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Revised W3C Patent Policy Out, Comments Invited
Janet Daly, W3C writes "Today, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) began what it expects to be the final review of the proposed Royalty-Free Patent Policy. A new draft has been published; the review period has been extended to allow for
public and W3C Member comments alike. Review closes 30 April 2003. The press release and summary give a short version of goals and changes of the policy."
Here are FSF's views on the (previous version of the) royalty-free patent policy.
whos web ?
the American web or the UK web or the Chinese web or the Austrailian web or the japanese web or the other 260 nations that are online's web ?
Americans forget while living in their bubbles there is a thing called the "World" and their patents and laws dont extend to most of it, so go ahead make all the laws and patents you like, no one is going to follow them especially the chinese/russians etc etc
people cant even follow w3c recomendations as it is
Every try to validate one of these pages? Ha! Good luck on that. They've actually FORBIDDEN the w3c validator from looking at the pages!
That's about the stupidest thing I've seen today (not counting usual Slashdot trolling). This is a license that applies to standards developped by the W3C. It prevents the big companies that participate in W3C workgroups to claim ownership of standards that they developped/helped develop. It says nothing about anything that isn't a W3C standard.
Karma: Could be worse (could be raining)
Okay, I'll bite. The idea is that you can do whatever you want with your owns stuff patented - however, if you want your patented material to be incorporated into the W3C standard, then its up to you to comply with their requirements. All standards boards have various requirements before something can be considered as "standard". It is for the good of the economy.
do i hear one-click shopping? :)
This is a Good Thing. The W3C should patent most of it's standards so that assholes can't. It raises the issue, though, of trusting the W3C members to not be those assholes that this protects against. An explicit policy on how they deal with patents can assure us that the patents won't be abused.
One question is, how binding is this? If a member of the W3C patents a process then starts telling people to pay up (a few years down the line, maybe), is this really any protection?
-- Bill "Houdini" Weiss
I guess I'm just stuck in the last century, because I don't really understand the whole thing. I didn't have the patience to read the draft, but I read the press release, and I'm scratching my head over the whole idea of software patents. It's been a long time since I did any coding (anyone working with the 6502 any more?) but I seem to remember that there were always an infinite number of ways to accomplish any programming task. How do you patent one way, and then claim that no one's allowed to use another way to do the same thing? Or am I completely confused here? (I admit that this is almost a certainty.)
As a writer, I can't help but make comparisons with copyright law, another form of abstract intellectual property protection. If you're a writer, you can't copyright ideas. If I want to write a book about a great white whale, I can. I can even call it Moby Dick, and not just because Melville's copyright has expired. Titles cannot be copyrighted. So how come, for example, the .gif standard can be patented?
Of course, I may have completely misunderstood all of this. In which case, never mind.
Exactly. ...the web is the last frontier. It reminds me of the lawlessness in the movie, "Thunderdome".
Enforcement of rules is going to be easy as putting bolts in cotton candy.
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
- The license may be suspended if the licensee sues the licensor.
(Disclaimer: IANAL, nor have I yet waded through the legalese of the proposal itself -- just the summary)Does that mean that the following can happen:
- Entity A implements a W3C standard, in the process receiving a royalty-free license for some implicated technology from Entity B.
- A distributes its implementation.
- time passes . .
.
- A sues B on an unrelated matter, say for example, getting B to abide by the terms of an open-source license.
- B suspends A's royalty-free license on the technology in the standard implementation.
- All distributions of A's implementation now in license limbo courtesy of a suit on an unrelated matter?
How on earth can this be a good idea?It matters I suppose. I have no prob with /. posting these kinds of articles, but to appreciate this news bit you have to be a geek AND a lawyer. Or at least be really knowledgable about patent law. I am not as such, probably most everyone here is the same (makes for some interesting uninformed posts though).
I know enough about programming and network administration and such, but patent law just doesn't have any logic to it as far as I can tell.
The policy promotes the widespread implementation of W3C Recommendations first by making the W3C Royalty-Free License requirements clear and enforceable
Like all/any the other insane EULA's, web patents and service agreements floating out there, how is this enforceable? Like previous posts, w3c can't even 'enforce' the html standard. I'm sure that enforcing anything web related is high on the FBI's list of priorities.
If a certain way to do something is the market leader (e.g. GIF on web pages), all the patents applicable to that particular way to do something (such as LZW compression, but only if you are compressing a GIF) should be nullified. That way, patent owners (e.g. Unisys) will not be rewarded by making "trojan patents": patents that the owner really doesn't enforce until they have become part of a standard (such as lossless image compression).
Karma: Excellent (fuck, even in the future moderation doesn't work!)
BUT, IMHO, as soon as you try to make it a "standard" - thus forcing the world to use it, you should be required to make it royalty free and fully documented. There is a certain responsibility to the larger community for any organization or company that finds itself in this possition.
Information is too important to risk limiting its exchange. Case-in-point: M$ word documents. The "defacto standard" for document exchange is Microsoft's Office formats. However, the formats aren't fully documented and are at risk of changing with every new version of office. We would love to be able to ditch Office for an open-source (open format) solution, but we deal with other companies and government agencies who expect documents in Office format and send documents in Office format to us. It's a catch 22. We can't move to an open standard format without having a (redundant) system to be able to communicate with "the other 95%".
M$ has every right to sell their products. They have worked hard on them. However, because the formats have become the "standard", (and Microsoft has been doing everything it can to make it that way), M$ should be forced to open the format and fully document it, so that others don't have to reverse engineer it every time, to inter-operate. An open standard does not preclude MS from selling office. If it is the best product, it will sell. But an open standard for document exchange will allow true competition, and hence greater product improvement, by allowing software companies to compete on the technical merits of their products instead of on a closed format.
The same concept goes for audio and video. If you're going to call it a "standard" you shouldn't be able to charge for it. Charge for your product, not for the method of data exchange.
My $.02
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
You should read Code And Other Laws Of Cyberspace, it's mostly focused on the Net and how it could be/should(n't) be regulated by government (and also how other governments might handle it).
This has been a test. Had this been a real emergency, we would have fled in terror and you would not have been informed.
ICANN has its power because the US Government gives it to them (FTC, IIRC).
W3C has its power because of the good will of the community, deserved because they usually do a good job.
If they start to get all crazy on us, we can safely ignore them and form another standards organization. It's a good incentive for them not to get all crazy on us, should such an idea ever cross their minds.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Internet Explorer is NOTORIOUS for not following standards. Ever wonder why so many DHTML-heavy sites won't work in Mozilla? They follow Internet Explorer's "standards" and use workarounds for all the bugs in Internet Explorer's page renderer, rather than making normal code that is more compatible with alternative browsers.
Karma: Excellent (fuck, even in the future moderation doesn't work!)
You're way wrong buddy. History has shown that royalty free and open implementations ALMOST ALWAYS win out over proprietary and closed. Look at HTML and TCP/IP for obvious examples. Do you see the internet running on OEB and IPX/SPX? Bet you don't even know what in the heck those are. People are cheap buggers and the "good enough" mentality definately dictates the actions of the masses. The ONLY exception to this "rule" is when it's a "life-or-death" situation or when a "good enough" option is not known to exist (perhaps due to being uninformed).
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Alternative browsers should not have to emulate the bugs in Internet Explorer, and it is downright impossible for them to support technologies like ActiveX, as they are proprietary and they'd get sued by M$ if they made an implementation. If you think that open source developers need to get off their 'arses', why don't you go 'fix' all those browsers. Open-source software is by-the-people, for-the-people, so stop bitching.
Karma: Excellent (fuck, even in the future moderation doesn't work!)
I remember a previous discussion of the mono project, where someone said that M$ might file .net for W3C standard. This would ensure that nomo wouldn't be sued from here to oblivion.
Fear is the mind-killer.
So if 99% of the population of Texas decided to, could they get together and form a club and call it THE Texas? Sure they could, but that wouldn't make them be Texas since documents issued by an existing authority (the government) exist outlining what exactly Texas is.
So IE with its huge marketshare can call itself a standard, but that doesn't make them the real standard, since documents issued by an existing authority (the w3c) exist outlining what exactly the standard is.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Standards - ok. But do patents really make sense in an economical way?
h tml
Software patenting is hot debated issue, but what about "ordinary" patents?
I've found an interesting link to an article totally against patents:
http://fare.tunes.org/articles/patents.
it chooses the 256 colors that fit the image best, then maps all the true colors to those. Doesn't seem lossless to me
W3C Working Draft 14 November 2002:
5.3. PAG Conclusion
After appropriate consultation, the PAG may conclude:
1. The initial concern has been resolved, enabling the Working Group to continue.
2. The Working Group should be instructed to consider designing around the identified claims.
3. The Team should seek further information and evaluation, including and not limited to evaluation of the patents in question or the terms under which acceptable licensing may be available.
4. The Working Group should be terminated.
5. The Recommendation (if it has already been issued) should be rescinded
Outcomes 4 or 5 require an Advisory Committee review and Director's decision. In any case, the PAG must state its proposal and reasons in a public W3C document.
W3C Proposed Policy 19 March 2003:
7.5. PAG Conclusion
7.5.1. Possible PAG Conclusions
After appropriate consultation, the PAG may conclude:
1. The initial concern has been resolved, enabling the Working Group to continue.
2. The Working Group should be instructed to consider designing around the identified claims.
3. The Team should seek further information and evaluation, including and not limited to evaluation of the patents in question or the terms under which W3C RF licensing requirements may be met.
4. The Working Group should be terminated.
5. The Recommendation (if it has already been issued) should be rescinded.
6. Alternative licensing terms should be considered. The procedure in section 7.5.3 must be followed.
You are missing some important points here. Possibly you are confusing royalty free licensing with open source software.
There is plenty of scope for innovation - just, not at the expense of interoperability. Implementors are free to make things faster, more robust, easier to use, and so forth (including using any patented techniques that they own or have licensed). Which can of course generate the ching ching - better products get better reviews and sell more copies. And there can be open source implementations too and gasp these interoperate with the commercial ones...
So your binary choice between good (but licensed for fee) and crap falls wide of the mark.
Chris Lilley W3C spec creation droid
Possibly 95% (seems a little high, please post your source) of the desktop computer market. Desktop computers whose sales growth has slackened off to pretty much flat over the last couple of years.
Compare this with the handheld PDA and mobile phone markets, whose growth is accelerating and whose lower cost and lower complexity make them more availabile to the populatrion at large.
Add a strategy to ensure we have just one Web - no more 'this is the handheld site' nonsense - people still get to share URLs without asking what brand of computer or phone you are using - and that percentage share rapidly goes below 50%.
Ta-da, instant relevance for standards-compliant content.
Chris Lilley W3C spec creation droid
Just yesterday I was learning XHTML+SMIL and found this MS technology called HTML+TIME (check the page, they even link to draft of XHTML+SMIL). Now, the funny bit is that XHTML+SMIL Profile W3C Note is authored by Microsoft but regardless of that, their implemention in form of HTML+TIME does differ from the W3C version quite a bit. What should we think when Microsoft helps W3C to author new specs and in the same time they implement totally incompatible implementation of the very same idea?
If you happen to have MSIE 5.5 or newer installed, check out some HTML+TIME demos (hopefully you don't slash down the poor guy). It seems that you need javascript turned on even thought the demos do not contain any javascript. Now, I must admit that those demos aren't that great looking, but look at the source. Pretty small and readable files compared to similar flash stuff.
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Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
anonymous coward said
Which - relinquishing their rights or being altruistic? Because contrary to your assertion, altruism (while being possible) is not the sole reason. Limiting their liability to patent infringement lawsuits is one big, sound reason. The people that designed the specification (remember, W3C designs these specs it does not just rubber stamp them) are the ones most likely to hold patents on them. If they all sign up to an RF working group, in advance, then that removes a big source of financial risk (not the only source, but the most credible and likely one).
Another reason is to grow the market. Four or five companies each pushing their own proprietary format or protocol results in four or five tiny niche markets. But four or five companies that collaborate to make a freely implementable format or protocol, in the expectation that they can make good products or services that use them, also results in a bigger market and more opportunities to make money.
Altruism is good, but altruism with the chance to make a bigger profit is a business case ;-)
Chris Lilley W3C spec creation droid
Patents are always dubious. They represent the artificial creation of a monopoly by the government, and monopolies are inherrently dangerous.
However, where a field has a high cost of entry, e.g., designing improved bridges, then the investment necessary for improvements in the art won't happen without some reasonable form of recompense. Patents are the way our society has traditionally choosen to handle this job. It avoids the necessity for the government to decide just how much an invention, or work on an invention, is worth. (And if you are depending on the government to give you a fair value for you work, after you have already sunk a large portion of the costs, then you are in an unenviable position... unless you bribe the evaluating committee.)
Personally, I think that patents are "sort of" reasonable, if the evaluation of what is a legitimate patent is done carefully and if reasonable criteria are used for "prior art" and "obviousness". But even then I feel that a monopoly is so dangerous that a forced licensing provision should be in place such that no licensee may be charged more than twice what the most favored licensee is charged. (1.25 might be more reasonable.) And no one may be denied the right to license a patent. If noone is currently licensing the patent after a reasonable period of time (say two years) then the patent may be licensed for $1000 per year. Obviously that price is arbitrarily choosen, and a real value would need to be come up with (1/17 of the cost of development per year?).
So, to the question "are patents good?", I have to answer "what kind of patent under what conditions in what area?". But sometimes the answer is clearly yes. And sometimes it's clearly no. But if you are talking about the current US patent system, I consider it an unmitigated disaster with no redeeming features.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It's still a bit too friendly towards patents, however. I don't feel that anything that calls itself a standards body should promote "standards" that are hindered by patents (i.e., where the patent is not licensed for all standard implementing uses). But outside of that it sounds pretty good. (If I were voting on this, of course, I'd give it a lot closer study... but just as a bystander it looks pretty good.)
Of course, this depends on it being binding on the committee members, and their companies, but others have indicated that their knowledge implies that it would be.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Come on now Mr. Ballmer! Be sport and use a real account like the rest of us. Hiding behind an anoncow account is not like you.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Yes, the patent license imposes conditions on "you"; and yes, those receiving the software may not have all the rights (ie, unfettered modification) that the GPL requires. But the second is not caused by the first, and therefore section 7 does not apply.
Specifically, as I understand, the hypothetical patent licenses would say something like, "this license permits you to practice patent P only for the purposes of implementing standard S". It would not say anything about the terms under which you may distribute your implementation. The fact that others will be restricted in how they may modify your software is due to their license from the patent holder (even if it happens to be the same license you have), not due to a "condition imposed on you".
The "detailed step-by-step example" makes the fallacy more plain:
I similarly know full well that C's patent licence prohibits folks from taking GNU Emacs and adding URL parsing code. By this logic, I am prohibited from redistributing Emacs.
The only difference between the two cases is that a large class of modifications (any that would remove the program from the scope of the patent license) is prohibited in the first, while a smaller class (any that would bring Emacs under the scope of the patent) is prohibited in the second. But this is immaterial to the GPL.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Coverage at CNET indicates that the W3C may be softening it's Royalty-Free Standard Licensing stance. Please read Adam Warner's W3C Patent policy page on why RAND is not an option for Open Standard Licensing and email your comments to the W3C Patent Policy mailing list!
The problem is, announcing this up front could still encourage companies (who want to make money) to try patenting things and springing them further down the road (before it becomes an official standard but after everybody's used to it), hoping that they'll end up with something that everybody desperately wants and thus make royalties. (Of course companies involved in the standards-making process are supposed to disclose, but that can be messy, as we know, and I'm also thinking of companies not involved in the process itself.)
IMO it would be far better to say "no, we will never allow royalty-required standards"--discouraging corporations from thinking the previous paragraph describes a plausible strategy. If something becomes so important that obviously everyone would rather have it then not, then they can change the rules at a later date, but there's no need to announce that and encourage the "wrong" behavior.
Thank you for the book recommendation. Looks good.
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
From section 5. W3C Royalty-Free (RF) Licensing Requirements:
This means that a patent may only be licensed for free if applied in code that implements the W3C recommendation.
So code that implements a patended recommendation may still be non-free in the sense that you cannot go and do with it whatever you want as long as you comply with the author's copyright license; you may violate the royalty-free patent license if you use the code for something other than implementing the W3C standard.
This doesn't mean that the code cannot be licensed under the GPL, it just means that you may need to take a look at the patent status as well before creating a GPL'ed derived work from code that implements a W3C standard.
It's a shame, but still better than RAND or nothing -- IMHO. Having said that, I think the biggest problem remains, which is patented content creation algorithms. You can eg. patent compression and charge shitloads for a license, but make decompression royalty-free. That way, media corporations can still raise a barrier to entry to the "creative commons", which makes patenting harmful and have exact opposite effect from they were designed to achieve.
All generalizations are false, including this one. (Mark Twain)