Sun Microsystems iCalendar Patent Disclosure

[Hal Jespersen <hal.jespersen@xxxxxxx>]

Sun Microsystems hereby discloses to the IETF that Sun and IBM are
joint owners of a patent application pending that relates to an IETF
working group activity, specifically, to the Internet Calendaring and
Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCalendar). Sun believes that
a patent may issue on this application as early as May 5, 1998. The
full text of the application and allowed claims may be viewed at URL
http://playground.sun.com/pub/cal-patent/.

Because of the recent discovery of additional prior art (the Chronos
specification--ftp://boombox.micro.umn.edu/pub/ietf/), Sun has filed
a Petition to Withdraw the application from issue in order to permit
the Patent Office to consider this newly discovered art. As a result,
the allowed claims will be reexamined in light of this art. Regardless
of the outcome of this reconsideration, Sun is willing to grant a
no-cost license to any person who would infringe this patent solely by
implementing the iCalendar specification, assuming that the iCalendar
specification is adopted as an IETF Standards-track RFC.

For additional information contact: cal-patent@poobah.eng.sun.com.

Hal Jespersen