Intellectual property

We feel that there may be significant intellectual property issues with 
the SOAP specification.

Multiple companies have said they believe they may have relevant 
patents.  Further investigation is required here before the 
specification should proceed to PR phase.

There is also a bit of divergence in some cases between IPR disclosures 
and grants in the SOAP 1.1 submission and the SOAP 1.2 specification and 
the IPR summary for SOAP should encompass declarations from both lists 
and reconcile them where different statements were made by the same 
companies.  These aggregate statements need to be considered and 
compared with the W3C definitions of royalty-free, looking for 
unacceptable terms which have been stipulated.

Ray Whitmer
AC Representative, AOL Time Warner

Received on Friday, 19 July 2002 22:10:33 UTC