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W3C Poised To Release New Patent Policy
egoff writes "According to ComputerWorld, the Patent Policy Working Group at the W3C is ready to release a new proposal for dealing with technology patents that get in the way of creating web standards. While making no comment, the W3C was seeking public input for its Royalty Free Patent Policy until April 30th."
The W3C is a standards body. The patent-free policy is to allow OSS/free software to even EXIST. Even the slightest patent royalty immediately kills the possibility of (legal) free software. In a patent free ecosystem, for-profit and not-for-profit software compete on equal footing. Allow even one patent with royalty fees, even as low as $0.01 a unit, and that ecosystem is gone, free software cannot exist by definition, much less compete. As for your monopoly argument, you are blurring patents with software. A patent (in this case) is a concept or methodology. There is no grant of monopoly to OSS. A monopoly grant would be that all software that abides by W3C standards MUST be open sourced. There is no such implication here, in fact OSS is not even mentioned anywhere in the clause. Please tell me that this is a troll?
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Patents last 21 years in most countries. A company can hold a patent and stay silent until it becomes popular one good example being the LZW compression and the GIF format.
another example being the JPEG extension that was patented quietly for the last 10 years and then invoked against one of the large digital camera manufacturers (Fujitso?). The patent holder, having done zero development of the research, netted $30 million from the infringement case.
Also, a company could license the patent under RAND ("Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory") terms. Such as charging a tiny amount per licensed copy, mabe 4cent.
The company looks like it's being a good member of the software industry but Free Software cannot mandate a fee per license so it effectively gives access all except Free Software. M$ love this style of licensing.
Ciaran O'Riordan
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What part of the word monopoly do you not understand? A patent is a monopoly granted by the government. The whole purpose of an industry standard is that anybody can implement it. The point of a royalty-free patent standard is to insure that no monopoly power is exercised over W3C standards.
If you allow RAND or other non-royalty-free patent policies, then open source software will be shut out of the standard. You may call that freedom. I call your words doublespeak.
If you want to get a protocol appproved by the W3C, as a standard for use on the internet, your protocol may not use a pattented (or pattent pending) operation which would require that people using this standard pay you, or another company (the holder of the pattent) ongoing fees.
This includes, but is not limited to, RAND (Reasonable And Non-Discrimanatory) royalties. The reason that RAND pattents are included is that what is Reasonable or non-discriminatory to one company or developer may not be reasonable or non-discrimanatory to someone else. Just because I am not bothered by a $1500 one time fee, and $0.000025 per copy royalty rate, does not mean that Apue in India may consider either to be reasonable.
This does not prevent someone from requiring that the credits screen for any application using that person's pattented techcnology display at least as prominently as the other developers for the application, credit towards the pattent holder.
Then again, perhaps I should have read the article.
-Rusty
You never know...
It's not at all a last-minute compromise. The RAND exception has been a part of the PPWG policy since last February, at least. See http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-patent-policy-2002022 6/#sec-Exception.
The current royalty-free policy is a shift from a previously announced August 2001) RAND policy. There were some (arguably) good reasons for a RAND policy; but the PPWG has decided that the only good reason for a RAND policy is if there is no way around the use of patented code.
Hence the exception still exists as a useful remnant of what used to be the RAND rule. Weitzner stressed that it's tough to use because the PPWG doesnt want people to use it easily. And remember, Berners-Lee has to sign off on everything, and it would really take a lot for him to sign off on a RAND Recommendation.
Also - a key part of the RAND exception is that the terms of the license (RAND or RF) must be clearly stated upfront. So they don't get submarined (a la Rambus - grrrr)