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Patent on P3P - W3 Seek Prior Art

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the stopping-dumb-patents dept.

Mindphunk wrote to say " Just saw this request for prior art over at the W3C. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today announced that it is investigating the status of a patent claim which threatens open access to privacy protection technology known as the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P). To aid in its investigative efforts, W3C is calling on the Web Community for help in locating "prior art," technology whose existence could be relevant to the validity of the patent. " There are growing incompatibilities between patents and open standards; the trend towards filing patents in areas where standards are already underway is cause for both concern and action," stated Daniel J. Weitzner, Technology and Society Domain Leader of W3C. "The Web and developer communities can be instrumental in providing the evidence required to render questionable patents invalid, thereby maintaining an open Web. "

1 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. Initial Reaction by Effugas · · Score: 5

    OK Folks, we're looking for stuff that fulfills this:

    ---
    A network system or architecture where a client (such as a browser) and a server exchange information using a control structure defined by metadata (e.g. expressed in XML) which describes

    how to transfer updated information from the server to the client
    how to transfer feedback information, and updates to that information, from the client to the server, and
    how to process the exchanged information by reference to the control structure.
    Additionally, the receiving device must be able to process the metadata using instructions external to the control structure.
    ---

    Off the very top of my head, capability testing apparatuses(such as telnet uses to transmit everything from default username to screen dimensions) would fulfill some of these requirements. This is important, not because telnet is prior art, but that there are sure to be systems, particularly "advanced languages" that never made it big, that attempted to expand on what telent began. Some places to research:

    1) Expired patents. Always nice, go to the IBM patent server.
    2) History. As far as I know, "tokens" that allow one-to-one marketing thousands of years ago have been successfully used to fight those patents that appear to place ownership on the majority of uses of cookies.
    3) Computer Languages. Yes, I'm repeating this--it's very likely that a number of languages could be argued to implement features of these styles. I'd poke around specifically for languages that advertised the ability to interface with other languages.
    4) Electronic Commerce Systems. Remember, there have been literally hundreds if not thousands of methods for representing the flow of products and monies. Middleware for converting the protocols of one data flow to another have been around for ages. Lets find specific examples. This is rather powerful, if you ask me. If I remember right, there was a massive move by the industry--DCE?--to move to a standard e-commerce solution. Any solution of this style would have left a wake of protocol conversion software, much of which written by companies as a matter of course. This goes even farther to prove that the systems described by the patent are "obvious to any master of the field".

    That's my "off the top of the head" response to Yet Another Preposterous Patent Situation.

    Once you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.