Re: Patent Protections at CR

On Wed, 16 Nov 2011 23:11:08 +0100, Carr, Wayne <wayne.carr@intel.com>  
wrote:
> Is this a real problem that needs to be fixed?  Are people being sued  
> for implementing CRs by members of WGs producing the CR?

They can be.


> 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.

It's always easy to say from high above "this is how it should be". But  
specifications developed in the browser space end up taking a long time.  
And in fact, most are never finished. This is due to a combination of  
continuously evolving requirements, constrained editor time, slow  
collaborative test suite development, and complexity of the technology.

Unless many of these factors change, the only reasonable outcome is having  
continuously evolving specifications with snapshots for patent policy  
reasons. That snapshot can be used by governments as well as they seem to  
have similar requirements for a non-changing document.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/

Received on Thursday, 17 November 2011 13:33:18 UTC