according to an open letter shared on X (formerly Twitter). 

In January, Unstoppable Domains was granted its first patent, US11558344, which claims that Braden River Pezeshki, Matthew Everett Gould and Bogdan Gusiev are the inventors of a technology that uses blockchain technology to determine domains. The patent request was filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in 2021. 

According to Johnson, the patent is "based entirely on innovations that ENS developed and contains no novel innovations of its own." The ENS documentation stipulates that:

In the open letter published on Nov. 17, Johnson claims that all the ENS work is under open-source licenses, with all standards publicly available for implementation. According to him, continued attempts to contact Unstoppable Domains about the issue have failed in recent months.

"UD has subsequently issued a press release ‘pledging’ its first patent to the Web3 Domain Alliance, an industry group founded and run by Unstoppable Domains. We appreciate the sentiment behind this, but regrettably, press releases are not legally binding," Johnson noted in the thread.

The ENS Labs is "ready to challenge this patent, which we believe is entirely derivative of our own inventions; a position we are able and willing to demonstrate.," Johnson warned.

One of the alleged inventors from Unstoppable Domains, Matthew Gould, responded in the thread, extending an open invitation to join the Web3 Domain Alliance, the blockchain domain registry organization allegedly pledged with the patent. Gould also argued