It turns out however, that a company called Walid (later renamed to IDN Technologies) claims to own the technology required for supporting non-ASCII7 names. Danish article in ComputerWorld [computerworld.dk]
Walid has 3 years ago told IETF that "WALID is prepared to make available, upon written request, a non-exclusive license under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions, based on the principle of reciprocity".
The operative word being "reciprocity" meaning that all companies using Walid's technology (i.e. that have non-English letters in their name) should give Walid access to all patents they may hold.
Now it's up to the Danish courts to see if the claims of Walid are valid.
Danish article about the Walid case [softwarepatenter.dk]
If not, they stand no chance... but then again, I guess we have to hope that the Danish courts actually understand the matter properly. Remember how they handled the newsbooster case?
Nick
Is Walid a Danish Company?
They are located in Ann Arbor, MI 48104.
That's the part that annoys me: They speak of "names and addresses with foreign, non-English characters." I don't want a "foreign" name - I want my own name (Hagstrøm).
If not, they stand no chance...
It is an alias for xn--5cab8c.dk
>www.æøå.dk
See, I just tried that, but my browser is not configured right to resolve that. Methinks a lot of other peoples browsers don't support that in default mode.
We'll see..
Take a look at [xn--5cab8c.dk...] which is what the DNS record for [æøå.dk...] ought to be translated to in the browser. IE 5.2 on Mac OS X ie. can't handle the æøå-form but has no problem with the xn-form.
Mozilla on Mac (and by extension then all Gecko-based browsers) has no problems at all with IDNa. Apples own Safari 1.0 v85.5 can't handle IDNa.
