RE: [idn] NSI Multilingual Testbed Information (fwd)

[bill@mail.nic.nu (J. William Semich)]

Paul:

The patent includes 10 claims (I've attached the 2 "claims" pages of the
patent as 2 gifs for your review).

Each claim is an independent claim, except those that refer back to earlier
claims in the same document. I would have thought that you might have
noticed the inclusiveness of the very general first claim, which I quote here:

"We Claim:

	1. A method for providing for multilingual names for use on the 
          Internet, related networks and computers, said method 
          comprising the steps of:
           forming an initial multilingual name in a multilingual format;
           mapping said multilingual name to a corresponding coded name
           in a reversible manner, said coded name comprising a restricted
           subset of the ASCII character set;
           utilising said corresponding coded name on the Internet and
           related networks in place of said multilingual name."

I don't know what your attorney said to you when he read these claims, WRT
RACE or any other ASCII character encoding proposed to be used for encoding
multilingual domain names on the Internet, but the .NU Domain attorney said
this could cause us problems down the road if we were to use an ASCII
encoding. This isn't a certainty, of course. But for us, it was an
unnecessary risk.

Since we are using UTF-8 for NUBIND and other implementations of
multilingual services in our system, this patent does not affect the NUBIND
and related IDN implementations.

To be honest, we selected UTF-8 for the same reason we made many of our
technical decisions in developing NUBIND: because it is a current IETF
standard (OK, best practice) under RFC2277. We made these decisions long
before the IDN WG was created, or had started work.

I expect that is also exactly why Microsoft and the Mozilla/Netscape group
have built UTF-8 into their browsers' URL encoding mechanisms as well -
following the current IETF (and W3C?) standard. I'd be surprised if
Microsoft or TimeWarner/AOL/Netscape would be willing to migrate their
browsers to an ACE at this point, especially facing the possibility of a
claim from Pouflis. But since I'm sure both companies have someone in this
WG, perhaps they'd care to comment on the issue?


Regards,

Bill Semich
.NU


At 04:02 PM 8/25/00 -0700, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
>At 8:04 AM -0400 8/25/00, J. William Semich wrote:
>>  And, as I mentioned in Pittsburgh
>>as well as on this list, some parts of RACE may be covered by a patent
>>granted to someone who is not even participating in this working group,
>
>The patent abstract you posted to this list on June 16 appears 
>completely unrelated to RACE. RACE does not rely on a pseudo-root. 
>RACE does not use hexadecimal encoding. I am not a lawyer, so there 
>may be parts that relate to RACE, but no one has shown that any part 
>of the patent applies to RACE.
>
>--Paul Hoffman, Director
>--Internet Mail Consortium
>
>

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