Re: Yahoo! patent 7,747,648 court case

Elaborating on what Henry said, occasionally a member of a standards
organization will (a) pursue a patent on a particular technology
deemed "essential" to implementing a standard and (b) wave royalties
for using the patented technology, as long as such use implements the
standard and remains royalty-free (think of this as "donating"). But
they still hold the patent and may prosecute companies that attempt to
make money off e.g. commercial and non-standard implementations.

Although it might seem perverse, this is one way for stakeholders to
protect the openness of standards by keeping out trolls, etc. The
*theory* is, you'd rather have a friend patent it than an enemy...

John
DISCLAIMER: I don't know that Yahoo! is in fact doing this.

On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 9:07 AM, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote:
> How would anyone know?
>
> Given that Yahoo is a member of the W3C, it cannot affect the w3c standards,
> since they signed up to a no patent policy.
>
> On 13 Mar 2012, at 13:54, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
>
> You may have seen in the news facebook are getting sued for using the
> following "patented" technology
>
> http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&RefSrch=yes&Query=PN/7747648%0A
>
> Abstract
>
>  Systems and methods for information retrieval and communication employ a
> world model. The world model is made up of interrelated entity models, each
> of which corresponds to an entity in the real world, such as a person,
> place, business, other tangible thing, community, event, or thought. Each
> entity model provides a communication channel via which a user can contact a
> real-world person responsible for that entity model. Entity models also
> provide feedback information, enabling users to easily share their
> experiences and opinions of the corresponding real-world entity.
>
>
>
> Does this affect Linked Open Data too?
>
>
> Social Web Architect
> http://bblfish.net/
>



-- 
John S. Erickson, Ph.D.
Director, Web Science Operations
Tetherless World Constellation (RPI)
<http://tw.rpi.edu> <olyerickson@gmail.com>
Twitter & Skype: olyerickson

Received on Tuesday, 13 March 2012 13:39:53 UTC