[humanmarkup-comment] Notice of OASIS HumanMarkup TC Work

[Rex Brooks <rexb@starbourne.com>]

Dear Colleagues:

By a rather circuitous route, we became aware of your company 
yesterday, through a cross connection with the the RDF-Interest 
mailing list and one of our members. This was purely innocent of any 
motivation to use any part of your work in our efforts, and 
illustrates a danger we now face as we move forward to write the 
first candidate specification of our OASIS HumanMarkup Technical 
Committee.

I say this explicitly so you know that, while we have become aware of 
your efforts, we have not studied it. One member of our group has 
done the demo available on your website, and I am hereby giving 
notice that the rest of us SHOULD NOT do so.

Unfortunately, due to the recent actions of some members of the 
MPEG-4 standard group seeking to enforce patents which encumber that 
specification, I have to ask that none of our members make themselves 
any more familiar with your work than they have already, and make it 
public record that we first became cognizant of your company only 
yesterday, 5 May 2002.

The way that patent and copyright and international ipr law works, 
any significant knowledge of pre-existing artwork--such as your 
website and the materials contained therein--can, (and I emphasize 
the word CAN), constitute prior knowledge of pre-existing artwork 
which could (and I emphasize the world COULD), consitute actionable 
infringement of patents and copyrights held by MST Corporation.

We invite you to make yourselves aware of our standards effort to 
create a Human Markup Language specification under the auspices of 
OASIS, The Organization for theAdvancement of Structured Information 
Standards.

Our url is: http://www.oasis-open.org/committtees/humanmarkup

Our effort is an open, public process, and available to public 
scrutiny at any time, and I suggest that you make yourselves aware of 
our work and of the rules governing OASIS, its members and Technical 
Committees since it is within the context of those rules that our 
OASIS HumanMarkup Technical Committee is proceeding to create the 
Human Markup Language specifications.

If you have any questions we would be happy to answer them and we 
invite you to join us under the rules referred to above, but we 
hereby make it clear that we have no interest in your products or 
services and we hereby state that any apparent duplication of efforts 
or similarities in methods or research is purely coincidental and all 
of our work has been done without and specific prior knowledge of 
your efforts, products or services.

Note to HumanMarkup TC members: We will have to be extra diligent in 
the future about discoveries such as this, and pause before allowing 
ourselves to explore any apparently proprietary efforts which overlap 
our interests. As I mentioned, MPEG-4 has placed its standard beyond 
our reach, and we could imperil our standard by making ourselves 
aware in any depth of proprietary work that we think may have some 
significance or impact for us.

As an example, in January I attended the architecture review meetings 
of the Web 3D Consortium, and met the MPEG-4 representative there, 
who was also the Nexternet contact person in the ill-fated attempt I 
made last year to build a Joint Project with the Naval Postgraduate 
School, Nexternet and Humanmarkup.org, Inc,--the separate Non-Profit 
organization that is a another continuation of the Human Markup 
Initiative from Phase 0.

We had to ask him not to go into details of the proposals he had in 
hand to more closely integrate MPEG-4 with the X3D specification 
being codified as the next version of the  Web 3D standard for ISO. 
He swore he could guarantee that there would be no encumbrance and no 
conflicts of interest.

There was, and there are and after more than 4 years of close 
association, we may be now in the position of defending that standard 
against claims from MPEG-4 which used many portions of the 
VRML97-compliant Humanoid Animation specification as part of its 
definitions for such things as facial and body animation parameters 
for streaming applications. I do not think that our HumanMarkup work 
is in any danger from contamination from MPEG-4, although we will be 
using the standardized terminology for bodily parts and segments, 
joints and feature points which are also used in MPEG-4 and VRML97, 
as well as other standard definitions and descriptions of the human 
body.

Regards,
Rex Brooks
OASIS HumanMarkup Technical Committee Vice Chair, Secretary and Webmaster
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