Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall

Jay Sulzberger, Corresponding Secretary of LXNY (New York's Free Computing Organization) writes with a report on the ongoing fight over patents in Web standards. "In the past two years the Free Software Movement has moved W3C, the Official Standards Body of the World Wide Web, from a proposed patent policy, which would have, in future, denied us our present right to full and free use of free software to build the Web, to a policy intended to guarantee that free software may be used without fear of patent encumbrances. This move is an important victory for us. But the present proposed policy on patents has a bug that is worth fixing. The mechanism of the bug is non-obvious, except to people who have studied the GPL and certain other free software licenses. It is a bug that, if the proposal is made an official standard, would allow for patent encumbrances to be laid on certain free software in circumstances where today no encumbrance is allowed." Read the rest of Jay's commentary (below) on this devil in the details.

Here is what the Free Software Foundation says on its front page about this bug:

"The W3C 'Royalty-Free' patent policy proposal does not protect the rights of the Free Software community to full participation in the implementation and extension of web standards. Please read more on this issue and send a comment to the W3C."

Part of the effort that moved the W3C to its present position was a furious outpouring of comments in opposition to the original proposal of the Englobulators:

• www.w3.org/2001/ppwg
• www.w3.org/2001/10/patent-response
• lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentpolicy-comment
• lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentpolicy-comment/2001Oct/thread.html

The fix needed right now is a small fix. But the W3C must again be reminded with what jealous vigor we guard our right to build our Web the way we have built it down to this day, using free software. The bug appears in Item 3 of Section 3, titled 'W3C Royalty-Free (RF) Licensing Requirements,' of the present proposal.

This Item allows for a supposedly free grant to use a patent to be so restricted that a piece of Web infrastructure software might be encumbered if used for some non-Web use. Since the GPL does not allow such encumbrancing, GPL-ed Web software re-purposed for non-Web use could not be legally freely redistributed. Please read the Free Software Foundation's page on this bug.

Here is the official Last Call for Comments.

If you write a comment in your own words, for repair of the bug, it will help. I shall write in, and I shall argue against adoption of the buggy sub-section. I shall also suggest an extension of the deadline for comments.

Comments

Re:Let me get this straight...

[Fastolfe]

The issue is that some "web" technologies (e.g. HTML) can easily find themselves in other areas (e.g. HTML e-mail). With the licensing phrased the way it is now, a "web" standard can be made free and beautiful, get entrenched as a de facto standard, but then everyone wanting to extend that into other related technologies would suddenly have to pay out the nose for patent royalties, which neatly excludes most all free software. This is the situation we are trying to avoid.

Wouldn't it suck to have to pay out royalties for technologies like SOAP because HTTP had patent encumberences that were only ignorable when dealing with the web?

The Internet is not the Interweb, and though the W3C is a "web" pseudo-standards body, they need to realize that their recommendations tend to extend well beyond the web and need to plan accordingly. A standard that's deliberately crippled so as not to be extensible is generally a bad standard.

A copyright licence is NOT a patent licence!

[Kjella]

Let me try to make it clearer with an example. Ford owns the copyright to the Ford cars. But that doesn't mean that Toyota can't also make a Toyota car.

But if Ford has a patent required for making *any* car (e.g. a component or standard required by law), Toyota is screwed.

This is about patents in internet standards which would prevent any GPL implementation. I don't understand what you're trying to say. Is ISS illegal because Apache exists? NO. But would Apache be illegal if Microsoft/ISS had a patent on HTTP? YES!

Kjella