Patents
Filed at the UK Intellectual Property Office in Couri Technologies' own name, and on the World Intellectual Property Organization's Digital Access Service so they can be taken to other countries.
When one service asks another to confirm who you are, the second service is told who you are and nothing at all about what you were agreeing to. The link between the person and the document is then a line in the first service's own database, which is an assertion by the party that benefits from it. Couri works a short code out of the document itself, shows it in both places, and requires the identity service to state which code it put in front of you. Where the two do not match, nothing is issued at all rather than something weaker.
A certified email reaches everybody on it as the same message, so there is nowhere to hand each person a proof of their own, and a record of who it went to is a list that anyone holding it can check a guessed address against. Here the message carries a key rather than a proof. Each recipient uses it with their own address to show anybody that the message was addressed to them. The proof reveals nobody else who received it and cannot be used to test for anyone else, and the record Couri keeps cannot be used to test an address either.
A Couri booking link presents a Confrmo Name, and a Confrmo Name is leased rather than owned, so the party holding it can change after the link has already gone out. Here the link freezes who held the name when it was created, and checks again every time it is opened. If the name now points to someone else, or no longer exists, the link refuses to serve. Where Couri simply cannot reach Confrmo to check, that is kept as its own outcome and is never treated as a change of party, so a brief outage cannot permanently disable a link and a real change of ownership cannot hide behind one.
An application has been filed and has a filing date. It has not been granted, and it has not yet been published, so there is no public document to read. Nothing on this page should be read as a granted patent, because it is not one.
What a filing does give is a date. From that date the invention is ours to pursue, and anyone arriving at the same mechanism later arrives after us.
GB2619673.3. Couri's certificate says an identified person approved a specific message. Every service that defers identity to another service has the same weak point: the identity provider confirms the person and is deliberately never shown the content, so the connection between the two ends up being something the sender's own system asserts. Closing that is the subject of this application.
GB2621378.5. A certificate that says who approved a message is only half of what a dispute needs; the other half is who it was sent to. Couri already bound the recipients into the certificate and could not let any one of them prove they were on it without exposing the rest. The same applies to the record Couri kept, which could be tested against a guessed address. Closing both is the subject of this application.
GB2622312.3. A booking link is only as trustworthy as the identity behind it, and a leased name can change hands quietly. Every recipient who ever opens an old link is entitled to know whether it still means what it meant when it was sent, not just when Couri sent it. Closing that gap is the subject of this application.
In each case the searches were done before the application was drafted, and the mechanism was built and tested before it was filed.
