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.

Comments

Re:This is good, but...

[sketerpot]

Despite that, the W3C still has significant voice in what happens. Check out some of the stuff at W3Schools and you will see the way the w3c is pushing--toward technical excellence with the ability to make your pages look good and gracefully degrade. And these technologies are being adopted! If you compare the Distributed Proofreaders site to the Cartoon Network site, there is no doubt which is more usable. (note for those of you who may be so dense that you have doubts: not cartoon network). Guess who uses more w3c-friendly html?

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.

Re:One-Click shopping

[BroadbandBradley]

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.

Example of RAND in purposed W3C standards

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Nice, but

[Bruce Perens]

To date, W3C has attempted to create unencumbered standards. You can't ever be sure that they are unencumbered, of course, some turkey could assert yet another patent on the Internet.

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

Re:A step up, but not good enough for RMS...

[Bruce Perens]

The grant of patents with the W3C standards is not for all uses. It is only for the work necessary to implement the standard. So, you can use the algorithm in one place in your code, and not another. It's the best compromise we could get out of the patent holders. So, RMS has a valid point.

Bruce

Re:Royalty free - how 'bout JPG, for example?

[Bruce Perens]

Neither JPG or GIF are W3C specifications. HTML is a W3C standard, and includes them by reference only.

Bruce

Re:One-Click shopping

[Bruce Perens]

Rather it is that W3C working group members could have gained the right to charge implementors for patents held by those implementors.

Hey folks, there are 100 other standards organizations where we have yet to win this fight.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Heh? SVG?

[cygnus]

I hope this puts flash out of bussines. It would be time for SVG to replace standard flash.

arg. everytime one of these stories comes up, i end up linking to this site.

SWF, Flash's file format, IS a free and open standard.