legalxml-courtfiling — archive

IP issues involved in the Entity Seal and in other referenced standards

From: John Greacen
To: [email protected]
Date: Wed, 25 May 2005 00:04:00 -0000

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legalxml-courtfiling message

Subject: IP issues involved in the Entity Seal and in other referenced standards

From: "John M. Greacen" <[email protected]>
To: "Electronic Court Filing Technical Committeee" <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, 24 May 2005 18:03:48 -0600

During the last conference call of the Member Section Steering Committee, we had a lengthy discussion with OASIS staff concerning the issue of “mismatched” TC IP policies. John Messing identified the issue and brought it to our attention. The Electronic Court Filing TC has long taken a very strong position concerning IP interests in our specifications – we have flat out stated that we will not include material in our specification if there are proprietary IP rights attached to it. Courts should not have to pay royalties for the use of a technology standard, we have said.

The DSS TC does not follow our IP approach. They use the standard OASIS RAND policy – that contributors to a specification must agree to reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing of their IP rights in a TC standard. In fact, there have been several statements of IP claims filed with the DSS TC concerning the Entity Seal specification.

This creates another layer of issues concerning the use or requirement of the Entity Seal within Court Filing Blue. The discussion during the Steering Committee call suggested a number of avenues that we could pursue. This is my memory and summary of that discussion. I invite other Steering Committee members to amplify or correct the following:

We will be citing to a large number of other OASIS standards in our Court Filing Blue specification – e.g., ebXML, UBL, Entity Seal. We will make use of the WS-I standards. We use the GJXDM. We refer to ISO standards. All of our work derives from the Schema standard of the W3C. In fact we have no clue what IP issues might lurk within or might have surfaced regarding all those standards. We do know that all of the standards developing bodies responsible for creating them did not follow our IP approach, which is clearly not a universal standard. However, we have all agreed to the importance of referencing and using other standards for constructing Court Filing Blue. Modern electronic exchange processes depend completely on the use of such specifications. It makes no sense to reinvent standards that work perfectly well already. In fact, interoperability would be harmed if we did not use them. The best that we can do in this situation is to acknowledge in our specification that we make no representations concerning the IP that might pertain to such standards and that users of our specification should find out for themselves if they have any concerns.

We could review the existence of IP claims against every other standard that we use and either disclose such claims or refuse to use that standard because of the existence of such claims. Remember, though, that an IP claim against a standard is no more than that – a claim. It may actually be groundless. And the fact that we do not find IP claims is hardly conclusive that there are none. And we do not have the time or the resources for such research.

We could fudge on our specification by using language such as “use a standard for locking down the complete contents of an electronic message using digital signature technology, such as the OASIS DSS TC’s Entity Seal specification currently in committee draft form.”

We could make the use of other standards, or of other standards that we know have IP claims against them, non-normative with the use of language such as “implementers might consider using X” or “we recommend the use of X,” with a disclaimer about the IP status of the specification.

We could attempt to obtain royalty free licensing commitments from the claimants against a particular specification that might figure prominently in our work, such as the DSS.

I regret to inject yet another troublesome issue into what is already a difficult, extensive and complicated agenda. But it is clearly there and we need to take it on.

I invite comments and suggestions.

John M. Greacen

Greacen Associates, LLC

HCR

505-289-2164

505-289-2163 (fax)

505-780-1450 (cell)

[email protected]