[idn] The WALID patent may not apply to IDNA

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org>]

At 2:40 PM -0400 5/7/01, Keith Moore wrote:
>it strikes me that attempting to determine whether the patent is valid
>is very similar to attempting to determine whether a proposed solution
>infringes a patent.

Keith is absolutely right. Assessing whether a patent applies takes 
the same set of skills as assessing whether it does not.

In the past few weeks, there has been a lot of off-list discussion of 
the WALID patent. One common thread in many of the discussions has 
been "our company doesn't want to be the first to post to the list". 
I have discovered another advantage of not working for companies. :-)

Many people have made the assumption that the WALID patent applies to 
the IDNA protocol. Until recently, I did too, based on a not-careful 
reading of the patent. After reading more carefully, I believe that 
the WALID patent does *not* apply to the IDNA protocol. Every claim 
in the patent talks about "redirector string" that is another layer 
of the DNS hierarchy (such as appending ".i" to the end of a FQDN); 
IDNA does not use that method and in fact doesn't use anything even 
vaguely similar.

Many of the people who are speaking on the mailing list have admitted 
off-line to not having read the patent. The combination of some of 
those of us who have read the patent saying we thought it might apply 
to IDNA and those who have not read the patent saying the same thing 
has caused many people on the list to assume that the patent applies.

WALID has never claimed that the patent applies to the IDNA protocol. 
There may be a good reason for this.

In the off-line discussion, every company I have talked with who has 
had their patent lawyers look at the WALID patent have said that they 
don't think it applies to IDNA. However, none of them wanted to say 
that first. On re-reading the patent, I now agree with them (and kind 
of curse myself for my cursory reading earlier on).

This working group has to reach consensus. We already did that about 
IDNA; then the WALID patent surfaced. However, unless the working 
group thinks the patent actually applies to IDNA, we should continue 
to work on IDNA.

If anyone who has read the patent would like to say why they think it 
applies to IDNA, please do so. Otherwise, I propose that the working 
group moves forward on IDNA and we ignore the WALID patent.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium