Report from the Fourth W3C Web Payments Working Group PAG

Status of this Document

This report was approved by the Fourth Web Payments Working Group Patent Advisory Group (PAG) on 17 March 2021.

Executive Summary

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 February 2021, W3C launched the fourth Web Payments Working Group Patent Advisory Group (PAG) in response to a patent disclosure from non-participant Tom Jones (the "Disclosed Patent") claimed to bear relevance to the Payment Request API.

In this report, the PAG concludes that the Disclosed Patent does not contain Essential Claims as defined in the W3C Patent Policy and recommends that the Web Payments Working Group continue to work on Payment Request API.

Procedure and Timeline

Analysis

We adopted this approach:

• We performed an infringement analysis on the Disclosed Patent to determine whether it raised Essential Claims against the Payment Request API.
• Specifically, we analyzed the patent's independent claims, and in each instance, were able to identify elements of the claims not required by Payment Request API. This PAG has intentionally omitted the details of its analysis from this report.

Tom Jones disclosed US 8060448 B2 and did not make any RF commitment.

Conclusions

We analyzed both independent claims of the Disclosed Patent and concluded that Payment Request API does not require all the claim elements of either one.

Accordingly, the PAG concludes that the Disclosed Patent does not contain Essential Claims as defined in the W3C Patent Policy.

Recommendations

The PAG recommends that work on Payment Request API continue.

Disclaimer

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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