Charlie Northrup, the guy in New Jersey whose prior art on what looks to be Web services dates back to 1994 and appears to trump anybody else's IP, has gotten another patent.

God knows it wasn't easy. The US Office of Patents and Trademarks pored over his application simply forever, comparing it to other like-minded patents. It found nothing that would disallow it, certainly nothing held by any member of W3C, and just granted the patent the other day.

Patent number 6,546,413, which bears the title "Access Method Independent Exchange Using a Communication Primitive," expands on Charlie's key 5,850,518 patent, otherwise known simply as 518, filed when the World Wide Web was just a baby and nobody else was thinking much about Web services. It's the third extension Charlie has gotten. The other ones were patents number 6,397,254 and 6,421,705.

To knock Charlie's patents out of the box, somebody would have to have filed for a Web services-resembling patent in late 1993.

The new patent contains 40 claims that basically cover any service provider providing a service. It also throws users a few curves. Like 518, it is good as of December 12, 1994.

The 518 patent is huge, rife with implications and could theoretically compromise any number of technologies depending on how it's, hum, interpreted. It's all about the automated discovery and connection of Web services though the word "Web" was never used in the filing since the Web didn't exist back then outside of research circles but 518 describes how to connect to a service using TCP/IP so it doesn't matter, it anticipates Web services.

Naturally, it's no fun holding such cards without playing them. So Charlie is setting up an LLC, a limited liability partnership, that the patents will be transferred to. The lawyers should have the LLC up and running, so to speak, in the next few days. Charlie won't have all that much to do with it. It's not his sort of thing. He's going to keep to the technology side. The LLC may involve big-time business types and, of course, lawyers - maybe three firms worth of them eventually.

It'll be up to the LLC to decide what to do with the IP, Charlie says, trying to keep the thing at arm's length. What that appears to mean is that the unnamed LLC will seek to license the stuff, which in turn may come down to suing people it thinks are infringing.

Charlie doesn't like to talk in terms of suing people, but says it may be advantageous to Web services players such as IBM, Microsoft, BEA, Sun and the service providers to have a license. The service providers could be practically anybody but it looks like it may behoove financial institutions and folks trafficking in multimedia - broadcast, audio and video - to check things out.

Charlie suggests that a license might also be helpful in mitigating the liabilities of companies being sued by other companies for some sort of Web services infringement.

The LLC lawyers are starting to work on what are called "claim charts" that track alleged infringement. Licensing terms are still being thrashed out.

Meanwhile, Charlie, who's got a little tiny company called Global Technologies Ltd, is productizing the IP under the code name DASCOA, short for Discovery and Connectivity Oriented Architecture, which is basically what it does using XML.

Charlie says, "DASCOA is like a super-PTSN (Public Telephone Switched Network), but for software. It simplifies the writing of Web services considerably, and does not require SOAP, WSDL or other encumbered specifications" like the stuff the IBM-Microsoft-created WS-I Organization has dreamed up.

Charlie is thinking of tying up with another company more skilled at marketing to get DASCOA to market. Reportedly the spec is written, the software's in the can, and the documentation is written, but needs some cleaning up before productization.