"Push" patent appears to cover a lot (fwd)

I am forwarding the following message about a recently approved patent that seems to have enormous consequences. I would like people to comment on it, pass the news on, etc. Please let the originator of the message know of your comments, as well (He asked).

You can just discuss it on this list. The important thing is that people know what's up. I also run a discussion list on some of the issues that might arise in this connection, so if you want to take your comments there, you can subscribe to the Committee for Independent Technology Community Discussion list by sending an e-mail message to
<Listserv[_at_]RealMeasures.dyn.ml.org> with SUBSCRIBE C-FIT in the message
body.

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Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 12:09:45 -0400 (EDT)
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980820120008.21889U-100000[_at_]picard.dnaco.net>
From: kragen[_at_]pobox.com (Kragen)
Subject: [ST] "push" patent covers BIND


Patent 5,790,793, which was granted a couple of weeks ago, apparently
covers most "push" technologies.  It also appears that its first claim 
covers BIND.  It's available at 


<URL:http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?patent_number=5790793>.  It says:


What is claimed as new and desired to be secured by Letters Patent of
the United States is:

    1. A method of communicating between computers, comprising the steps of: 

    - creating a message at a first computer, said message including a
      reference to a predetermined location;
    - transmitting, by the first computer, said message to a second
      location; and 
    - receiving said message by a computer at the second location;
    - decoding said message by the computer at the second location by
      retrieving data from the predetermined location, automatically by 
      a single application, without requiring user interaction, into the
      computer at the second location.

Doesn't this cover DNS lookups by referral?  When I've sent a request
with no recursion requested to the "wrong" DNS server, the DNS server
creates a message including a reference to a predetermined location
(the NS record), transmits that message to my nameserver, which
receives it, and then decodes it and retrieves data from the
predetermined location automatically and without requiring user
interaction.

Interestingly, the references include the MIME RFCs.

Several of the other claims don't appear so obviously invalid to me.
Claim 2 specifically covers the case where the message is HTML, claim 3
specifically covers the case where the message decodes to HTML, etc.
If one claim is bad, does that destroy the whole patent?

Kragen