Thanks for the post Carl. One thing to clarify:
Our internal patent lawyer has reviewed the license agreement and said that
he found no IP issues and we are free to pursue a license to use it in our
infrastructure.
Eric Allman's analysis states: "... the RFSIPL permits [end-user
customers] to use Sender Id without executing a license."
It would probably be good to clear up (as there has been some confusion on
the list) that sites which are just publishing Sender ID records or
installing commercial or open source Sender ID software *would not* need
to get a patent license for the IPR (they would of course need to get a
license for the copyrighted code they are installing)
Your comment implies that AOL might need to execute a license in order to
implement (ie, write) Sender ID code for your infrastructure. The
question of if "in-house" development needs a license is an interesting
one, but I wanted to make sure that this is in truth different from sites
"implementing" *other people's software* in their environment.
-Rand