Subject: RE: [Enum] Re: IP claims that may impact ENUM

From: "Peter Williams" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 12:52:08 -0400 (EDT)

E.164 attributes were in X.500 1988 Directory standard, as personal phone 
number listings, and as components of PSAP addresses (in the IETF profile). 
Domain names were added to the X.500 RFCs about 1990, by Steve Kille, 
internal documents much earlier. Mashall went one step further, with his 
experimental fax/printing stuff. There were several messaging/fax services 
that used complex directory lookups and iterative knowledge discovery 
processes (rather like ENUM) - to switch outbound channel - phone, SMTP, 
telex etc. There were also experiments to populate a DNS database from the 
Directory, and sync up  - to make provisioning manageable. most of these 
were CEC funded projects, so formal deliverables exist.

Every IETF standard deployement effort, for any scheme of any value, is 
going to be hit now by the European software patents opportunity. Europe is 
just catching up with the US, in this regard. Remember, unlike IETF, the ISO 
process always had explicit political goals - standardization for itself (of 
unworkable, never implemented OSI protocols) had value in itself - to form 
markets, create opportunities, and establish prioir art under the special 
class: international law.

I have a very large library of older documents in trusted directory, 
untrsted directory security using certs, knowledge and discovery processes 
(mainly tree walking for secure path discovery). It could help address the 
most general patent claims; (This is my personal library, not VeriSign 
property, note.) If HP have actually invented something than makes their  
ENUM* better than the general model, then good luck to them.

Peter.

FYI: ENUM is using ideas from RFC 1486 published in July 1993 (which means 
Internet Drafts and testing were going on long before that date) which 
imply any patent claims talking about mapping of E.164 to domain names have 
to be filed before that date. The document specifies the tpc.int domain as 
root. So, ENUM was not where this mapping was invented.

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