Providers of web site hosting and other Internet-related services offer customers the means to acquire and disseminate a plethora of public, private, commercial, and non-commercial information. While the Internet provides a forum for free and open discussion and dissemination of information, there are competing interests at issue, in terms of a web hosting company's Terms of Service (''TOS'') and the various laws that govern such services.

With Internet-based intellectual property lawsuits on the rise, the question has become: how will Internet law keep up with the freedom of speech issues - and, to what degree will these laws affect the web hosting industry as a whole? The ramifications of some recent Internet litigation, and its impact on the web hosting industry are presented and examined below.

Patent Litigation

Recently, a Canadian firm has claimed infringement upon a patent it owns, with regard to Resource Description Framework (RDF), a software based upon Extensible Markup Language (XML). Using this technology, programmers can write software to access web resources, such as web page content, music files and digital photos. Vancouver-based UFIL Unified Data Technologies, holds U.S. patent 5,684,985, a '''method and apparatus utilizing bond identifiers executed upon accessing of an endo-dynamic information node,'' awarded in November 1997. According to the Patent Enforcement and Royalties Ltd. (PEARL)'s web site, as many as 45 companies may be infringing upon the patents. It is believed that the patent may also infringe on the RDF Site Summary standard (web content that's written in something other than HTML). For example, RSS (originally developed by Netscape Communications, now owned by AOL Time Warner), allows web sites to exchange information and content.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which evaluates and recommends standards for web technologies, has endorsed the RDF standard. PEARL has been engaged to work with UFIL, to enforce the claims, since 1999. According to information released by the W3C, Daniel Weitzner, Technology and Society Domain Leader, indicated that the Consortium had not been approached directly regarding the patent issue. Mr. Weitzner stated, ''We consider it to be quite important that fundamental technology specifications such as RDF should be able to be implemented on a royalty-free basis. If anything comes to our attention that suggests that's not possible, we'll pay attention to legitimate property rights out there, but at the same time, RDF was developed in the open by a very broad range of the web community.''

Freedom of Speech Issues