The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Thursday
determined the Platform for Privacy Preferences
(P3P) technology does not infringe a patent held by the Intermind
Corp.
P3P will allow Web sites to notify users of the site’s privacy
practices and will provide users with greater control over the use of their
personal information on the Web.
The use of P3P-compliant technologies was halted when the original patent
holder sought to charge royalties for products or services that utilize the
P3P specification. The technology was originally developed in an open,
collaborative process by a number of W3C members.
Intermind’s patent claims the rights to certain
techniques of controlling the interactions between clients and servers,
especially in regards to the exchange of personal information. Since much
of the Internet is based on such technologies, Intermind’s claim of
proprietary rights could have had a repressive effect on many Web
developers’ plans for P3P deployment.
Noted patent attorney Barry Rein, of Pennie & Edmonds, was hired to
evaluate the degree to which P3P does or does not infringe upon Intermind’s
patent. Rein and his team concluded that compliance with the P3P standard
can be done without infringing on the patent.
The analysis found that “P3P does not include the control structure of the ‘325
patent claims for at least two fundamental reasons: (1) neither the
proposal nor the User Preferences file includes data, metadata, and
instructions organized using object-oriented programming to encapsulate the
data together with the instructions for using it,
and (2) neither the proposal nor the User Preferences file provides
location transparency or completely specifies a communications
relationship. For these reasons, P3P-compliant Web services and user agents
do not literally infringe any claim of the ‘325 patent.”