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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.
Most patents are created or applied for in order to make the applicant some money in licensing fees, or as part of a larger effort in leading up to another fee.
The "prior art" clauses would indicate that if one wanted to place an invention in the public domain, one would simply post about it in a public forum, like what Mr Torvalds did many years ago. No-one could patent Linux now, becuase it's in the public domain.
A third possibility is closer to Linus' trademark idea, i.e. he owns the trademark, but will only legally enforce that fact if he disagrees with someone's {ab}use of it. In patent-land, I could do the same with my invention, put it in the public domain and let others use it freely, as long as they conform to some license agreement such as the GPL.
That opens a whole other can of worms, but we're starting to see some convergence here, where licenses to use a technology (software or otherwise) are freely doled out under certain conditions. I'm surprised the FSF hasn't come up with something like this before.
jer
We may be human, but we're still animals
- Steve Vai
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."
Fortunately the W3C have (up to now) been relatively open and ethical about their products. I say relatively, because certain other protocols, languages etc. have been hidden beneath a wash of legalese and DMCA-isms both recently and in the past.
The fact of this whole patent drive seems to be getting up the nose of /.ers simply because they are advocating patents. This could be a good thing (remember: not all software patents are bad), or it could be a sign of their fall to the dark side. If so, it'd be a pity - they've been a stalwart of the open-standards community for some time now.
jer
We may be human, but we're still animals
- Steve Vai
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.
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It is a foundation of open standards which have allowed for innovations like streaming media over the Internet. It is open standards which allow for rapid development of these services. What? You think it'll be better if companies X, Y and Z get 50 patents over one technology and then allow them to fight it out in court so we can have feature A in our web browsers? Or, after they've finished bickering, that it is ok for a corporate created browser to claim compliance because they can afford the licensing fees but a browser like Mnemonic can't because it's created by a bunch of hackers?
Patents are not needed or wanted for a standard like the one drafted by the W3C. Ever. If a company wants a product to become a standard for the WWW then they need to be willing to give up control of that "intellectual property." Otherwise, take your chance in the market and get eaten by MS (you know this just had to be included. it is /. :) like every other smoe out there.
Patents do have uses and I am all for them but not in software. As long as there is copyright and trade secrets available it's an axiom I won't accept.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
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.
There is a lot that is wrong with software patents, not with patents in general.
The problem is that everyone can make a small contribution, and when you write software, your standing on other developers toes, not their shoulders.
There are only a few things that are big enough to be patented. For example, the Web. But the web wouldn't have existed if it had been patented. TimBL has made this very clear, over and over. And TimBL has also made it very clear that you're wrong: It's the common standards that encourage growth, because it makes it possible for everybody to compete on a level playing field.
Software patents had been OK if they costed no more than $100 to get (so that everybody could get them), took a week to get granted, and expired after a month.
That's what it takes for software patents to hinder continued development. However, this is completely unrealistic, so better drop them.
OTOH, I'd like you to come up with good examples of software patents that encouraged growth. And we'll see how important they were compared to e.g. the Internet and the Web.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
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.
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I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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
Nothing wrong with patents in general. However, there are several problems with the current implementation. Namely, that it's far too open to abuse.
The biggest problem by far is that corporate patents are not "use it or lose it", like trademarks are. This allows corporations to essentially kill any products that might compete with them by simply buying the patent and never using it ot licensing it to anyone. The energy industry is particularly guilty of this, and has been known to be doing this for years.
Then, of course, there's the length. While seventeen years was a decent amount of time in past years, when the pace of technology moved fairly slowly in general, in this world they last far too long. Patents are supposed to encourage innovation, but not at the cost of competition. They need to be shortened to ten years at the longest, to fit the current state of technological advancement.
And finally, of course, the ability to patent software. Software is a written work, not a device (if anything is a device, it is the computer itself, but that is not software). The difference is basically the same as copyrighting a novel and patenting an entire genre. What if Tolkien had patented fantasy? It sounds absurd, but this is exactly what is going on in the software industry. Copyright provides adequate protection against stealing one's work in this case; there is no need for patents. never mind that you're not supposed to be able to patent math problems anyway, but the corporate whores in Congress seem to have ignored this for the time being.
Besides which, open patents should all be royalty-free; that's the critical part of why they are open. If you want to patent something, that's fine, but you shouldn't be allowed to charge for it if you want it to become part of an open standard.
Patents aren't bad in and of themselves. But they've been abused, most commonly in the software industry but others as well, for many years now. The system needs to be reformed to prevent this.
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.
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I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.