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W3C Revises Patent Royalty Policy

Posted by michael on from the doing-the-right-thing dept.

Jeff Heaton writes: "Looks like W3C is backing down on allowing companies to charge royalties for technologies that are incorporated into a W3C standard. In a controversial proposal made public last fall, the consortium debated whether to allow companies to charge royalty fees if their technologies are used in a standard." The new draft is online.

1 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. Patents should live outside of standards by kingpin2k · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "There is still an open question of what's going to happen in the case that we run into tech that's only available for a fee. That could happen regardless of what our policy is. We still have to sort out what happens in that exceptional case," he said. God only knows how many non-standard "features" that IE implements. This fact has failed to crash the net. I assume if browser makers wished to do the same with patented technology, they certainly could. It would probably be hard to keep giving the things away, though.