RE: Patent Protections at CR

Is this a real problem that needs to be fixed?  Are people being sued for implementing CRs by members of WGs producing the CR? 

About commitment - First Public Draft and Last Call set off a fairly short window after which commitments  happen that can't be backed out of (commitments that lead to licensing for final rec).  There can’t be anything in CR that wasn't already committed to by the previous Last Call (or else there would have had to be another Last Call).

If this was a problem, another approach is not to create specs that take a very, very long time to finish.   I think that's why standards orgs in general don't worry about this.

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Robin Berjon [mailto:robin@berjon.com]
>Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2011 1:39 PM
>To: Carr, Wayne
>Cc: fantasai; public-w3process@w3.org
>Subject: Re: Patent Protections at CR
>
>On Nov 16, 2011, at 22:34 , Carr, Wayne wrote:
>> It isn't just to have something for lawyers to review.  Some companies may not
>want licensing commitments for their intellectual property that doesn't actually
>make it into the spec.  Candidate Rec could lead to features being thrown out.  I
>think for at least some companies they'd want to know it is a real, implementable
>spec that they're donating to.
>
>Right. When this has come up before, the idea that was suggested was that there
>would be a timeout on the CR licensing commitment (e.g. 2 years) that would
>hold automatically (i.e. if you agree to it you can't back out of it) for all features
>that make it to Rec but not for anything that gets dropped. And it would be
>automatically cancelled if the spec didn't make it to Rec in time (if it's still in
>development, then a renewed CR would be required I would assume).
>
>--
>Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Wednesday, 16 November 2011 22:12:13 UTC