- From: <Philippe.Aigrain@cec.eu.int>
- Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2001 12:06:50 +0200
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
This message expresses only my personal opinion and does not necessarily represent the official opinion of my employer, the European Commission. I am head of sector for Software Technologies in the European Information Society Technologies research and technology development programme, with particular responsibility for the field of free software and open source software. I would like to relay the very serious concerns raised, for many of the participants to our research actions, by the new proposed policy. I also would like to contribute the personal view of someone whose daily task it is to follow the interaction between information and communication technology and intellectual rights or intellectual property environments. Let me start by quoting Commissioner Busquin's intervention at the OECD Global Research Village Conference in Amsterdam in December 2000: "When counting the blessings of the Internet we should remember that neither Vinton Cerf nor CERN patented the Internet". Those requesting a change to the royalty-free patent licensing policy of W3C have the burden of proving that there is a need for this change. When one looks at the working draft, one finds the following justification to the proposed change: - General statement: "At the same time, many Members invest significant research effort in the development of their own intellectual property portfolios, so are concerned about protecting and benefiting from proprietary technology they have developed or acquired." - Circumstantial: statements in section 2.1 that as the Web now interacts with many industries with patenting traditions, and as there is a fashion of business method patents and more generally of software patents, there is growing pressure on the standard process to accommodate the patent portfolio management strategies of the respective players. Those 2 lines of justification fall short of delivering any real proof that the change is needed. They basically amount to say that the condition for the W3C to continue being a successful standardisation arena is ... to stop doing its job of keeping the Web open and equitable. The underlying reasoning is: either we give in to some powerful industry players in terms of ability to obtain royalties for ideas included in the standards (and patented, mostly in the US, either as processes, or as algorithm, software or data structures), or they risk to ignore the standardisation process. I am sure that for many members of the working group, the new policy was chosen as the best possible compromise, with openness and fairness in view. But in my opinion, they are mistaken. The key factor in the success of the Web is not its (sometimes late) endorsement by large industry players. It is its endorsement by the public. The trust of the public in the Web, the ability of many small and independent entities (not always aiming at profit) to develop, experiment, validate and bring to maturity new information exchange mechanisms has brought more business to these players that they ever dreamt they could get. Now that this is taken for granted, their intellectual property departments would like to capitalise on it and derive revenue from the Web information infrastructure itself. They also would like to shape the Web on the template of their existing installed position and ways of doing business in broadcast, consumer electronics or telecommunications. They are powerful enough to succeed, but they will hold an illusion. Meanwhile, those who truly adhere to the standards of openness and freedom of access to ideas will succeed in the businesses of tomorrow ... if these businesses are given a chance to exist. The Web of today is only a pale prefiguration of the networked information exchanges of the future. The future evolution of such an infrastructure rests on the continued ability to innovate at an extremely low entry cost. Patent licensing under the new terms will create no problem for large companies able to cross-license or for which RAND licensing is an invisible part of overheads. It will create unacceptable barriers to the distributed innovation by many small entities. Richard Stallman has considered to replace the proposed Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory policy by "uniform fee only". I personally think that this would still be excessive, and that a royalty-free policy is necessary, but Mr Stallman's plea may be envisaged as a mid-term position. Finally, I would like to stress that the new policy pre-empts the result of a debate on the scope of patentability which is far from closed, in the US as in Europe. Philippe Aigrain Head of Sector "Software Technologies" European Commission DG INFSO/E2 Office N105 3/54 Philippe.Aigrain@cec.eu.int Postal address: rue de la Loi 200, B-1049 Brussels, Belgium Office address: avenue des Nerviens 105, B-1040 Brussels Secretary: Tania Devroede Phone: +32.2.295.0411 Tania.Devroede@cec.eu.int Phone (direct): +32.2.296.0365 Fax: +32.2.296.7018 http://www.cordis.lu/ist/ka4/tesss/ This message expresses only my personal opinion and does not necessarily represent the official opinion of my employer, the European Commission.
Received on Monday, 1 October 2001 06:45:43 UTC