- From: Matthew Ratzloff <matt@builtfromsource.com>
- Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:43:14 -0700 (PDT)
- To: public-html@w3.org
On Wed, March 14, 2007 8:07 am, Laurens Holst wrote: > Plus that all those people on the WHATWG list haven't signed the patent > policy. Can the W3C copy a feature in the WHATWG's spec if the person > who proposed it didn't join the W3C HTML WG? It seems to me that any new > idea proposed on the WHATWG list could potentially be one idea less that > can make it into the W3C specification, even if it's really good. The > person who originally proposed it could file a patent, because he(/she) > is not bound by the policy. The only thing you could do is to track him > down and get him to sign the patent policy separately, which seems like > a lot of trouble. Or am I missing something here? This, to me, seems like the biggest issue. The whole point of the patent policy is to give reasonable assurance that the specification is free of IP concerns. Unless there is patent language that I missed, subsuming the WHAT WG's HTML 5 spec would be opening up browser makers to be blindsided at a later date. How can this be addressed? -Matt
Received on Wednesday, 14 March 2007 20:11:05 UTC