[OpenID] The OpenID Patents and foaf prior art disclosures

[Peter Williams]

The folks who have disclosed that they are applying for core OpenID patents may want to ensure their applications and/or applications for continuances address the prior art noted in journalistic articles such as http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/02/04/foaf.html - which reference teaching on assigning URIs to people.

Ill be going through the foaf-dev archives for 2002-2004, which seemed to be the period where the RDF constructs for FOAF and WOT were being innovated - and the notions of URI assignments to people were being discussed liberally - both for and against. A search of FOAF patents would seem to be in order.
 
As the above article mentions, foaf folks decided against explicitly assigning URIs to people. However, this doesn't matter for prior art disclosure purposes. The folks publishing the FOAF document continue to assert certain copyrights, note, specifically reserving their moral rights.