General Patent to License, Enforce WALID’s Key Internet Patent

SUFFERN, N.Y., January 14, 2003 - IDN Technologies LLC (IDNT) announced today that General Patent Corporation (GPC), a premier patent enforcement firm, will manage the licensing and enforcement of its patent portfolio covering the use of internationalized domain names for the Internet, recently acquired from WALID, Inc. IDNT and GPC are headquartered in Suffern, New York.

IDNT’s patented technology allows Internet users to access web pages and use Internet applications with domain names that include non-English and other special characters, which are known as Internationalized Domain Names (IDN). Currently, the Internet Engineering Task Force’s RFC 1035 standard only permits domain names to include 37 English characters – the letters A-Z, the numbers 0-9, and the hyphen/minus sign “-”. The restriction on the types of characters permitted in domain names has hampered the proliferation of the Internet in non-English-speaking countries. IDNT’s patented technology is expected to satisfy the pent-up demand of non-English speaking Internet users, and also fully complies with the proposed standard for Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications, recently approved by the Internet Engineering Steering Group on October 24, 2002.

“IDN Technologies is exploring a number of alternatives pertaining to the licensing and enforcement of its patents,” said Alexander Poltorak, Chairman & CEO of GPC. “We would like the technology to be widely available to the world’s Internet users so as to promote the growth and usage of IDNs,” he added. “To that end, IDN Technologies intends to offer the patents for license on attractive terms.”

“At the same time, if necessary, GPC will vigorously enforce the patent rights of IDN Technologies,” said Neil Cohen, GPC’s Assistant General Counsel, who is spearheading IDN Technologies’ licensing and enforcement campaign.

“While we recognize that some in the Internet community believe that IDNT’s patents should be donated to the public, we believe that the millions of dollars invested in the development of the technology and the creativity and foresight of the inventor, Dr. Walid Tout, must be recognized and adequately compensated,” added Mr. Cohen.