This report was approved by the second Web Payments Working Group Patent Advisory Group (PAG) on 31 January 2018.
The goal of the W3C Patent Policy is to assure that Recommendations produced under this policy can be implemented on a Royalty-Free (RF) basis. W3C forms Patent Advisory Groups (PAGs) when patent claims are asserted against or expressly excluded from royalty-free commitment for implementations of W3C Recommendations.
In November 2017 W3C launched the second Web Payments Working Group Patent Advisory Group (PAG) in response to patent disclosures and exclusions by Visa (the "Disclosed Patents") claimed to bear relevance to the following specifications (collectively, the "Web Payments Specifications"):
Note: The disclosures also referred to the Web Payments HTTP API 1.0 specification, but that specification was removed from the Recommendation Track and published as a Working Group Note in December 2017.
In this report, the PAG concludes that the Disclosed Patents do not contain Essential Claims as defined in the W3C Patent Policy and recommends that the Web Payments Working Group continue to work on the Web Payments Specifications.
Of the 22 blocks of excluded claims, 20 were from patent applications. As was the case in previous PAGs, the PAG has not analyzed the pending applications of the Disclosed Patents because they have not been allowed.
This information was adapted from the report of the first PAG.
|
Issued Disclosed Patents |
Filing Date |
Priority Documents |
Claims excluded from |
|
(WO09/002972) |
2008.06.24 |
60/946,113 (2007.06.25) 61/034,904 (2008.03.07) 12/143,509 (2008.06.20) |
1-6, 9-25, 28-30 |
|
(13/358,475) |
2012.01.25 |
60/946,113 (2007.06.25) 61/034,904 (2008.03.07) 12/143,509 (2008.06.20) (DIV) |
1-26 |
This following finding from the previous report is most relevant to the current analysis:
To improve the user experience of making payments, the Web Payments Specifications move some functionality from the merchant application page to the consumer-side applications: browsers and payment apps chosen by the user. Thus, the claims that refer to functionality on merchant application pages are not essential to the implementation of the Web Payments Specifications.
This PAG finds applied the same reasoning to the Payment Handler API specification and reached the same conclusions.
The PAG concludes that the Web Payments Specifications do not require the claim elements underlined in the claims above for the Disclosed Patents. Accordingly, the PAG concludes that the Disclosed Patents do not contain Essential Claims as defined in the W3C Patent Policy.
The PAG recommends that work on the Web Payments Specifications continue.
None of the authors is your attorney. No part of this report is intended as legal advice either to W3C or to its members. It is intended merely as a summary of what the PAG has learned to date. Rely on this report entirely at your own risk. This analysis includes the personal opinions of the authors.
THESE RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE WEB PAYMENTS WORKING GROUP PATENT ADVISORY GROUP ARE NOT LEGAL ADVICE. NEITHER W3C NOR ANY OF THE PARTICIPANTS OF THIS PATENT ADVISORY GROUP OR THEIR RESPECTIVE EMPLOYERS TAKES ANY RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ACCURACY, LEGAL CORRECTNESS OR OTHER FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE OF THE INFORMATION PROVIDED IN THIS REPORT. ESPECIALLY, NEITHER W3C NOR ANY OF THE PARTICIPANTS OF THIS PATENT ADVISORY GROUP OR ANY OF THEIR RESPECTIVE EMPLOYERS MAKE ANY REPRESENTATION THAT FOLLOWING THE RECOMMENDATIONS HERE WILL AVOID AN INFRINGEMENT OF ANY PATENTS MENTIONED IN THE REPORT.
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