The Web's leading standards body will tap the resources of the Internet to challenge a patent that the group says threatens a key privacy standard.
On Monday, the World Wide Web Consortium began marshalling Net users to help search for previously existing examples of technology underlying the Platform for Privacy Preferences. The effort is designed to revoke the patent issued to Intermind, a Seattle firm.
"We will ask people in the Web community if they know of technology that was already out there before [Intermind] claims to have invented it," said Daniel J. Weitzner, leader of W3C's technology and society domain.
One company should not "be able to control this open standards process," Weitzner said. "The reward for a good standard is one that by definition has to be shared by everyone."
P3P is the Platform for Privacy Preferences, a protocol designed to give consumers more control over information that is collected about them as they click around the Web. Using P3P, users would determine what kind of personal information could be collected and used by Web sites.
The consortium has worked on the P3P standard for years. It has been touted by a number of industry and government leaders as a technical solution to privacy regulation.
But early last year, the US Patent and Trademark Office said it was inclined to award a patent for the technology to Intermind, which said it would charge millions in licensing fees for anyone to use what had previously been an open standard.
