The P3P standard will survive a patent scare.
That was the conclusion of a year-long analysis by the World Wide Web Consortium, undertaken to assess the first major threat to the key Web privacy standard.
The standards-setting body said Thursday that an exhaustive legal analysis determined that software using the W3C's Platform for Privacy Preferences, known as P3P, will withstand a patent infringement claim by Intermind Corporation.
P3P is a software tool that allows users to control the exchange of personal information between browsers and Web site software. It was at one time considered essential for creating the confidence consumers needed to surf and shop.
Intermind claims it owns the rights to the technology used for controlling interactions between clients and server software, specifically personal information swapping.
"What our analysis illustrates is that it is entirely non-infringing to do what P3P does -- use particular kinds of meta-data ... to control interactions between users and Web sites," said Daniel Weitzner, who oversees P3P development for the W3C.
Although Intermind promised reasonable licensing terms when it announced its patent last year, the news chilled development of P3P-enhanced software.
Companies developing software based on the specification feared the patent would require expensive licensing agreements. It was the first time the open W3C standard had been threatened by a patent-infringement claim.
Working with a patent attorney, W3C policy analyst Joseph Reagle compared Intermind's patent to the structure of P3P and concluded that key differences between them precluded any infringement claims.
Intermind's president Drummond Reed could not be reached for comment. However, the company's previously published statements on its Web site indicate that it ultimately favors the development of privacy software.
"It was to help advance the standards for such an environment that Intermind joined several of the W3C P3P Working Groups," one statement says. "Only after contributing to these Working Groups for nine months did other W3C members take an interest in these pending patents, asking us for more information and licensing terms."
Intermind has made information on the patent available to all concerned W3C members since last August, the company said.
"Although this document provided royalty-based licensing terms as requested by the W3C, it also invited the W3C and its members to discuss with us alternatives based on an innovative new application of our technology." The legal analysis frees companies to deploy the technology, but privacy watchdog Jason Catlett, president of Junkbusters, isn't holding his breath.
Catlett said P3P will take too long to roll out to be effective.
Lorrie Faith Cranor, co-chair of the Web Consortium's P3P interest group, disagreed.
"I think there's time. It's true that P3P has been a long time in coming," Cranor said. "We've scaled it back so it's much easier to implement, so I believe it can be adopted quickly and can have an impact."
Has scaling back P3P weakened its privacy protection capabilities?
"It doesn't do things the previous draft had it do, but I think it does most of the important things," Cranor said. "What we have done is take the important step of giving the user an easy way ... to fetch and be informed about a site's privacy policies."
P3P now acts mainly as an informational tool for users who would otherwise have had to wade through the fine print of privacy statements.
That's a downgrade from P3P's original promise, which was that Web sites could offer a choice of privacy policies. Users could choose which policies best satisfied their privacy preferences.
At best, the W3C hopes greater user control will be included in a future version of the software.
P3P won't do anything at all until companies begin implementing the technology in software such as browsers and plug-ins, however.
Weitzner and Cranor predict that will happen soon without the threat of litigation to hold companies back anymore.
"Now that we have a reputable analysis [it's] unlikely that anyone would want to incur the significant expense of mounting patent litigation, when the arguments just don't look to be on their side.... We didn't get a middle-ground analysis from these attorneys. Their obligation was to give us their best advice."
