Date: Oct. 27, 1999
Link: http://www.w3.org/TR/P3P-analysis
Source Author or Organization: Pennie & Edmonds llp

This is a legal analysis of the "intrinsic evidence of record" that would be used by a court to determine whether the act of using P3P documents on one's web site, in itself, infringes upon Intermind's patent for a "Computer-based communication system and method using metadata defining a control structure."

The paper compares the patent's claims to a typical P3P implementation (including the use of the APPEL vocabulary to express user-preferences). The detailed explanation was prepared by the intellectual property law firm of Pennie & Edmonds llp, and concluded that the use of P3P to express a site's privacy practices would not constitute an infringement of Intermind's patent, which requires the use of a "communications object" using a metadata-based "control structure" to contain the methods, data, and processing instructions required to enable the two-way transmission of information between a "provider" (server) and a "consumer" (client), while running transparently on the consumer's machine.