Patent Policy

I'm going to make as clear as possible by quoting directly from Janet 
Daly's  Response ....

It appears the reasons behind the development of the draft is to answer 
the following question.

  "In a world where patents exist and may be used to constrain conformance
   to standards, how should W3C best proceed in order to accomplish its    
   mission?"

In order to minimize/eliminate the following possibility that..
 
      "The Web community is not surprised by "submarine" patents
       whereby unsuspecting participants are forced to pay license fee
       after their participation in the creation of a Recommendation
       that they thought was unencumbered."

An additional goal is to help with decision making: 

       "The proposed policy is designed to promote better 
       decisions through disclosure of information."

The proposal's final intent as stated by Janet Daly is to:

     "It establishes a process that requires people to disclose to a       
      Working Group that a specification in development may intersect
      with patented technology."


If this is the real gist of the reasons/intent of the Draft, it seems 
simple to me:

            Either establish a process requiring disclosure or not.

Make it simple.  Although the W3C has had to deal with "apparent" 
intersecting patented technology, that fact will not go away.  And, it 
doesn't even matter what other bodies are doing!  It also doesn't matter 
what individual's or company want.  The W3C's original goals are what's 
important. 

RAND is a land mine waiting to be stepped on.  Section 4(e), Item 3 
appears to allow a company to implement additional proprietary 
functionality to a technology after that technology has been incorporated 
into an adopted standard. That possibility invites control.  Make it  "May 
not be limited by current or future implementations of the Recommendation. 
 There are 10,000 licenses out there already, couldn't the committee find  
one that might have worked?

Get rid of the fees in Section 4(3), Item 5. Just change it to "May not be 
conditioned on payment of royalties or fees"  Company's must be willing to 
share their technology for the common good of the WWW or not. That is the 
real bottom line.

I believe that "If you keep it open and keep it free, it will keep on 
working".

-- 
John Gutierrez
jtgutier@ix.netcom.com

Received on Tuesday, 2 October 2001 03:40:13 UTC