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Patenting the Internet in Your Spare Time

According to a post to the IETF’s IPR list and an eWeek story, Microsoft maybe asserting IP rights over basic Internet protocols:

Has Microsoft been trying to retroactively claim IP (intellectual property) rights over many of the Internet’s basic protocols? Larry J. Blunk, senior engineer for networking research and development at Merit Network Inc., believes that might be the case.

Blunk expressed these concerns about Microsoft’s Royalty Free Protocol License Agreement in a recent note to the IETF’s Intellectual Property Rights Working Group. Specifically, Blunk suggested that Microsoft seemed to be claiming IP rights to many vital Internet protocols. And by so doing, “Microsoft is injecting a significant amount of unwarranted uncertainty and doubt regarding non-Microsoft implementations of these protocols,” Blunk said.

Blunk pointed out that Microsoft is claiming some form of IP rights over “a total of 130 protocols which Microsoft is offering for license.”

“Many of the listed protocols are [IETF] RFC [request for comment] documents, including but not limited to the core TCP/IP v4 and TCP/IP v6 protocol specifications,” he said in his note.

Some of the RFC protocols that Microsoft asserts that it may have IP rights over, such as the TCP/IP protocols and the DNS (Domain Name System), form the very bedrock of the Internet’s network infrastructure.

UPDATE: GrokLaws posted an excellent article on this. There is also a SlashDot story.

Tags: ietf, ipr, microsoft, patents —

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