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

WarCraft 3 Wont Charge Royaltys...

[LordYUK]

woo hoo!! Now I can patent the Wisp Rush and don't have to pay Blizzard a penny!!!! hehehe :) Me

Oh no!

[gpinzone]

"Oh no! There go all the royalty checks on my patented tag!" - Marc Andreessen

Re:WC3?

[MindStalker]

yes, wc3.org
walnut creek church of christ

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.

Thank god!

[locarecords.com]

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).

Nice, but

[Duderstadt]

While I commend the W3C for demanding royalty-free licenses, I am not exactly sure that this makes a great deal of difference at this time.

There are, AFAIK, currently dozens (hundreds?) of closed and open source implementations of virtually every defined W3C specification, all royalty free. Just as an example, I have used four or five XML/XSL parsers, some OSS, some not. Am I wrong about this?

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

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

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.

Heh? SVG?

[justsomebody]

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

Let the proprietary follow free standards.

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.

Better yet get rid of Patents on Software.

[BoomerSooner]

How nice would that be? I've yet to see patents do a damn thing but stifle innovation. How the fuck can someone interpret a law written in the 1800's to apply to 21st Century society.

All laws should expire, if they are worthy they will be renewed (could you imagine the crisis if murder was legal for a day?).

Royalty free - how 'bout JPG, for example?

[Weaselmancer]

From the article: The draft policy now provides that all patents necessary to implement W3C specifications must be "royalty-free".

What does this imply for the now patented and non-royalty-free JPG and GIF? If I read this right (IANAL), I believe it says that only royalty-free patents can be a part of spec. In a nutshell, it appears JPG and GIF are SOL.

I think it would be great if W3C took a stand against abusive patents. This could be a really good thing, in disguise.

Weaselmancer

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:This is good, but...

[rusty0101]

Nothing says you have to follow standards. Unless you market the product as "Standards Based." Even then...

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

[lakeland]

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.

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

If there's a patent, why bother?

[LostCluster]

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.

I think you are confused

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

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