- From: Bob Goates <bob.goates@echostar.com>
- Date: Mon, 08 Oct 2001 14:39:25 -0600
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
- CC: letters@lwn.net
WWW Patent Policy Working Group Sirs: I have a comment regarding the Working Draft of 16 August 2001 of the W3C Patent Policy Framework. In section 4.(a)2 it is stated that Essential Claims will not include "claims which would be infringed only by ... enabling technologies that may be necessary to make or use any product or portion thereof that complies with the Recommendation but are not themselves expressly set forth in the Recommendation (e.g., semiconductor manufacturing technology, compiler technology, object-oriented technology, basic operating system technology, and the like)." I am concerned that this limitation on the definition of "Essential Claims" will allow a standard to be adopted, without appropriate licensing requirements, that depends on the proprietary API (Application Programming Interface) of a proprietary operating system. In other words, the standard would require users to purchase a specific proprietary operating system in order to use products based on the standard. I believe such a situation would be unacceptable and contrary to the tradition of World Wide Web usage. A similar problem might crop up with the implied exclusion of other software interfaces from the definition of "Essential Claims". A possible solution to this problem is to remove the wording "compiler technology, object-oriented technology, basic operating system technology" from section 4.(a)2 and add to the definition of "Essential Claims" the statement: "Any claim regarding a software interface, which interface is required by a standard, will be considered an Essential Claim." Thank you. Bob Goates r.goates@ieee.org
Received on Monday, 8 October 2001 16:31:36 UTC