RAND Licenses in WAI working groups

Dear all,

Excuses for double posting. I do not know if these are the appropriate 
fora to initiate this thread. Someone pointed me to the "W3C Patent 
Policy Framework" Working Draft. I have not read the whole document in 
depth, but there is something that really concerns me, if we are 
supposed to talk about open web standards (was not that W3C mission?) 
and accessibility. There is something called ...

RAND License

     RAND stands for "reasonable and non-discriminatory" terms. A "RAND 
License" shall mean a license that:
        1. shall be available to all implementers worldwide, whether or 
not they are W3C Members;
        2. shall extend to all Essential Claims owned or controlled by 
the licensor and its Affiliates (except as described in section 8.2 
concerning licenses relating to Contributions);
        3. may be limited to implementations of the Recommendation, and 
to what is required by the Recommendation;
        4. may be conditioned on a grant of a reciprocal RAND License to 
all Essential Claims owned or controlled by the licensee and its 
Affiliates. For example, a reciprocal license may be required to be 
available to all, and a reciprocal license may itself be conditioned on 
a further reciprocal license from all (including, in the case of a 
license to a Contribution, the original licensee).
        5. may be conditioned on payment of reasonable, 
non-discriminatory royalties or fees;
        6. may not impose any further conditions or restrictions on the 
use of any technology, intellectual property rights, or other 
restrictions on behavior of the licensee, but may include reasonable, 
customary terms relating to operation or maintenance of the license 
relationship such as the following: audit (when relevant to fees), 
choice of law, and dispute resolution.
###

And to be honest, IMHO this goes against the whole philosphy of W3C, and 
WAI Working Groups. There is a long list of comments in this URL:
	http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentpolicy-comment/
I am wondering whether, as WGs, can we set a consensus opinion on this.

Regards,
carlos

-- 
Dr Carlos A Velasco
mailto:velasco@fit.fraunhofer.de    http://access.gmd.de/
Fraunhofer-Institut für Angewandte Informationstechnik (FIT.HEB)
   [Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT.HEB)]
   Schloss Birlinghoven, D53757 Sankt Augustin (Germany)
   Tel: +49-2241-142609 Fax: +49-2241-142065

Received on Saturday, 6 October 2001 23:01:27 UTC