The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) this week called on the Web community to aid in an investigation of a patent claim that it said threatens open access to a developing privacy technology.
The Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) is being developed to help Internet users know how sites use data they collect from visitors. More than a dozen consortium member organizations and privacy experts are involved in the P3P project.
P3P, based on Extensible Markup Language, allows Web users to control the personal information that is released to a Web site as well as how that data is used. The process involves technology that automatically sends data between two computers using a metadata (data about data) structure.
Seattle-based InterMind Corp. -- a W3C member -- said it patented a version of the technology in January and has indicated that the W3C's metadata standards, particularly in regard to P3P, constitute a possible patent infringement. The company has in the past hinted that organizations including Netscape Communications Corp. and Microsoft Corp. may have to license its push technology.
The W3C is calling on the Web community to provide "prior art," technology predating InterMind's patent. The organization hopes to prove that the technology in question had actually been invented elsewhere, a move that it said could invalidate the patent.
InterMind, in a statement, defended its patent.
"It was to help advance the standards for [privacy on the Web] that InterMind joined several of the W3C P3P working groups after notifying the W3C management of the company's pending patent applications filed 18 months earlier," the statement said. "Only after contributing to these working groups for nine months did other W3C members take an interest in these pending patents, asking us for more information and licensing terms. In response, we published a detailed background document that has been available to all W3C members since last August."
