telecommunications Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than tha ...

, 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 kind of variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics and synchro ...

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 Specifications for proprietary protocols may or may not be published, and implementations are not freely distributed.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 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 disclo ...

rights, and by keeping the protocol specification a

trade secret Trade secrets are a type of intellectual property that includes formulas, practices, processes, designs, instruments, patterns, or compilations of information that have inherent economic value because they are not generally known or readily a ...

. 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 The Skype protocol is a proprietary Internet telephony network used by Skype. The protocol's specifications have not been made publicly available by Skype and official applications using the protocol are closed-source. The Skype network is not i ...

is a proprietary protocol. The Venturi Transport Protocol (VTP) is a patented proprietary protocol that is designed to replace

TCP TCP may refer to: Science and technology * Transformer coupled plasma * Tool Center Point, see Robot end effector Computing * Transmission Control Protocol, a fundamental Internet standard * Telephony control protocol, a Bluetooth communication s ...

transparently in order to overcome perceived inefficiencies related to wireless data transport.

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

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 and oriented towards businesses. It was the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was released to manufacturing on December 15, 1999, and was official ...

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

. 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 online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and trigge ...

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 accompli ...

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

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

implementation of the specification. Methods of reverse-engineering a protocol include

packet sniffing A packet analyzer, also known as packet sniffer, protocol analyzer, or network analyzer, is a computer program or computer hardware such as a packet capture appliance, that can intercept and log traffic that passes over a computer network or ...

and binary decompilation and

disassembly A disassembler is a computer program that translates machine language into assembly language—the inverse operation to that of an assembler. A disassembler differs from a decompiler, which targets a high-level language rather than an assembly l ...

. There are legal precedents when the reverse-engineering is aimed at interoperability of protocols. In the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...

, the

Digital Millennium Copyright Act The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or ...

grants a

safe harbor A safe harbor or harbour is literally a "place of shelter and safety, esp. for ships". It is used in many contexts: Film and television * Safe harbor (broadcasting), established in 1978 in the US, the time period in a television schedule during wh ...

to reverse engineer software for the purposes of

interoperability Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader def ...

with other software. WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties Implementation Act

References

{{reflist Network protocols Reverse engineering Telecommunication protocols