Royalty Free Atom
IBM just filed a blanket IPR disclosure relating to the activity of the Atompub WG. Before any misinformation starts going around about this I thought it would be a good idea to give y’all a heads up.
As of right now IBM has NO KNOWN patents or applications for patents that read on the Atom specs. However, as is well known, IBM has a massive IPR portfolio and it would take a very long time and cost a lot of money for us to dig through ‘em all to know for certain. Rather than spend the time and energy doing that, IBM has agreed to a blanket commitment to Royalty Free terms for any IPR that reads on the Standards Track specifications produced by the atompub Working Group.
Again, I want to reiterate that there are no patents we are currently aware of nor are there any applications in progress that we are currently aware of.
There are basically two reasons we are doing this:
- We think the Atom Syndication Format and the Atom Publishing Protocol are really important.
- We want anyone to be able to implement Atom without any fear of patent hell (and we’re really hoping that others agree).
I must add that I am not a IPR expert by any stretch of the imagination. If you have questions, please direct them to me and I will answer what I can or I will forward them on to our IP Law experts
February 15th, 2007 at 4:03 pm
Why is it necessary to get IBM’s agreement on something that to your knowledge doesn’t exist anyway?
February 15th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
Good question Randy. This is largely a precautionary measure. We don’t know of any patents that read on the Atom spec’s but we also haven’t done an absolutely exhaustive search of our portfolio to be able to say for sure.
Another purpose this serves is to put folks at ease about the potential for patent applications to suddenly pop up in the future, especially given that IBM is getting ready to put out a bunch of new products (e.g. Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr) with features that rely heavily on Atom. As of right now we’re pretty certain that there’s nothing in the pipeline but again we haven’t done an exhaustive search. With a company the size of IBM it’s always hard to know with absolute certainty what is going on. Given that, we feel that it is very important to be crystal clear about our position with regards to Royalty Free terms for Atom.
I hope that answers your question.
February 16th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
Does this include standards-track documents that Atom references and/or is commonly used with? e.g., HTTP, Basic/Digest Auth, TCP, IP, etc.?
Cheers,
February 16th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
Good question Mark… the short answer is “I don’t think so but don’t quote me on that”. I’m fairly certain that dependent specs would have to be dealt with individually and I’ll have to claim absolute ignorance on any potential IPR issues around those specs.
February 18th, 2007 at 9:24 pm
OK. After a little bit of digging, my reading (and I’m not a lawyer) is that the license is for “Necessary Patent Claims”; i.e., *anything* necessary to implement Atom.
The upside of that (according to my not-a-lawyer understanding) is that underlying specs *are* covered, as long as they’re required to implement the relevant RFCs… so if Atom *requires* HTTP, etc., they’re covered. It’d take a detailed reading to figure that out, but my intuition is that HTTP and friends aren’t covered for the syntax, but perhaps could be for the protocol (since it’s much more bound to HTTP).
The downside is that it’s “necessary to implement,” not *use*, so if you guys have, for example, a patent on “using Atom to communicate between Medical Devices” or “Atom for Network Monitoring,” you can go ahead and collect your license fees.
But again, IANAL.
February 18th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
That would make sense but, like you, I’m not absolutely certain. What I can say with absolute certainty, however, is that the entire motivation behind this covenant was to make it clear that we don’t want anything getting in the way of folks being able to freely implement the syndication format and the publishing protocol — I can say that because I’m the one that started the ball rolling on this. As for the usage bit, yeah, I would guess that your reading is correct but I would qualify it by saying up front that I’m not aware of any such use patents.