- From: Steve Cox <stevec@canaries.co.uk>
- Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2001 23:09:17 +0100
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
I would request some clarification of a few points from the RAND documentation. 1. With regard to the definition of the principles: > "may be conditioned on payment of reasonable, non-discriminatory > royalties or fees" What is deemed to be 'non-discriminatory'? Such a term could be interpretted differently. Any incorporating development which can be licenced or sold itself would not be too concerned with relatively lower licensing costs for component technologies. However, open source / free / non-licensed software would incur costs it could not - by the development's description - hope or even want to recoup. It appears that this principle is financially biased against open source development - let alone it's ideals. 2. In the opening paragraph of both the background documentation and the FAQ - the terms: "entrepreneurial energy" and "competitive forces" give the documentation a feel of corporate 'spin' speak. I'm sure you did not intend the items to read like sales brochures? 3. With ongoing devlopment of new technolgies and protocols using the Internet appearing to abandon the 'open' nature of the oringinal infrastructure, is there a need to compound this turn-about by allowing such to happen to the WWW? By reading the documentation, it appears that the authors themselves fail to see the difference between the 'web' and the underlying Internet. Surely, by continuing to ensure the WWW remains open and well defined, it will remain one of the predominent Internet technologies (together with email) rather than just being one of many corporate interest defined communication methods? 4. You define European patents - but you must be aware that the legality of software patents specifically in Europe is not yet agreed? 5. RAND does not simplify patent concerns - not unless you treat development in a US-centric view - or in terms of any other nation state for that matter. Any development can only conform to patent law of the country developed in - until it is distributed whereby it can come under the concern of the patent law of other countries. This does not simplify the issue of non-disclosed patents at all. Surely, if simplicity is the goal, the use of non-patented design would be best? Finally, I have to agree with the other 'Cox' in that if the W3C follows this proposition, it must surely be heading towards it's own irrelevence. Some may argue that by not using Patent controlled devlopment, it may become an irrelavence anyway - but surely a noble death is better than a celebrated one? Yours, Steve Cox
Received on Tuesday, 2 October 2001 18:09:12 UTC