Slashdot Mirror
W3C Publishes "Current Patent Practices"
jdaly writes "Given the interest Slashdot readers have shown in W3C's
Patent Policy, I would like to provide an update and pointer to the
most recent document published by W3C on Patent Issues.
The W3C has published Current Patent Practice as a W3C Note. Reviewed by the W3C Advisory Board, the Note represents the current state of W3C patent practice as implemented by the Team for W3C Recommendations.
"
From the document: This current practice has evolved in order to satisfy the goal held by a number of W3C Members and significant parts of the larger Web community: that W3C Recommendations should be, as far as possible, implementable on a Royalty-Free basis [AC]. The current practice described here seeks to
- establish Royalty-Free implementation as a goal for Recommendations produced by new and re-chartered Working Groups;
- encourage maximum disclosure of patents that might prevent a W3C Recommendation from being implemented on a Royalty-Free basis;
- provide a process for addressing situations in which the goal of Royalty-Free implementation may not be attainable.
Looks like (at first glance) that the W3C have taken a cop-out route... "yes we'll keep things royalty free (but only if we can't find a good reason to make them royalty charged)".
Why can't they take a stance and say that without exception patents registered by the w3c will become public domain property (by filling the patent it prevents any other group trying the same thing without the public interest)
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
As a slashdotter with a typical Gen-Xer's with a low attention span and laziness when it comes to reading large documents.. I'd like to know is the document pro-license-free or pro-royalty-payments?
"encourage maximum disclosure of patents that might prevent a W3C Recommendation from being implemented on a Royalty-Free basis"
So basically they're saying "pretty please tell us about your patent that might ruin our scheme so we can have enough time to prepare to defeat your patent."
Sure, that'll work.
------
Today's Top Deals
Why is Slashdot only showing LAST Friday's posts?
...or maybe i'm losing it..
The linked article on /. had 111! comments, thats hardly a interest by /. readers... there are usualy more trolls on a article then that. I think this is another prime instance of where /.'s management have interest in something and repeadly post worthless articles about it, while all along a very small percentage of there readers give a shit.
I just don't see the evil here folks.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
~~~
This will probably get modded down as a troll, but I have a slightly deviant perspective on the subject of patents. I believe that patent law is essential in order to protect inventors and provide incentive to innovate. Open standards discourage development of new technologies, and makes a sort of religion or fetish out of what are quite often outmoded tech. Web patents are just as necessary. Now, this is not to say that there haven't been some overzealous lawyers in the mix, but it seems to me that people forget the necessity of patents and overemphasize the negative aspects.
Let's hope they also mean restriction free as well as royalty free. Royalty is money. Patent Licenses can have other restrictions on usage.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
It seems like the long and short of it is, "Specification candidates which are RAND encumbered must pass through an extra committee, and that committee must publish it's justification for recommending approval of specification status to that RAND encumbered specification candidate."
Not as strong as I might have liked, but it does make our path clear. Whenever a RAND encumbered specification is recommended by a PAG (the extra committee), we should review the justification, and voice our opinion. IE: if a PAG says, "we should make WMA the standard audio streaming architecture because Bill says it's better.", we should make a large and public effort to discredit the members of the PAG group, and have the recommendation overturned by the W3C director.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Hallo, i come from India where we do not have popular cultures and I still am learning the Western civilizations. ?Is this real words to the popular song IMAGINE by John Lennon? I thought it was about peace and oneness but this song is all sick and biological. I am Hindu and I thought this song was inspired by the great Hindu verses but this song isn't about anything except perversion. I thank you for your replys.
How about a clear statement such as the free software foundation has about US patent laws being insane, the patent office being incompetent and then refusing to support the insanity?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Your post has to be modded down as a troll.
Now, the problem is that you can't claim to be of public utility if you create proprietary stuff from which you'll get money by preventing public organisations not only to use them but also to learn and teach pothers to use them.
IMHO only public international organization should be involved in such researches and thus *not* make a life out of it.
We're not dealing with some home luxury device here but with a communication standard and if such standard accessibility is hindered by a royalty-hog patent, then it should no more be considered as a communication standard.
Now, you can see the obvious problem with patents when handled by multinational profit-seeking entities if you consider these bio-piracy exemples from the real world.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
There are a lot of guidelines, but I don't see anything about how they will enforce them.
Will the member company be removed from the committee or fined?
Oliver's army is here to stay Oliver's army are on their way And I would rather be anywhere else But here today
What do they mean with "as far as possible"??
What do they mean with "situations in which the goal of Royalty-Free implementations may not be attainable"???
This is bullshit.
If a "standard" turns out to be encumbered with a patent, and the owner can't be convinced to allow it's use gratis as needed for standard conformance, then the standard should be revoked.
...).
Sorry, but I don't see any way around this. A standard is a way of doing things that everybody is supposed to use to accomplish some purpose. A limitation on usage is an automatic effective limitation of the "standard". I.e., it becomes non-standard (some people are unable to use that approach). So the spec should be stricken from the list of standards.
If only some people are allowed to do something, then is just isn't a standard way of doing it. And to the extent that they even hedge on this the W3C should be ashamed of themselves. If they go against this, then the need to be replaced. It may be difficult, but they have violated the turst placed in them.
This isn't the first time that they (or one of their committees) have taken this stand. They can't be trusted. They need to be replaced.
This is not to deny that they have in the past done some good work, and that they may still do some good work. But we can't take their word as to what a standard usage is, because they have proven themselves unreliable.
This is what one should expect of them. Up until this year, or very late last year, every member was the representative of a large company, so it was to be expected that they would act for the benefit of those companies. The two Open Source members that they have added are going to be in the minority whenever a vote is taken. Company values will dominate this group. We can't expect otherwise given their structure and organization. But we can decide that they are not an acceptable authority for us to decide standard usage on.
This is made more complex because most of their past decisions were acutal standards, and much of the web and the net has been formalized based on those standards. But this doesn't act to mitigate their recent decisions. They can not be trusted. So some parallel group is needed that can act to specify acceptable standards. Even though most of what they would do originally would be to rubber stamp the pre-existing W3C standards (this one is unencumbered, that one is unencumbered,
It has been said by members of the W3C that a fork would be extremely bad. Well they are the ones who have created the fork by chaning their definiton process. A fork in the standards is less bad than accepting pseudo-standards as if they were the real thing.
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It seems like the long and short of it is, "Specification candidates which are RAND encumbered must pass through an extra committee, and that committee must publish it's justification for recommending approval of specification status to that RAND encumbered specification candidate."
Not as strong as I might have liked, but it does make our path clear. Whenever a RAND encumbered specification is recommended by a PAG (the extra committee), we should review the justification, and voice our opinion. IE: if a PAG says, "we should make WMA the standard audio streaming architecture because Bill says it's better.", we should make a large and public effort to discredit the members of the PAG group, and have the recommendation overturned by the W3C director.
I'm with you there, I don't think that W3C is going to back down anymore than this, since IBM is reportedly pushing hard to keep the RAND option open. We should let this go on advisement, just as you say. But we should not forget who the bad actor is here and bring that up next time they want something from the open source community.
Keep in mind that there are two already-RAND- encumbered W3C standards: SVG and Voice Browser, both of which were quietly pushed through before the RAND policity was even opened to public discussion. These two standards now need to be re-examined, that is, withdrawn and ammended in line with W3C's revised patent policy. W3C isn't going to do that without a good, strong push.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Even within an industry such as ours that is absolutely ravaged by the rampant (and often-unnecessary) use of acronyms, this consortium has reached new levels of stupidity and pretension.
Through the use of my Not-Quite-Patented® 'Acronym Counter', I have identified no less than TWENTY-FOUR used and abused acronyms within this document that didn't even amount to 2500 words!!! That is an unprecedented 1% of the total words!
Here an now I would like to propose the formation of a committee dedicated to ending the abuse of acronyms in technical documents concerning the I/T industry as a whole. We will be called the "Word Implementation Negating Division of the Operating World Subcommittee" (WINDOWS). On second thought, big, bad Bill might take exception to that...
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin
While this doesn't prevent problems with license restrictions -- that would have to be dealt with separately -- it DOES mean that free software alternatives would be relatively unburdened.
Of course, RMS and co. wouldn't be happy, and I'd be inclined to agree with them -- this is a compromise, and compromising is the art of leaving everyone unhappy, but less unhappy than they would be if someone else at the table got everything their way.
Need a UNIX/Linux/network guru in the Boulde
In my job, before I embark on a course of action that has huge ramifications for the livelihood of my employer, my coworkers or our customers, I seek peer comment (listservs, web forums, etc.). I do this so I'm sure to see all sides of an issue and make the best decision possible. [Side note explanation: I do not have comparably knowledgeable peers at my workplace.]
/. about how bogus it is. Surely a few of those hundred posts have credible points. If a bunch of geeks can poke gaping holes in government thinking, surely something is amiss.
The Patent Office should open itself up (or open itself up more). It's gotten rather old to hear about some crazy patent that was just awarded, then read a few hundred messages on
If you disagree with someone's patent, ignore it. Release your patent-violating piece of software (spread it) without crediting yourself (use a l337 handle instead :)
I don't really care about how the software laws go anymore. Once the whole open source community is forced underground it'll all be quite cool, and it'll make a mockery of the law with so many people casually ignoring it. The "warez" people have been at this for years and survive ok! Only the profiteers get caught, the crackers etc can't really be punished. The judge simply can't see what the defendent has done that warrants 10 years ....
test. this a test. see?
Your kidding right? Or course that isn't the words to imagine, hell, it isn't even the right beat. Its a lame attempt to troll, which I obviously just stepped into! :)
the real lyrics are here.
Patented standards are unuseable as standards. I don't like this, but I can't come to any other conclusion. And something masquerading as a standards body push these un-standards is possibly more harmful even than not having ANY standards body. At least there is the pre-existing basis of standards to build on.
If you doubt this, just consider the problems that the ogg-vorbis people are having because of so many patents in that area. The existence of patents renders an area unuseful for standards. Calling a government granted monopoly a standard degrades the language, and the meanings of the terms beyond usefulness. That a monopoly, not a standard. It's only a standard if it can be adopted as the standard approach.
Companies that attempt to sneak their patented approaches into the standards should be immediately removed from all participation in the process. They are deadly to it. This isn't even punishment, this is merely self protection. A standard needs to be able to be used. Otherwise it only confuses things, and pollutes the data-space.
Move the whole process to Europe? It could be in Europe for all I know. The location doesn't really matter. But it you care about this at all, campaign to keep Europe from recognizing the validity of software patents.
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I'm against nearly all patents, but the very worst ones often do get revoked. Some of the more glaring/humorous ones can be found www.bustpatents.com. It's possible to entertain yourself for hours on end by reading these.
This reminds me of another software difficulty: software which is available for free (and often available in source form), with license terms that forbid distribution for fee or other consideration. After all, does "sale price" include the media price? Shipping and handling fees? What about aggregate media? That opens another can of worms.
A better solution would be that the patents would be licensed Royalty-Free for implementations covered by a license meeting the Open Source Definition requirements. This would allow flexibility for open-source implementors while preserving the proprietary products value chain. The only major complaint from patent holders I can think of with this approach is that open source may outcompete proprietary products, drying up the royalty stream.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements can be and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.
Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here, here.
Let's all work together to improve free software.