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W3C Approved Patent Policy: Royalty Free Standards
Danny Weitzner writes "The World Wide Web Consortium has approved the W3C
Patent Policy based on review by the W3C Advisory Committee and thanks to lots of input and cajoling from the Open Source community and slashdoters. Read the public Director's decision. We're the first major standards organization that sets the explicit goal of producing only standards that can be implemented without paying patent royalties. Our policy requires legal commitments from all who contribute to the development of Web standards that patents held by the contributor will be available on royalty-free terms. Both proprietary and open source software have been critical to the growth of the Web. With this policy, we intend to enabled continued innovation by both open source and proprietary development."
Some good developments in the great techno-legal world war. There had been too many bad ones lately...
This one would have been a small disaster if it had gone wrong. Now let's hope the EU makes the right decision too!
Daniel
Carpe Diem
I wonder whether this will make getting software patents easier or harder, and whether people who failed to get a royalty patent go for one of these instead?
It's really a shame that they have to allow patents at all. If they didn't they'd alienate most commercial contributors who'd then go to another standards body, or none at all. Since they do allow patents, though, it continues to promote the rediculous patenting of software processes.
Developers: We can use your help.
I doubt that this will be that great a deal - instead, look for the W3C to become less and less relevant going forward. In the next few years, you'll see more proprietary development, or worse yet, alternative coalitions made up of proprietary vendors who don't care to give their IP away for free...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
But raising this money by collecting royalties from every user of that infrastructure is a bad idea. To exaggerate a little (yeah, just little), imagine where the economoy would be if everyone had to pay 0.01 cent to the inventor of the wheel for every turn of a wheel he is using...
More to the point, a new web standard that would require paying royalties for every implementation would hinder the technology sector.
Yes it would. But that's not what the WC3 is doing, they aren't ending software patents. They are saying that nothing that requires paying royalties on a patent to implement can be part of the standard. You can patent your cool new *ML generator but you can't require everyone who uses *ML to pay a fee. This will allow more people to inovate not stifel inovation.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
That's where the technology buyers become important. When deciding on a particular platform, the PHB's may have a great deal to say about what vendor to use, but it's the tech people (the CTO, if the company is large enough to have one) that determines the basic capabilities of the proposed system. With a stated checkbox-item to use only published W3C standards where applicable, for instance, the buyers can greatly influence what technologies their vendors will support. Some vendor-specific formats nonwithstanding, this is pretty much what has happened in most areas of information technology.
Vote with your money, in other words.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Having patents is not required in order to make money.
For example, SQL is a standard. Lots of database vendors make lots of money, yet none hold a patent on SQL, as far as I know.
What going RF does is remove one potential source of a non-level playing field. Vendors large and small can provide implementations of W3C Recommendations without having to pay a royalty for the Recommendations themselves. This does not mean such firms can't make money, and the lack of a royalty opens the door to small firms attempting to gain mindshare before "the big boys" dive into the space.
If people start to remove money from the equation, what's left?
What are you, an insensitive imperialistic American pig dog!? (j/k)
What's left, of course, is motivation for the spirit of doing it. For the fundamental human quality known as 'endeavour', 'fortitude', or 'curiosity'.
There are plenty of things in life more valuable than money, greedo. And lots of the modern things you and I take for granted got that way in spite of it.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
You're confusing sales with service, the misconception that the factory model of software development is the same as the service model. At least 85 to 90% of developers do not work for companies that sell software for profit (factory model). They work for companies that need software written for their own purposes or to service others (developers in a service model). Removing all software companies will not remove much money from the equation. Most developers are paid for their service, not for their output, i.e. they're paid to get software written, not to sell bits. People pay to get software which gets the job done either by buying bits from companies with patents, which is the exception, or by buying services, which is the rule. Patents only work for the few selling bits such as Microsoft. Patents don't help most of the industry working as a service.
Developers: We can use your help.
I think you missed the point. The real innovation isn't in standards, it is in implementation of them. For instance TCP/IP, HTML, HTTP are all free to use. IF royalties were required to use these not near the money would have been made off of them. The money is generated by the tools and bodies needed to build around the standards. More money is made by having these standards be free because more people will use the standards and more people will need tools and contractors.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
Anyone else find it interesting that this post was made a few minutes ago and almost instantly got exactly 4 moderation points for being interesting?
I'll tell you what's left when you remove royalties from the equation -- and it certainly isn't shills like you. It is innovation, freedom, and advancement for everyone. Why should I have to pay a guy a buck because he came up with the idea of a "shopping cart" on a website? Why can't I take the idea and move it forward? It is alright to patent machines and such, but patenting ideas is absurd. (And, on a lesser note, I wouldn't mind them patenting their code and only their code -- but what's the use of that?)
And ask yourself this: did the internet grow by leaps and bounds because Microsoft came out with IIS or because a bunch of organizations decided to pool their efforts to make one solid web server that can be configured to do anything a web server should do? I personally think proprietary software is holding us back and costing us far more than the cost of licensing the software because we can't take their ideas and build on them.
Then where do we get paid? Two ways: By implementing existing solutions in a way that people can use them, or by implementing entirely new solutions. For both instances, people are willing to pay money to have someone else do it. For both instances, it really doesn't matter whether the end result is Open Source or proprietary to them. We know that going the Open Source will allow us to satisfy more people with better products than the other case, because IT will constantly be evolving and building on the successes and failures of the past, rather than limiting the growth to one giant monopoly.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
This is a great FIRST step. Basically, standards by W3C will now ensure that no one has to pay a royalty when trying to conform to the standard. Compuserve's GIF patent greed fiasco should hopefully not be repeated in future standards.
... all you MBA and Law school folks grasp! You will kill innovation, you say! Well, if this means that Amazon.com will stop coming up with "innovations" like 1-click shopping and shopping carts, I think that is okay. These "innovations" were so ridiculously obvious that it insults any technical person's intelligence to classify them as innovations.
... any technology built on our technology is legally owned by us unless you licence an "innovator" contract ... for which we charge you 50% of all sales. The fact that the work of the W3C is given away for free, doesn't make it less valuable ... rather the opposite! As such, I feel that the W3C must setup a licence agreement to prevent technologies that are built on top of it to be royalty free.
However, I think we need to go further. Technologies built on top of W3C standards should not require royalties. Ack
Why do we need to do this?
Intellectual Property lawyers are greedy greedy greedy. They don't give a crap about the technical merits of a patent or innovation. They care about how many hours they can bill you and making partner in the firm. Anyone heard of patent portfolios? I think 10-30% of why biotech is not showing the results everyone expected is that these fucking patent issues have KILLED innovation. Go Canada for rejecting the Harvard mouse patent! Biotech is out of juice and these bastards have set their eyes on tech now. We must nip this asap!
Why is this justified?
W3C commands a significant position in the evolution of the World Wide Web. If it was a for-profit organization, it could easily say
Iq
For crying out loud, will everybody quit bitching! The community - i.e. *us* to large extent - campaigned for this and the W3C actually listened to us. This was one case where people power actually worked. Whether or not it was what you wanted personally, you should be grateful that we as a community do still seem to have some sort of meaningful democracy still available to us.
We should be thankful for that and move on to the next phase, i.e. campaigning to prevent the balkanization you've predicted.
Take a look at what W3C is working on. Most of it is XML formats and other categorizing of data. A few things (e.g. PNG) may contain novel algorithms, although in the case of PNG the format was invented to avoid the patent restrictions of GIF.
It could be argued that W3C does its job best when it produces standards which are not novel, and are essentially what any person with the same mindset would produce on a good day. This is the exact opposite of the original, non-obvious nature required (though perhaps not enforced) by US patent law.
W3C is mostly about communication standards, and it's all about interoperability. Describing stuff in XML is more of a categorization skill than an invention. Good librarians are as important as good engineers-- and patents are about as useful as bicycles for ducks.
Finally, iteroperability only works if everyone can use it. XML and "semantic web" stuff is frequently going to be web services which are parsed by spiders and middleware servers (including web servers), where vendor or technology lock-in is anathema. Patents or threats of patents are at least as likely to slow adoption of standards as to speed it.
But one thing that has happened several times over the years, was that sometimes I couldn't easily/cheaply interface with or convert data from some other system. Customer gets my huge estimate, decides not to do it, and then I get nothing.
And if I have to "invent" something, I do it for the purpose of getting money from my customers when they buy my products. Not having exclusivity on the "invention" (I put that in quotes, because, hey, look at the stuff that gets patented these days) isn't going to stop me from doing what I have to do, to get my customers' money. What's the worse that can happen? A competitor clones my "innovation" after it has already been deployed and I've been paid for it? Ooh, competition and free markets, I'm scared! Hold me!
Not having to pay royalties means one less annoyance/complication to worry about, and fewer expenses to take away from the bottom line. This decision doesn't just help Free Software / Open Source guys. It helps everyone except monopolists.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
"It is alright to patent machines and such, but patenting ideas is absurd."
I'm curious as to the grounds on which we may claim that patents on machines are permissible, but that patents on software is impermissble.
First consider the scenario in which we create a machine which processes raw cotton. We designed both the exterior and the internal workings of the machine, cast in iron.
Now consider the scenario in which there exists a general purpose machine which could potentially be made to, amongst other things, process raw cotton. It could be made to do so by designing a particular software algorithm to do so.
In the first case the internal workings are implemented as hardware: iron gears and bearings, which control the exterior workings so as to process raw cotton.
In the second case the internal workings are implemented as software: a particular software algorithm of the particular sort which is capable of controlling this particular general purpose machine's exterior workings so as to process raw cotton.
Now, for what reason relevant to the principles at play here is it permissible to patent the internal workings of the machine implemented as hardware, while it is impermissible to patent the internal workings of the machine implemented as software.
I don't know what such a reason might be.
If you can not identify a relevant reason, please don't hold back, let's do away with patents altogether. We can talk about that sort of thing here. We can say what we believe, and what we really want to say.
It is we the people who are supposed to control this nation, not corporations and not the small minority of owners and large shareholders in these corporations.
Why don't we simply say that we don't want to play their game anymore?
Why don't we simply say that if they want to do business in OUR nation, that they will do it by the rules we stipulate or they will not do it at all?
It might not happen, but let's at least say that it should. Let's at least not give them the satisfaction of thinking they have suppressed even TALK of change.
Workers of the world unite!