- From: Ron Arts <raarts@office.netland.nl>
- Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2001 11:45:30 +0200
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
Dear Sirs/Madams, I just read your Response to Public Comments on the W3C Patent Policy Framework Working Draft. And after careful thought I decided I should send you my comment. I think it is reasonable that the world community should be protected from 'submarine' patents suddenly popping up in accepted technology, this surely constitutes a danger. Also it is reasonable that IP is protected, in the sense that patent holders have a right to receive their part of the returns license holder make through implementing the patent. On the other hand, by allowing patents - even in RAND form - into worldwide standards you create the opening for exactly the same danger you're trying to prevent, but then achieved by 'legit' ways. Especially large companies have the means of 'leveraging' their market power into standards. Let's try an example: think of microsoft bundling some napster-like program with Windows, which becomes very widely used of course, due to it's hegemony on the desktop. This standard becomes accepted and suddenly the road is closed for opensource programmers to build an opensource alternative for this program. This is one step to keep linux totally off the desktop. Another problem is the low/high level separation. If you look at the history you will notice that what currently is high-level, can in a few years be seen as low-level (for example: HTTP used to be high level but is now included in the linux kernel). Accepting a high-level standard under RAND may sound reasonable, but will result in a few years in a low-level standard under RAND. So what may seem a solution for the submarine patent problem, will in fact turn out to be a trojan horse on the long run and will definitely favour large companies above small ones. I think this even goes against the spirit of the patent system. I would like to suggest the W3C will embrace and extend the RAND concept as follows: change paragraph 5 in the RAND license from: 5. may be conditioned on payment of reasonable, non-discriminatory royalties or fees; into: 5. may be conditioned on payment of reasonable, non-discriminatory royalties or fees; may not be conditioned on payment where the entire implementation is open source. The non-discriminatory part or RAND now applies only to closed-source implementations. Regards, Ron Arts CEO Netland Internet Services BV -- Netland Internet Services bedrijfsmatige internetoplossingen http://www.netland.nl Kruislaan 419 1098 VA Amsterdam info: 020-5628282 servicedesk: 020-5628280 fax: 020-5628281
Received on Tuesday, 2 October 2001 05:41:48 UTC