- From: Kenny Graunke <kenny@whitecape.org>
- Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2001 01:25:38 -0700
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
All true internet standards must be royalty and patent free. It is simply not fair to try and convince companies and businesses to use standards which require payment of royalties - everyone who wishes to use these so called standards must pay large amounts of money (collectively) to a few companies who own these patents. This creates a very distorted field - the patent holders get rich quickly, while the small businesses face an even greater challenge, and small community based development projects simply cannot support the standard at all. Free software and common patent-free protocols have built the internet. Trying to control this to increase the flow of money into the hands of a few works against both cooperation and competition. In America, we believe in competition - one of the key requirements is /lack of barriers to entry/. Patents are one such barrier. On the internet, we believe in cooperation and community - working together to meet the needs of the group. Patents work against this. Eventually, people will get fed up with this unfairness. They will join together to support development of a patent-free standard which is at least as high quality if not better. In times past GIFs were the defacto image format on the web, now we have a superior format supported in almost all modern browsers - PNG. While MP3s are quite popular, the patent-free Ogg Vorbis format is becoming more popular and is just as good as MP3s are quality-wise. I am especially sad to see an organization such as the W3C turn to patents and closed "standards". The W3C has long since stood for common, open standards to be shared by all - implementable by anyone with the time and skill, even volunteer open source developers. For years, I could point to the W3C and say "They're supporting the internet community, and making good standards shared by all."; if you adopt RAND, I'm afraid I am going to have to say "They're supporting the needs of a few over the rest of the community, making so-called standards influenced by a few company's desires, and completely unusable by many." What good is a standard when it is defined by the desires of a few companies, anyhow? If Microsoft or Apple own patents on the "standard", they essentially control it. It is no longer a standard in the sense that it represents something done by many, for many, but rather is something a few companies are pushing on the rest of us. This seems like a step backwards into the days of the browser wars - you could see the Microsoft patented standards, Apple patented standards, Kodak patented standards... Pretty disgusting, when you think about it. When you have one royalty-free standard, you can share it with everyone who wants to use it. You can get their input, too. But with patented standards, anyone who wants to contribute to that standard, or does not wish to use this patent has to essentially write a new standard, or perhaps fork an existing one to remove patented areas. Forking is _disasterous_ to a coherent information system - then our software would have to implement 5 different major branches of a so called "standard", when the whole problem could have been avoided in the first place by not allowing patented material in the standards! If the W3C decides to allow patented material in their standards, I will be happy to take my business elsewhere, and actively convince a lot of others to do so as well. Kenny Graunke
Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 04:26:51 UTC