Experts question Microsoft's Caller ID patents

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March 5, 2004 (IDG News Service) -- Just a week after Microsoft Corp.'s Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates unveiled his company's plan for securing e-mail communications, leading e-mail authorities, legal experts and at least one Internet service provider (ISP) are expressing concerns about the e-mail sender authentication plan, known as Caller ID.
Some experts agreed that the technology is promising. However, Microsoft's claim that it owns patents around Caller ID and its decision to license the technology to third parties, rather than submit it to an Internet standards body, have riled e-mail experts and domain owners, some of whom said they fear a power grab by the company and are wary of signing on to the new system.
Caller ID allows Internet domain owners to publish the IP address of their outgoing e-mail servers in an XML format e-mail "policy" in the Domain Name System record for their domain. E-mail servers can query the DNS record and match the source IP address of incoming e-mail messages to the address of the approved sending servers, Microsoft said. The goal is to reduce spam for end users.
Speaking last week at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Gates said Microsoft hopes to have Caller ID in place by the third quarter, provided it can reach "the right agreements" with ISPs and e-mail providers. He didn't elaborate on what those agreements might involve but said Microsoft had some patents related to "the fundamentals" of Caller ID, which is "royalty-free, available for everyone to use," according to a transcript of his RSA speech.
Microsoft published a technical specification for Caller ID on its Web site, along with an "implementation license" for organizations that want to develop and implement software conforming to the specification.
At least one e-mail expert who has studied the agreement said it could be an obstacle to Caller ID's widespread adoption. "Given the license they're offering, it's clearly a problem," said John Levine of the Internet Engineering Task Force's (IETF) Anti-Spam Research Group.
Levine said he is concerned because Microsoft hasn't said what technology its patents cover. He also took issue with its assertion in the license agreement that Caller ID licenses can't be transferred from one party to another, leaving the job of assigning licenses to Microsoft.
"The way the license is written, you can't read [Microsoft's] intentions," he said. "They could stop giving out [Caller ID] licenses at any time, or suddenly say that Caller ID is bundled with Windows."
Microsoft's agreement grants licensees a fully paid, royalty-free license to "make, use, sell, offer to sell, import and otherwise distribute" licensed implementations of the company's Caller ID patents. The company won't seek royalty payments for

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