Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Over at the RDF interest online forum, at least two developers of implementations based on RDF have received a legal mailing from a firm representing Unified Data Technologies Ltd (UDTL), implying a possible patent infringement due to the use of RDF/RSS.
The RDF working group is consulting with the W3C about the legalities of the whole thing. You can read more at:
http://www.pearlltd.com/content/news/03-10-00.html
http://rdfig.xmlhack.com/2002/01/01/2002-01-01.html
RDF Interest Group online forum
Patents in question are:
Patent 5,684,985 and 6,092,077 as well as others most likely under review for patent pending.
Hopefully the W3C will be able to resolve this, but I doubt this will go away quickly. At least one of the impacted projects, 4suite, is open source.
This is an effort to exploit open source as well as an open W3C specification, enabled by the extremely poor patent review methods of the US Patent and Trademark Office. A case of making money off of the goodwill efforts of others.
Happy New Year, Open Source. Happy New Year, RDF.