By Stefanie Olsen, 10 June 2004 08:40
NEWS Software company Zero-Knowledge Systems has filed a $5.1m copyright infringement complaint against IBM, alleging it wrongfully reproduced its privacy language specification.
Montreal-based Zero-Knowledge Systems (ZKS) filed the civil suit on behalf of its newly formed subsidiary Synomos, a specialist in privacy and data-management solutions for corporations. The complaint was filed on Tuesday in the District of Montreal of the Superior Court of Quebec.
According to the company, Synomos worked with computer giant IBM from June 2001 to February 2002 to create a standard for writing corporate privacy policies based on XML (Extensible Markup Language), a protocol for exchanging data among computing systems. The standard drew on ZKS's pre-existing protocol, Privacy Rights Markup Language (PRML), which it shared with IBM under a confidentiality agreement. The resulting technical specification, the Enterprise Privacy Markup Language (EPML) 1.0, was released jointly in February 2002.
That specification formed the basis of IBM's Enterprise Privacy Authorization Language, which was licensed to the technical standards body World Wide Web Consortium without ZKS' authorization, according to the complaint. In doing so, IBM violated copyright laws of Canada and civil codes of the province of Quebec, ZKS claimed.
IBM did not return a request for comment. Synomos declined to comment.
ZKS is seeking damages of roughly $5.1m, plus legal expenses. It is also asking the court for a permanent injunction preventing IBM from licensing the EPAL specification without its consent.
Stefanie Olsen writes for News.com
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