Re: [meetings] Agenda Request - Review Working Group Charter Changes (#52)

> @timcowen has raised an innovative suggestion concerning FRAND terms for the data needed to implement a standard. There is nothing that would prevent such a clause being part of the charter therefore providing all web participants the certainty that should they wish to implement independently the standards of the group those that worked on them have already agreed to not only licence the intellectual property related to patents but also access to the necessary input data from their products. As a concrete example I would know that if Google and Mozilla joined the Working Group that they would licence me the data needed to implement the standard outside of a web browser and there would be no need to negotiate such an agreement with them in the future. However Apple if they did not join the group would be under no such obligation. This concept is identical to intellectual property associated with patents and seems very important where functionality is desirable to implement outside the web browser to avoid the web browser becoming a chokepoint.

This _appears_ to answer my question above about what was meant by licensing of input data: the mandatory sale or sharing of data about users and their online activities to other organizations. Mandatory sale or sharing of browsing history would be deeply concerning to user advocates, and I expect to many people in a group working on private advertising technology. This proposal seems confused about what it means to implement a standard (do you mean instead: provide similar functionality in a different way from any proposed interoperable interface?), but also who has the right to sell data from a user's device or software. It would not be identical to royalty-free licensing of intellectual property in the design of a standard; it would instead be a novel mandate for organizations that participate in a standard-setting process to proactively sell or share data about users of their products. It also seems extremely unlikely that adding mandatory sale of user data to a charter would be generally acceptable to W3C membership.

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Received on Tuesday, 28 June 2022 15:58:29 UTC