In article <dfsRh.1802$I%2.1401@n...>, 
michael@g... says...
> If I come up with an XML Schema, do I own the intellectual propertyrights 
> for that schema? Can I legally restrict others from using that schema?

I am not a lawyer but...

You can copyright the schema itself, which only protects the text of the 
schema. Someone could duplicate the functionality of the schema using 
different tag names and your copyright would be worthless. Fortunately, a 
copyright doesn't cost anything in the first place. In the US, as soon as 
you create a document (and a schema is a document) then it is 
copyrighted. It helps if you place a copyright notice within it and it 
helps even more if you register it with the copyright office but it isn't 
absolutely necessary.

You can also patent the design and functionality of the schema. This is a 
costly and time consuming process. In the US you must file at least a 
provisional patent within a year of publishing information about the 
invention, your schema. In the EU you have one day. So you must decide 
ahead of time whether you want the thing to be public domain or not. Do 
not publish the details of your schema until you have made this decision 
and consulted with a lawyer.

There are many on the internet who will tell you that you can't patent a 
standard, but then write a document using OpenOffice or Star Office which 
creates documents conforming to an XML schema called the "Open Document 
Format" (ODF) which is patented by Sun. It is patented, but they have 
committed themselves to license it royalty-free to anyone. Sun has 
submitted the standard to OASIS and agreed to their patent guidelines, so 
now the OASIS standards body can extend the standard but no one else can. 


Fortunately, writing complicated open source licensing agreements (such 
as GPL or the Apache license) seems to have taken hold in the open source 
community and many accept that a simple public license applied to and 
included with a standard will suffice. Whether that would hold up in 
court has yet to be tested.

So, if you want your schema to be a public standard then you need to make 
it as open as possible while still protecting it from fragmentation. But, 
if you want to use it in a niche market and not allow anyone else to copy 
it then you should patent it probably copyright it too. It is not an 
either/or proposition despite the what many seem to think. You copyright 
the text of the schema along with the names of all the tags, then you 
patent the design and functionality irrespective of the actual text or 
names of tags.


> I'm in the UK if that makes any difference... 

Ask your lawyer.