Re: FW: Patent licensing and avoiding late Exclusions of Essential Claims in the WebApps WG

On Thu, 07 May 2009 17:48:06 +0200, Per Fröjdh <per.frojdh@ericsson.com>  
wrote:

...
> Today Ericsson joined the W3C Web Applications Working Group. Some W3C  
> members may be aware of the Ericsson preference to license some of its  
> patents on FRAND terms and conditions. For the avoidance of doubt we  
> would therefore like to state that we understand that the W3C Patent  
> Policy applies to this Working Group and the licensing obligations of  
> Working Group participants apply to Ericsson.

Nice to know :)

> There is a possibility that Ericsson in the W3C WebApps Working Group  
> might be faced with a situation where we would have to exclude an  
> Essential Claim with respect to a first public Working Draft or  
> documents later in the W3C Recommendation track, e.g. due to a  
> Submission by other member causing one of our claims to become Essential  
> claim. Unfortunately an exclusion at that stage will initiate the  
> Exception Handling in the W3C Patent Policy and may cause significant  
> additional work by the Working Group to design around the Excluded  
> Claims. Ericsson would like to find a way to avoid causing all the work  
> associated with the Exception Handling according to the W3C Patent  
> Policy.

Thank you. (Having been involved in two such groups, I would like to avoid  
it too :) ).

> In case Ericsson representatives in W3C, long before the publication of  
> the first public Working Draft, would be aware of a patent or patent  
> application that they think might have or get claims that might become  
> Essential Claims to a future first public Working Draft, Ericsson would  
> like to draw the attention of the Working Group to such a patent in case  
> we want to exclude such claims from the W3C RF licensing requirements,  
> and instead license them on e.g. FRAND terms and conditions. The major  
> purpose of this would be to enable the Working Group to avoid language  
> in the first public Working Draft whereby claims of the patent might  
> become Essential claims. In this way all the additional work associated  
> with an exclusion after the publication of the first public Working  
> Draft could hopefully be avoided.

Yes. As mentioned below, the ideal situation would be not to run into the  
problem at all, but given the Ericsson policy this appraoch is at least  
more helpful than excluding on the last day of a call...

> As a new member in the WebApps Working Group it has not yet been  
> possible at this moment to identify which claims that might possibly be  
> Essential Claims for specifications presently being developed by WebApps  
> Working Group. We will look into this now. Hopefully there will be no  
> Ericsson owned Essential claims. What Ericsson can do now at this moment  
> regarding the WebApps Working group is to draw the attention to patents  
> or patent applications. At the moment Ericsson representatives are only  
> aware of three different patents and patent applications and  
> corresponding patents and patent applications in other countries which  
> we would like to inform the WebApps Working Group on. The first is US  
> 6,321,250, the second is EP1310114 and the third is PCT/EP2008/064352  
> (not yet published).

Can you provide a little more information about what these patents are for  
(i.e. a rough idea of what area they might cover)?

> We understand that this document is not a formal exclusion in accordance  
> with the W3C Patent Policy and we understand that the WebApps Working  
> group can decide to ignore it. We can only hope that our efforts to  
> avoid late exclusions are welcome. Hopefully we will not need to make an  
> Exclusions at all.

right :)

Cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com

Received on Saturday, 30 May 2009 07:27:27 UTC