RE: [rights] An effort to clear up the confusion over CG patent c laims

I think that your message below and my last post (the one in which the fourth paragraph begins "Both of them mention...") crossed paths. Now that I have a little more context (and now that I understand ContentGuard's RF policy a little better--all I saw before was RAND) I believe that your 3:05 PM post is a big step forward in clearing up misunderstandings.

That sentence would pertain to people who have systems which they think may infringe and they want a license to do some things royalty free.

But I have to ask the simple question. If you afraid that people have to get licenses for royalty free activity why is it that people talk about granting Royalty Free licenses??? see http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/security/rsa-ipr-statement-SAML3b-OASIS-2002-04-22.shtml as just one of many examples.

Brad,

I really like most of what you wrote, until the end:

"Here we make it plain that there are royalty free licensing options such as "a royalty free license to distribute and/or commercialize an application that only uses XrML to attach or associate usage rights to digital works such as content or services."

So an application that does not infringe on the patents will still require ContentGuard's permission (i.e., a license) to use this OASIS standard?

Karl,

Are there any other OASIS standards that require a particular company's permission to use?

Bob DuCharme
Consulting Software Engineer, LexisNexis
Data Architecture, Editorial Systems and Content Engineering

All,

There has been some confusion, in part based on recent inaccurate media coverage, of XrML's relationship with ContentGuard's IP claims. ContentGuard's intellectual property consists of patents describing DRM technology. Only one of the many technologies described in the patents is a rights language. The connection between the patented technologies and XrML is their common original source: ContentGuard. XrML itself is not mentioned in those patents. XrML represents an instance of a rights language (and the best one created to date). A licensing agreement with ContentGuard is necessary for using the technology described in the patents, not for using XrML. We believe that our technology provides a superior platform upon which to build an XrML-based DRM system. We recognize the possibility that DRM implementations using XrML may theoretically not infringe the patents. We have also outlined much of this on our website at:

http://www.contentguard.com/PatentLicensing.asp

Here we make it plain that there are royalty free licensing options such as "a royalty free license to distribute and/or commercialize an application that only uses XrML to attach or associate usage rights to digital works such as content or services."

rights message