Email Standards

Standards are good (by promoting interoperabilty) and standards are bad (by deterring innnovation for component products). And there has been an ongoing controversy, lasting decades, about whether "open" industry standards may or should include patented inventions. For instance, ANSI and W3C each have patent policies calling for disclosure and nondiscriminatory or royalty free licensing of intellectual property (IP) included in standards.

Now that same debate has spilled over into IETF, the Internet's standards-setting body. Anti-Spam Effort Killed Amid Patent Row [washingtonpost.com]. This time the standards body killed a proposal by Microsoft for an email "Sender ID," designed to prevent spoofed emails, because the folks in Redmond had patented the scheme. Though the company promises to make the IP available for free, it wants to bar software developers from further licensing it, a restriction that several members of the open-source community find unacceptable.

The end result is that consumers get stuck holding the bag -- in this case, junk emails -- while the engineers and lawyers bicker, perhaps endlessly. So what else is new?

 Posted by glenn