'Legal' input

[robert_weir at us.ibm.com]

RAND standards are perfectly legit for ISO.  They have many of them, 
including very popular ones, for example the industrial strength video 
compression standards used by the motion picture industry.  In fact, a few 

years ago ISO/IEC received an "Emmy" award for ISO/IEC 14496-10, which is 
full of patented technology that requires licensing. 

However, I think there will be wide interest in knowing exactly what 
subset of ZIP may be implemented without infringing on known patents. 

Certainly, that kind of clarity would benefit other open standards that 
use ZIP. 

The ZIP Application Note calls out which portions have patents pending on 
them.  That is probably a good start.  This could be delineated via a 
baseline profile, via multiple conformance levels, etc.  We 
have several tools at our disposal for factoring the functionality of a 
specification in order to meet multiple producer/consumer requirements. 

-Rob