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W3C Policy To Favor Royalty-Free Patents Only

Posted by timothy on from the good-guys-in-the-corner-pocket dept.

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.

8 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. This is good, but... by vasqzr · · Score: 3, Insightful



    Who says you have to follow standards?

    People [b]will[/b] create their own, royalty-free or not. The market decides who wins.

    1. Re:This is good, but... by aardvarkjoe · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Huge? it only looks like about 10 screens to me. The slashdot comments page is an awful lot longer.


      I absolutely hate the mentality that everything has to have its own page. It leads to things like sites where articles are split into pages of 50 words apiece. I've got a scrollbar -- let me use it.

      --

      How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
  2. Thank god! by locarecords.com · · Score: 5, Insightful
    W3C stand up and be counted. At last they are actually stating a position and it is one we can all applaud!

    I hope they now start to be more proactive in naming and shaming those who subvert their standards (no names m$entioned).

    --
    ---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
  3. Hold your horses by jki · · Score: 3, Insightful
    This is good, but final celebration is to be held later. And there are still changes that find some new heave artillery against this. Anyway, good work!

    The Working Group hopes to advance to Proposed Recommendation in February or March 2003, with a final policy to be adopted by May 2003.

  4. Re:A step up, but not good enough for RMS... by lakeland · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Software can't be Free as long as there are patent restrictions on it, even if you can use the patents royalty-free. Why?


    Simple. While they're royalty free now, what is to say they're royalty free next week? With free software nobody can take away your rights to use it. With free patents, the patent holder can stop giving out free usage at any time. Even if that allows your existing program to carry on using the patented technology, it can screw up interoperability.


    Say for example you wrote a l33t gif producing program, 'caus gif is licenced royalty free, right? Now, at some time in the future, some nasty, evil corporation might change the patent rules on gif, and render the output of your program useless to free software. And you can forget about releasing a new version of your program, say one that fixes a security hole, because for most free beer patents, that requires another free licence.

  5. If there's a patent, why bother? by LostCluster · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Any standards body needs to insist that standards it declares are standards that are not restricted by any patent limitations. If they do not, then they risk putting out a standard that one company controls, or worse, you need the permission of serveral companies.

    If you want the benefits of having your technology as part of a sactioned standard, check your patents at the door.

    1. Re:If there's a patent, why bother? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      I should have replied here, maybe I should read before posting, this comment was replied to the main thread, so please don't mod it up here, or vice-versa.

      I don't think the W3C would have ever considered, 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."

      but now there's a policy

  6. I think you are confused by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There are, AFAIK, currently dozens (hundreds?) of closed and open source implementations of virtually every defined W3C specification, all royalty free.

    This is not about implementations. This is about patents.

    Perhaps someone out there can inform me if RAND licences are required to implement any of the existing W3C specs?

    No. They are not.

    The W3C policy has been for a long time that nothing with a patent encumbrance will be made a W3C standard. The story that you are replying to is on the subject that last month the W3C was considering changing this policy.

    Under the proposed policy change, the W3C would gain the capability to adopt as standards things which in order to create an implementation of that standard you might have to pay some RAND licensing fees. (And it is quite possible that whoever paid those RAND fees and created an implementation might then turn around and make that implementation available royalty free.)

    This policy change has been rejected, and things will continue as they were before, namely no patent encumbrances on anything that is going to become a standard unless implementing the patent is allowed universally royalty free. Meaning, no, it makes no difference, becuase nothing is different.

    Had they allowed RAND licensing into standards, it would have had a number of pretty big differences in things. For example, it would concievably be impossible to implement such standards in GPLed software, as the GPL bans the use in GPLed software of patent implementations unless you can ensure that patent is perpetually and unconditionally licensed royalty-free to all future GPLed programs.

    Does this answer your question?