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Act Now To Sidestep A W3C Patent Pitfall
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.
Also of note:
Working Draft, W3C Patent Policy...
Abstract:
...When in doubt, think for yourself.
No, what the FSF wants is for the W3C standard to be defined in a way that GPL'ed software can comply with. If complying with the W3C standard requires the use of any restricted software technology, then there might not be compliant GPL browsers and servers, and everyone loses.
If the patent owners don't want to release their IP, then the patented technology shouldn't be part of the standard. Period.
In the Star Trek evil Mirror Universe, virtuoso cellist Yo-Yo Ma is gangsta hiphop star DJ Yo Ma-Ma.
And those are taken from just the top 22 posts in the list...
"Truth is not decided by majority vote" consensus gentium -- Norman Geisler
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.
Considering you intentionally block the W3C validator
I can't help but think that's about the stupidest thing /. has ever done (though I may be wrong). I mean, what's the point? Lame jokes about the crappy output of your Perl scripts got you down? How about fixing it instead??
You can't GPL a specification, that doesn't make any sense. You can GPL a document which contains a specification, but to protect the specification itself, you would have to patent it.
The GPL has nothing to do with patents, it has to do with copyright. If patents try to assert control over copy-rights, then the GPL has something to say.
If that is it, I suppose an illustration of the implementation and the problem, would be that if GIFs were part of the standard, then we could read them from the web, and generate them for the web, but using the software for non-web purposes would be restricted?
I think what they're saying here is that people could patent use of software outside the domain of the web, and use the patented technology as part of the web standard... crippling implementations of free software in such a way that they cannot evolve beyond the web. Could intranets be a problem?
I don't really get it, as a patent is a patent is a patent. There are plenty of things free software can't do now just because of patents. This may actually be to our bennefit as patent-encumbured technologies would have to shed control if they wanted to be incorporated into the web...
Insert obligatory "patents are stupid" comment here.
So I'll paste a bit from the fsf site:
Here's a detailed step-by-step example that shows how this problem could play out:
Programmer P downloads the Konqueror web browser, receiving it under terms of GPL.
P learns of a new web standard that requires exercising a technique for parsing URLs that is patented by Corporation C. C has licensed the patent under an RF, non-exclusive license, but with a "field of use" restriction that says the license can be used to "implement the standard". The standard, as it turns out, covers only what browsers must do with URLs, and says nothing about the server side or clients that aren't user browsers.
P implements this technique in Konqueror, and seeks to redistribute the modified version on his website so that other users can benefit from Konqueror now complying with the standard. If he does, he is bound by the GPL under copyright law, because he is redistributing a modified version.
However, he knows full well of a condition on that code that contradicts the GPL (violating Section 7) -- namely, he knows that C's patent license prohibits folks from taking his URL parsing code and putting it into, say, a search engine. Therefore, under GPL Section 7, he is prohibited from redistribution.
You might think that he can simply assign his copyright to the existing copyright holder of Konqueror let distribution happen from that source. They could distribute under GPL, but they would be granting a self-contradicting license. Nothing (to my knowledge, but IANAL) prohibits someone from distributing copyrighted works under licenses that make no sense and are self-contradictory. However, it is certainly true that those who receive distribution of the works are stuck and can't undertake further distribution or modification themselves.
The way I understand it is that it can create a weird situation. Suppose I write code to parse Yahoo pages to extract information from them. Suppose that Yahoo uses some technology licensed in this way on their site. Now they can stop me because it's not a web browser.
Jesus christ..
I hate being Mr-RMS-protector and GPL-Anti-Basher, but the amount of bad "information" and people throwing completely unrelated things around infuriates me.
As some others have tried to say, this has nothing to do with the GPL putting the idea in some sort of "forced distribution" form as the author of the original comment would have you believe.
The GPL doesn't put restrictions on the distribution of ideas, only their implementations.
Here's an analogy as I see it:
Say I'd patented the idea of drawing pictures on a computer screen, and up until now the web (and computers in general) were only text base. Yes I'm stretching, but go with me for a second. I want to put pictures in a W3C standard, but I don't want to give up my right to charge money for my one-handed picture-viewing slideshow program. I submit it to the W3C standard and say "It's okay for people to use my patented idea for free for web applications." Now someone goes and makes a graphics-enabled web browser and distributes it under the GPL. Someone else then takes that GPL code and turns it into a GPL'd one-handed slideshow program -- a right the GPL affords them. Suddenly they are in violation of my patent. But the original author of the graphical web browser didn't break my patent, and the person who modified it into the slideshow program didn't disobey the license on the web browser..
And that's the problem being addressed as I see it. Note how it has nothing to do with the GPL "virally infecting" the patented idea?
Next time, read the article (and perhaps the GPL) before getting on your little pedastal. Thank you, please drive thru.
>A monopoly over the Internet is just
>as bad in the hands of OSS developers
>as it would be in the hands of Microsoft.
How? Tell me how that would be worse... If OSS dominated the web, you would be able to use any OS to access the web, and not have to pay for it. People would be able to not worry about strange patent limitations and being sued for single-click patents. The GPL places no restrictions on content created on the web, so anything on the web would be on the web in such a scenario. Any company that wanted to make a closed source application would not be prohibited, or secretly (or blatently, as the case may be) shut out of the standards committee.
So tell me how the web would be worse if it were dominated by the OSS instead of MS. Or shut up.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
The point he is trying to make, in my case, is that companies may, under the current policy, use the said clause to specifically sabotage a GPLed piece of software that is trying to implement a standard.
An example of this would be if a commercial corporation (call it company X) comes up with a new piece of technology (call it WWW++ for here), which instantly becomes a hit. So, there is a big push for WWW++ to become a web standard, and company X agrees that they have the write to us WWW++, but only in terms of web development. However, since this is incompatible with the GPL, what this would mean is that anything trying to implement WWW++ cannot be licensed under the GPL. Therefore, singlehandedly by making a popular web standard, a company can say that this web standard cannot be used under certain licenses. We all know companies which would like to do this.
What is being proposed instead, would take away that clause. It would not harm commercial implementations of the standard at all. In fact, commercial implementations would even benifit from the removal of the clause because it would give them more freedom of action. What the removal of the clause would do is ultimately give developers more freedom to work with the next generation web standards, to foster the kind of innovativeness on the part of the developers without having to constantly looking for patent violations, and to continue the tradition of the free web as much as possible.
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.
The issue for me as an architect (I have written IETF, W3C and OASIS standards) is that I don't necessarily own all the IP that I need to address a problem. If I need to get an IP owner to donate their property for the common good my job is easiest if I have to ask for as little as is necessary for the particular purpose.
Equally when I hold the IP I see little point in giving away more than I need to for the purpose of the Web specification even though my company does not regard patent licensing as a revenue stream. The point is that I might need some IP held by a party that deals in the non-Internet world. I will have an easier time negotiating a license for Internet use if I have some bargaining chips.
The FSF reading on the situation is 100% about their ideology and has nothing to do with real needs as far as I am concerned. Open Source software is not imune to the patent system. If you modify any open source software sufficiently you will run into a patent infringement.
If you apply the FSF "logic" you would have to stop distributing gzip because someone could modify it so that it infringed the Unisys LZ patents.
The W3C does not have a monopoly on standards making and in fact is already seeing a lot of the standards work migrating from to OASIS. Dealing with the cumbersome W3C process and formatting conventions is bad enough without additional IP roadblocks being errected.
At the end of the day the IP policy is utterly irrelevant since nobody is going to use the specification unless the IP terms are acceptable and they are going to determine what is acceptable, not Tim and certainly not RMS. To date that has generally meant 'free as in beer' however there are many applications where that is simply not achievable, if you want to do voice browsing you will run into IP issues and your choice will be do something encumbered or don't do it at all.
Don't do it at all may be the FSF answer, but he does not pay $57,500 a year for W3C membership dues. The point that Tim has missed is that the W3C membership is already annoyed on the value for money front, W3C is way more expensive to join than OASIS where we pay $10K. We are also far from happy on the bogus process front, it took me almost a year to get a W3C working group started. I am not happy with a set of document publication rules that are 'standards based' but turn out to mean that you can only edit standards with one editor.
The last thing W3C needs to do at this stage is to reopen the IP issue with the membership.
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Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Jay Sulzberger is the one on the right with the beanie:k =327588
No, really.
http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLin
Bzzt -- there's no such thing as a specification that's GPLed, or at least I've never seen such a beast. Your post isn't very clear, but it seems you believe that the FSF is trying to promote standards that permit only GPLed implementations -- which isn't even close to what's going on.
The W3C has adopted a limp-wristed patent policy which would allow a patented technology X into web standards, so long as it was licensed for free use within the context of the relevant web technologies -- but no one, not even commercial entities, would be able to write software which imitated X outside the realm of the WWW. That's bad for everybody except the lawyers.
The only thing this even has to do with the GPL is that the GPL can't be applied to software which is restricted by patents in this way.
The GPL is not an unrestricted license.
True, the GPL does not remove all restrictions which copyright law imposes. How is that relevant to the matter at hand? The matter at hand (I think) is whether we should ensure that standards are implementable by free/Libre software.
I would tend to oppose the use of a standard in which the specification is GPL'd ...
The GPL doesn't really make sense when we're talking about something like a document. That's why the FSF folks came up with their free document license. Again, there seems to be no connection to the matter at hand. Now look at the next paragraph:
If the author of a GPL'd work wishes to submit the protocol involved as a standard, then let him submit it as FREE. He can keep the code GPL'd, but the standard must be free for use -- even by commercial entities.
This seems to confirm the confusion that the earlier lines hinted at. This talks about restrictions on the text of standards, rather than restrictions on the use of standards.
This post seems to me to be off-topic. It is tangentially related, perhaps, but it definitely doesn't advance the discussion.
It might be considered inflammatory, and it almost seems to be deliberately confused, as if it were intended to provoke impassioned responses. In short, it has a smell of troll, or simple ignorance. Now, look at the moderation:
Moderation Totals: Insightful=3, Informative=1, Overrated=1, Total=5.
Three insightfuls and an informative? Moderators, if you don't know, don't moderate. Somebody with some mod points should tack on a couple more Overrated's, too.
See what I've been reading.
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
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That is not quite right, we never relased any code under the GPL. We released the libwww code as public domain, it is not GPL, it is not BSD, it is public domain.
When GPL was being discussed it was in the context of 'make it free', the GPL was rejected because it did not make the cern code free in the ways we wanted it to be free. We explicitly wanted browsers to be included with computers as a cost free part of the basic operating system. Remember that at the time (91) Mosaic had not even appeared, let alone Netscape. The point is that Tim never wanted the viral aspect and dropped the GNU angle as soon as it was explained to him.
In the end the public domain route was in large part dictated by political expediency. Explaining GPL or BSD to cern management would have taken a lot more time and led to more opportunity for confusion. Putting the code in the public domain was something they could understand - it had already been done with much of the CERN libraries.
The mistake that was made was public domain rather than BSD. If we had gone BSD then Mosaic would have been required to state that it used CERN code (60% of the Mosaic code was code from CERN used without attribution). That in turn would have meant that IE would have a credit. As it was the mainstream media did not recognize Tim as the true father of the Web until about 1996, and then only as a result of a major PR campaign led by MIT.
I would certainly advise researchers to use the BSD license in their code. I would strongly advise against the GPL if you want your ideas to be taken up by industry.
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It's important because, time and time again, this sort of pedantry has morphed over the years into an enormous deal. There was a pretty bitter battle a few years back over gzip; many people wanted to use LZW, a patent-encumbered compression technology, because it was good and easy, and it was in use all over the place. "The patent doesn't matter," they said, "For Christ's sake, they use LZW in GIFs." Others were extremely concerned about the legal implications this might have down the road; fortunately, the pedants won, and years later when Unisys started firing around lawsuits left and right, GNU/Linux companies did not find themselves on the receiving end of any of them. There are a few other examples, but in general it is now agreed that it is a Very Good Thing for free software to be compliant with the letter of patent law.
Unfortunately, web software which uses patented techniques simply can't be free software; its code cannot be redistributed without restriction. I think the thing the FSF is most afraid of is that people will implement patented techniques in GPLed web software and Not Worry About It. That would be bad. One scenario I can imagine is this: A developer sues a GNU/Linux vendor for royalties on his patent-encumbered web software, because the GPL can't be applied to patent-encumbered software, and hence the vendor is redistributing it without a license. Technically, the developer is correct.
It seems you don't care much whether free software is available; fair enough. I like having free software, though, and so the situation where (a) technology X is a widely-used standard (web or otherwise), and (b) it is illegal to write free software which implements technology X, seems as odious to me as it does to the FSF.
Okay, who's the moron out there that believes a post asserting a difference between GPLing of spec documents verses actual code is somehow "offtopic" under a post that's about GPLing specs infecting closed code, which in turn was under an article about GPLing spec documents? The only way to be more on-topic would be to be the person submitting the original article. But whether or not something is on-topic has nothing to do with whether or not you agree that it's true.
Is someone moderating posts at random here?
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Nor does it make it impossible for GPL software to make use of the patents. If you want to use a patent in GPL software, put that routine under the MIT license, which does not have the GPL's language regarding patents, and can link with GPL work. This work-around was suggested by Eben Moglen.
This doesn't mean I support software patents. I think they should be eliminated. But we can't eliminate software patents through W3C - only through legislatures.
I'll end this with a plea to Jay Sulzberger. Jay, you are working to destroy two years of work by myself, Eben Moglen, and Larry Rosen. You didn't participate in the patent policy working group. I didn't see you volunteer. You don't sufficiently understand the issues yet. Please help us get the current W3C policy accepted, so that things will get better instead of worse.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I could write more, but you get the picture.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Lawsuits are a sign of freedom. They're a sign that the government has decided to leave as much as possible to the free market and the law of contract and tort, and not to come in with a big wet fucking nanny
If freedom is a lack of government (aka, anarchy), just remember that this whole debate is about patents, which are a product of the government. Thus, by your logic, they represent a loss of freedom, and so your whole rant becomes meaningless.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
Now, let's get to the matter of whether a license is OSD-compliant or not. In Open Source licensing, a copyright holder conveys rights to others. The OSD specifies what rights that copyright holder must convey for their license to be considered Open Source. The copyright holder doesn't have any control regarding the patent rights of third parties. Thus, I don't see any point in requiring the copyright holder to first obtain a non-scope-limited license, applying to everyone in the world, to every patent that the software might infringe upon. I dare you to even find out what patents those would be for any non-trivial program. Patent searches are never provably exhaustive. Thus, I could contend, following your rationale, that no software is Open Source, because all non-trivial software submitted as Open Source is potentially infringing of an issued patent. So, my contention is that the OSD would indeed not achieve anything if your rationale was followed.
Now, there is a potential pernicious case in which the copyright holder has a license that the community doesn't, and thus can make use of community-submitted code that others can not. If the copyright holder uses that license to their advantage, by working in collusion with the patent holder to deny commercial use of the code to others, I would contend that the copyright holder does have at least partial control and that the software in question might well not be considered Open Source. I don't yet know what to do about this.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
let the W3C screw themselves.... lets stop using them as the voice of standards.......
Standards are what the majority agree upon, not what some committee decides the majority should be forced to use.
The only power they have is what people give them.
If they screw up........ Then thyey aren't the standard....
What the backup plan? In case they do sell out..
Here are more coherent comments:
0 2111 4/ .
/
.
To All Members of the Free Software and Open Source Community,
For the past two years, I've been working on the W3C patent policy on
your behalf, to make it safe for Free Software to implement W3C standards.
Now, I'm worried that we could lose that fight, not because of the patent
holders, but because of our own community.
There's a long discussion below. I'm asking you to do something once you
read that discussion: Please write to
and tell them something like this (please elaborate - everyone discounts
rubber-stamp comments):
To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
Subject: Approve of draft policy - disapprove of software patenting.
I request that W3C approve the draft patent policy, because it's a
compromise that protects the right of Open Source / Free Software
programmers to implement W3C standards.
And you may want to add this:
I object to software patents, and support efforts to eliminate them
at the legislative level.
Now, to the discussion.
Three representatives of the Free Software / Open Source community:
myself, Larry Rosen of the Open Source Initiative, and Eben Moglen of
the Free Software Foundation, worked on the W3C patent policy for two
years. We spent between 1/8 and 1/4 of our time on the project for all
of that time, participating in many face-to-face meetings and conference
calls. Across the table were some companies that, I feel, wanted to
"farm" their own patents in W3C standards and would have erected
lucrative "toll-booths" to collect royalties from every implementor of
web standards. If they had their way, we would have been locked
out.
We got you the best deal we could get. It's not everything we want,
and it can't be. The draft policy is at
http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-patent-policy-20
The proposed W3C patent policy grants a royalty-free right for everyone
to practice patents that are embedded in the standard by W3C members who
own those patents. It prevents "patent farming", the biggest problem
that faced us. The problem is that the patent grant is limited - it only
applies to code that actually implements the standard. This is called a
"field-of-use" limitation. The problem this creates for the Free Software
community is that other uses of the same patent in our code, for anything
but implementing the standard, could be covered by royalties.
I object to software patents entirely, and many of you do as well. Why,
then, did I (on your behalf) approve of a policy containing that
limitation, and why am I asking you to support it?
The answer is simple. Patent holders won't continue their membership
in W3C if that membership forces them to give up their patent rights
for non-standards-related applications. They will instead move their
standards-making activities to other organizations that allow them to
charge patent royalties on the standards. And we will have lost.
It comes down to what we can compel people to do, and what they won't
stand for. The patent holders want the W3C brand on their standards,
and will give up something for that. If we ask them to give up more,
they'll do without the W3C brand, and we have no way to control what
standards organization they move to. If we wish to fight software patents
outside of standards, I think our only choice is to do so at the legislative
level.
The field-of-use limitation presents special problems regarding the GPL,
because the GPL disallows a field-of-use-limited patent license. There is a
work-around for this. The code that makes use of the patented principle
must be under the MIT license, which allows a scope-limited patent
license. That may be linked into GPL code and distributed. I'm less than
comfortable with this, but my discomfort arises from the basic injustice
of software patents. A work-around is the best we can do in this case.
FSF, by its tenets, was bound to protest the field-of-use-limitation.
I respect that protest, as it is rooted an a belief that I share - that
software patents are fundamentally wrong. However, if the Free Software
Open Source community comes out against the W3C patent policy, and the
patent holders who want unlimited rights to charge royalties come out
against it, just who will speak for it? The result will be that W3C
will fail to give final approval to the policy, and we will not even have
the limited protection from software patents that we've won. Thus, I
have to ask you _not_ to do what FSF asks this time. Of course, this
disagreement does not diminish my respect of FSF, and I will continue
to work with them as I have on many projects for years.
Thus, I'd like you to write that email now. It's very important that W3C
see support for the draft policy, or we'll be back to the old, bad policy
again. Thanks!
As always, please feel free to call me to discuss this at 510-526-1165
(California time) or write me at bruce@perens.com
Thanks
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?