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Ask the W3C's RAND Point Man
Danny Weitzner is Director of the World Wide Web Consortium's Technology and Society activities, which means he's in charge of handling reactions to a W3C proposal that would allow "Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory" (hence "RAND") license fees to be charged for use of W3C-endorsed standards that are covered by patents or other trade restrictions. Many prominent Free Software and Open Source people are firmly against RAND; RMS has even emailed me personally several times, asking me to post a link to this anti-RAND story (in which he is quoted). Slashdot has mentioned this controversy before, because we, too, feel it's important.. But Danny is the person at W3C who is dealing directly with all of this, so he's the person we should question. So ask away, one question per post as usual, and we'll post Danny's answers to 10 of the highest-moderated questions as soon as he gets them back to us.
Doesn't the idea of charging to use the standards combine the worst features of both? Doesn't doing so severely compromise the respectability of the process?
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
Seems to me that patents and trade restrictions are the antithesis of standards. Charging people for a something makes it less likely that they will use it, no?
(Then again, there is Windows. Never mind.)
Isn't that statement at best naive? The Internet and Web were originally designed with the idea of free and open communication. Today, there are powerful forces that would like to see open communication closed down and the Web turned over entirely to commercial pursuits. If a RAND policy is adopted for Web standards, won't the next move by those commercial entites be to create as many propriatry standards as possible and force them on the entire Web community (using hammers such as DMCA), like it or not?
sPh
I have two questions:
1. How can you have non-discriminatory licensing from platform vendors? If Microsoft charges itself a $25 license fee and offers the technology to everyone else for the same $25, that is not non-discriminatory. For Microsoft, it's merely account-shuffling. For everyone else, it's out-of-pocket.
2. Why support fiefdoms with RAND? Why not refuse to even consider any standard that the submitters have not already agreed to license freely for Web use (ie, even if they have patents, you have secured free use) and to indemnify the W3C and Web users against any claims by patent holders whose patent applications the submitters were aware of?
Netscape and IE are the de facto standards bodies these days; the browser wars are over and the days when standards were needed are over too. Apart from a gang of standards barrack-room lawyers going "Oh, I use WebFart 2000 because it's standards compliant blah blah blah", nobody cares anymore.
So my question is; why are you giving up the last shred of self-respect you might have had as a lobby group against the encroachment of the IE monopoly as a de facto standard, by turning yourself into a shill group for the same bunch of corporate interests? To preserve the fig-leaf of the "importance of standards"? Isn't that rather like destroying the village to save it?
-- the most controversial site on the Web
A better solution would be that if RAND was to be used that the only licensing that can be done is a significantly small fraction ( < 1% ) of the total sales from the product, with maybe a maximum cap for things on the order of Photoshop. That is, for 0.5% 'licensing fee', your GPL software makes $0.00 profit, so that the licensing would be 0%. Your shareware author sells his program for $25 would pay $0.12 per copy, and your major web-publishing package at $200 would be $1/copy. Obviously, there's questions about resells (Redhat in the case of GPL/Linux programs, for example), but this solution is, IMO, still in the spirit of RAND without threatening the free and open nature of the web.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
The WWW as well as Gopher, FTP, Telnet, WAIS, Archie and Veronica before it have been based on free tools that have come out of university environments -- anybody with enough technical know-how has access to the standards by which these tools operate, and can thus write programs that communciate via these standards. Many of these programmers are in educational settings where they work with little or no financial support. In addition, some of the most predominant software for the Web today is available without licensing fees -- take Apache for example.
It seems to me that adding royalties to the cost of writing software that interoperates with other W3C software is a specific threat to this sort of development, because what may be "reasonable and non-discriminatory" to a $100M business may be thoroughly out-of-reach and prohibitively expensive for 4 college students working on their senior project. As a result, rather than invigorating development, adding royalties would seem to slow it down by denying the ability to develop to the very people who have gotten us to where we are today. What mechanisms are there in the proposal to protect the ability of those who have been producing high-quality freeware to continue to do so?
People from the W3C have "acknowledged" that the Internet's growth has been due to open standards.
This isn't not even half the story. The Internet would not exist without open standards promoted by bodies like the IETF and W3C (until now).
In the 1980's and early 1990's there were a number of network protocols in use: DECNet, VINES, NETBIOS/NETBEUI (shudder), IPX/SPX, SNA, and more. None of them initially would have been as scalable as TCP/IP, however, if any of them had been truly open, it might have been possible to fix them.
But none of those other protocols were open... and where are they now? Nowhere.
It's the same situation for hypertext protocols. People and companies have proposed substantial improvments onto existing protocols. A notable example of this is Hyper-G, which was then commercialized by Hyperwave.com. It fixes a lot of problems with navigation, and stuff like broken links. However, there was never a free and open implementation, and so it has languished in obscurity for the last 5 years.
My question to the W3C is this: Do they have any evidence that proprietary protocols will foster continued growth of the Internet and the applications that run on top of it?
- The web was started by, and is still largely compromised of, people who don't earn a dime for their work. Independent web sites, universities, etc., do not usually make a profit from their sites. Forcing them to pay royalties would essentially be the equivalent of a cease-and-desist.
- Not everyone is in a position to pay royalties. Groups in our country, let alone other countries, are still being introduced to the web. Royalties would only deter them. Not to mention that only a few countries actually *recognize* the types of patents which RAND would try to enforce.
- Surely this would apply to the US federal government. If suddenly they have to pay royalties for their myriad of websites, where is that money going to come from? US Taxpayers, like you and I.
- What may be reasonable to some, is not reasonable to others. This has been noted already, but what may be a "fair" fee to a company like Microsoft would not be a "fair" fee to myself, a freelance developer.
- If the W3C becomes a group that tries to enforce royalties on existing web standards, their plan will backfire, and alternate standards (not to mention groups!) will crop up. Not only could this be the end of the internet as we know it, but it would be the end of the W3C as an established leadership that we try to follow.
Plain & Simple: RAND would not serve those that started and continue to develop the internet. Passing RAND will have disastrous consequences.Open source and free software is very common on the web today-- free browsers, servers, and anything else vaguely connected to the web and the internet are very widely used.
The very distribution terms of free software make them fundamentally incompatable with any standard whose licensing requires a fee. Some licenses explicitly forbid the use of algorithms burdened by patents, while others may "just" face the practical problem that the software is widely distributed for no charge, and often isn't even written by a for-profit company.
Given the prevalance and importance of free and open source software on the Web, and given the fundamental incompatability of such software with a standard that requires any licensing fee, how can any such standard be called "reasonable and non-discriminatory"? How would the W3C argue that any "RAND" standards at all requiring licensing fees do not descriminate against a large and important fraction of the web sofwtare out there today, specifically free and open-source software? (This is not a rhetorical question-- I really want to know what the W3C would say in answer to this latter question.)
-Rob
from your website (www.w3c.org), one of the key points of the w3c's mission is:
" 1. Interoperability: Specifications for the Web's languages and protocols must be compatible with one another and allow (any) hardware and software used to access the Web to work together.
".
my question is this:
if the RAND measure passes, will it affect this statement?
The W3C has, somewhat unintentionally, become a central clearinghouse that defines how humans fundamentally communicate with each other in this digital age. As a result, it is necessarily the W3C's responsibility to pay attention to how their actions affect society.
I would like to know, both from a W3C standpoint, and from your own personal belief, how you feel that RAND will improve human society. Also, do you feel that it is befitting a standards organization to approve a standard that is patented?
Which is more important in such a case, that the patent is honored, which could kill the standard or even cause hardship for those who can't afford it, or that the standard is released royalty free so that all of humanity can benefit? How do you reconcile this statement with W3C's role in society?
Thanks,
Jim McCracken
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
There is the possibility of making a free standard which is only useful if you use something non-free. For example, you are free to use the standard of driving on the right side of the road in the US, but it's only useful if you have a vehicle, which you have to pay for.
The GIF standard is free; you can use it without any problems without paying anyone anything, except that it does a funny thing with the data such that, if you use the non-free LZW algorithm on your data first, the file is smaller.
For SVG, the standard is similarly free, but in order to actually follow one of the steps legally, you have to sue Apple for patent fraud.
So you don't have to pay to use the standard. You have to pay to do the things that the standard tells you to do. It's like a user's manual that says, "buy some batteries".
I agree with what you're thinking, though: it's important for our standards to not require the purchase of other stuff, especially when the required stuff is only available from a single source or possibly not available at all (i.e., if you need a piece of software that doesn't exist for your computer). But this is distinct from a different possibility for standards: the standard itself could require a license. For example, the unicode standard has a license which prohibits further distribution (essentially so that old versions don't hang around, I think). There are standards where the document itself is not available for free. But that's not what the W3C policy is about.
Hypothetical:
1) M$ armtwists/rams a patent encumbered standard down W3C, promising royalty-free use etc. etc.
2) M$ waits several years for wide adoption.
3) M$ hits up everyone for royalties, especially free software projects.
Now tell me why M$ wouldn't do this.
Do you really think they give a shit what W3C RAND guidelines would say? AFAICT the W3C guidelines are not legally binding , but patents have the force of federal law behind them.
Ok, so M$ gets kicked out of W3C. Too late, the patent encumbered standard is too entrenched. They have everyones balls in a vise.
Read the halloween document again, then tell me with a straight face they wouldn't do this.
Also keep in mind M$'s flagrant disregard for federal law...
I am corrupt an greedy, so therefore I'd like my slice of the cake as well.
What is your procedure for including a patent of mine into the standard?
Do we go 50/50, or do you normally take a bigger cut?
I'm willing to go 80/20 in your favour, but only this if you can make it a key part of the standard so we can fleece a whole lot of people.
I don't currently have a patent, nor any good ideas, but that doesn't really matter, does it?
One more question, how do you deal with the men with nice suits and Italian accents trying to muscle into your turf?
"The best part? I became an ordained minister while not wearing pants." -- CleverNickName