Microsoft and AOL have recently embarked on a project to develop secure chat applications for corporate users, the first major effort to cash in on what has been a largely free software tool. Reuters Group is one of the biggest corporate clients, using Microsoft's IM technology.
AOL has scores of other technology patents, including one for Internet browsing memory tags, or "cookies," and another for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), an application that secures e-commerce transactions. But it has never sought to enforce these.
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