telecommunications Telecommunication, often used in its plural form or abbreviated as telecom, is the transmission of information over a distance using electronic means, typically through cables, radio waves, or other communication technologies. These means of ...

, a proprietary protocol is a

communications protocol A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics (computer science), sem ...

owned by a single organization or individual.

Intellectual property rights and enforcement

Ownership by a single organization gives the owner the ability to place restrictions on the use of the protocol and to change the protocol unilaterally. Specifications for proprietary protocols may or may not be published, and implementations are not freely distributed. Proprietors may enforce restrictions through control of the

intellectual property Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, co ...

rights, for example through enforcement of

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

rights, and by keeping the protocol specification a

trade secret A trade secret is a form of intellectual property (IP) comprising confidential information that is not generally known or readily ascertainable, derives economic value from its secrecy, and is protected by reasonable efforts to maintain its conf ...

. Some proprietary protocols strictly limit the right to create an implementation; others are widely implemented by entities that do not control the intellectual property but subject to restrictions the owner of the intellectual property may seek to impose.

Examples

The Skype protocol is a proprietary protocol. The Venturi Transport Protocol (VTP) is a patented proprietary protocol that is designed to replace TCP transparently in order to overcome perceived inefficiencies related to wireless data transport.

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Exchange Server protocols are proprietary open access protocols. The rights to develop and release protocols are held by Microsoft, but all technical details are free for access and implementation.

developed a proprietary extension to the Kerberos network authentication protocol for the

Windows 2000 Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft, targeting the server and business markets. It is the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RT ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

. The extensions made the protocol incompatible with implementations supporting the original standards, and this has raised concerns that this, along with the licensing restrictions, effectively denies products unable to conform to the standard access to a Windows 2000 Server using Kerberos.

Effects of incompatibility

The use of proprietary

instant messaging Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of synchronous computer-mediated communication involving the immediate ( real-time) transmission of messages between two or more parties over the Internet or another computer network. Originally involv ...

protocols meant that instant messaging networks were incompatible and people were unable to reach friends on other networks.

Reverse engineering

Reverse engineering Reverse engineering (also known as backwards engineering or back engineering) is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accompl ...

is the process of retrieving a protocol’s details from a

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

implementation of the specification. Methods of reverse-engineering a protocol include packet sniffing and binary decompilation and disassembly. There are legal precedents when the reverse-engineering is aimed at interoperability of protocols. In the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act grants a safe harbor to reverse engineer software for the purposes of interoperability with other software. WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties Implementation Act

References

{{reflist Network protocols Reverse engineering Telecommunication protocols

Intellectual property rights and enforcement

Examples

Effects of incompatibility

Reverse engineering

See also

References