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W3C Policy To Favor Royalty-Free Patents Only
A report on NewsForge notes that the Last Call Working Draft of the World Wide Web Consortium's patent policy has reversed the possibility found in earlier drafts of allowing patents in Web standards which required "Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory" (RAND) licensing fees. This draft is the result of the vote by the W3C's patent policy board mentioned last month, which came after a proposed loosening of the royalty-free standards in the Fall of 2001.
Sorry to nit-pick
Sited like that are everywhere because many web sites are made by people who care about such things, rather than fawning over browser-specific stuff.
this isn't about patents, this is about the W3C.org which is an internet standards group. there was this possibilty that they would charge folks to impliment what was considered the standard...oh hell read the story.
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If you were wondering what they're talking about, it might be:
in this submission
An article talks about it on
ZDnet
which I probably found on an old slashdot article.
But W3C was under pressure to create encumbered standards, mostly from big companies that would have made money from the royalties. Some companies that are usually considered our friends were working against us in this regard. Of course we didn't want to see them erect toll-booths on the Internet that would have, as a side-effect, locked out Open Source implementations.
I think there may be a problem right now regarding the VoiceXML standard, which was chartered before this new policy is accepted.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
What's "royalty-free" today can become expensive tomorrow. There needs to be a legally binding promise that the patent is effectively surrendered, that is there's never going to be an attempt to use the patent rights, before that technology can be freely used as part of something else.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I guess this was mostly a joke, but in case it was not - you might be interested in knowing that:
Amazon Tastes Its Own Patent-Pending Medicine and One-Click Shopping: litigation turns out unexpected real owner:
Amazon (internet bookstore) received a US patent on reducing the need for data input in case of repeated ordering through a network like the WWW. Based on this patent, Amazon sought an injunction against a competing bookstore. Amazon had applied for the same patent at the EPO under EP0902381 in Sep. 1998 under the name "Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network". By the time a search report was issued by the EPO, this patent had already aroused an uproar in the USA, leading to the discovery of a lot of prior art. Under the impression of these facts, Amazon refrained from further pursuing the patent application at the EPO. Meanwhile it has turned out that the One-Click technique is "owned" by a subsidiary of Thomson Multimedia, which had obtained a similar patent a few years earlier.
Whoever is going to try to force it - will be in trouble. Seems like there is previous art more than carry. Even I have made such a wonderful thing in 1997. Who has not :) :)
Hey folks, there are 100 other standards organizations where we have yet to win this fight.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
SWF, Flash's file format, IS a free and open standard.
Just raise the taxes on crack.
Imagine that there's new standard for transmitting porn over HTTPS, that involves the use of my fictional patented "Sloppy Encryption Xtreme." I grant a royalty-free license to implement my encryption algorithm for HTTPS. Someone writes a GPLed web browser that uses it.
Then next week, someone decides to take some of the GPLed code from the web browser, and use it in another project for puppy shredding machines. This other project doesn't involve web browsing or HTTP, but has some sort of use for Sloppy Encryption Xtreme (transmitting shredded puppy statistics to corporate headquarters, for example).
Then I sue for patent infringement, because the license that I granted, is only for HTTPS implentations.
Oops. That's bad. That's not Free.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I don't think the W3C would have ever consider, that strongly, adopting a standard which required royalties. I support that claim with common sense and a quote from:
W3C Patent Policy Working Group Chairman Danny Weitzner, "Despite the lack of a policy, there has always been an understanding amongst the various contributors that the Internet and the Web wouldn't be possible or scalable unless their contributions were available to everyone on a royalty-free basis."
So now there's a policy
What does this imply for the now patented and non-royalty-free JPG and GIF?
The current thinking on the patent status of still JPEG 1 is that Forgent doesn't have a case.
The patent on GIF's compression (U.S. Patent 4,558,302, owned by Unisys) is due to expire at the end of June. Patents that were once licensed royalty-free are quite hard to "evergreen".
Will I retire or break 10K?
Patents have a reasonably short life. The "GIF patent" (#4,558,302), expires on June 20, 2003.
You are wrong. The really sad thing is how easy it was to prove this.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.