[OpenID] The OpenID Patents and foaf prior art disclosures

[Story Henry]

You can't patent the idea the a URI be assigned to people.
That is what URIs are: Universal Resource Identifiers. Resources can  
be anything, including people, thoughts, concepts, etc...

So that has been covered by the W3C, the IETF, and the semantic web  
initiative at a general level.

You can "buy" a domain name, and thereby lease URL namespaces, which  
you have control over.

Henry


On 30 Sep 2007, at 08:13, Peter Williams wrote:

> 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.
>

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