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Sunday, April 14, 2002 |
A chilling note from Doc Searls: IBM, Microsoft plot Net takeover
David Berlind in ZDnet: IBM, Microsoft plot Net takeover: IBM and Microsoft have been quietly busy behind the scenes for the last two years building a toll booth that could position the two companies to collect royalties on most if not all Internet traffic. The bottom paragraph:
According to documents on the W3C's Web site, IBM and Microsoft not only own intellectual property within specific Web services protocols, but also have no intentions of relinquishing their IP rights to those protocols should they become standards. The documents indicate that the two companies are currently maintaining their rights to pursue a reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) licensing framework as opposed to a royalty-free-based framework. The RAND framework is widely acknowledged as the one that keeps a vendor's options open in terms of being able to charge content developers and Internet users a royalty for usage of relevant intellectual property.
There's more on Slashdot. [via Doc Searls]
8:24:22 AM 
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© Copyright 2002 Rob McNair-Huff.
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