[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] namespace copyright, trademark patent question
I was just thinking about the legal ramifications of namespaces as a way to control interoperability. It seems to me that a vendor could, with bad motives aplenty, decide to prohibit other companies via exorbitant pricing/licensing from building tools that processed their namespace with the same result as the namespace(or just profit from people building such tools). If the above seems to be an ambiguous statement please excuse me, I was thinking specifically of an svg document I saw yesterday, it had a lot of adobe extensions from Illustrator 10(note this is not an adobe bashing post, I just use them cause their convenient), here's a list: "http://ns.adobe.com/Flows/1.0/" "http://ns.adobe.com/Extensibility/1.0/" "http://ns.adobe.com/AdobeIllustrator/10.0/ "http://ns.adobe.com/Graphs/1.0/" "http://ns.adobe.com/Variables/1.0/" "http://ns.adobe.com/ImageReplacement/1.0/" "http://ns.adobe.com/SaveForWeb/1.0/" "http://ns.adobe.com/GenericCustomNamespace/1.0/" "http://ns.adobe.com/AdobeSVGViewerExtensions/3.0/" there don't seem to be any rddl documents for these :( I don't know if any rights have been registered for namespaces anywhere, and I would assume that if rights haven't been registered for a particular namespace then it's too late, but the logic on which law is built can be warped quite quickly when millions of dollars are involved. Hmm, probably a good thing that there aren't any rddl documents at the end of those urls as a clever lawyer might argue that the reachability of the url used to bind the namespace via the web on a domain owned by a particular company would suffice to register the namespace as the property of that company. Certainly I can, without any great legal apprehensions consume an svg document in my application whether or not it has these namespaces, I suppose also that if I process the namespaced elements/ or attributes I would not be opening myself up to repercussions but I'm thinking that if I processed the namespaced elements to do something similar to what adobe does with them, which would I suppose be an xml form of reverse engineering, then I might find myself in a gray area. I sort of feel maybe I shouldn't post this but what the hell, just doing my part to make the world a cheerier place. PS: Checking through google I see there has been some discussion of this(http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200208/msg01388.html) but it was more in the area of "why namespaces are bad" and the common consensus seemed to be that it would not be a legal problem, I'm thinking this scenario better illustrates problem area.
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