RAND inconsistent with W3C Mission

Please (re)read the W3C's own description of its mission,
http://www.w3c.org/Consortium#mission.

W3C states that it has

- a goal of universal access, "promoting technologies that take into 
account vast differences in ... material resources..."

- a goal of careful consideration of 'novel legal, commercial and social 
issues'

- a vision of being a 'truly universal information space'

- a design principle of interoperability which 'allow (any) hardware and 
software used to access the Web to work together'

W3C Recommendations which require RAND licensing violate all of these 
principles. RAND based Recommendations will set up barriers in this 
'universal' information space which are based on material resources, 
geographical location and computing platform.


The proposed patent policy appears to give careful consideration to a few 
U.S. based multinational corporations and short shrift to everyone else. I 
agree that these corporations have a right to make a reasonable profit on 
their investment, but let's not forget that they are already benefiting 
from uncountable man-years of  labor of others in developing the Internet 
and Web. In return for this invaluable gift they have received from the 
community they should donate their Essential Claims on royalty free terms 
to implementors of W3C Recommendations.

Best
Michael

************************************************
Assoc. Prof. Michael Rose
Center for Tele-Information,    Technical University of Denmark
(45) 45 25 51 72                mailto:rose@tele.dtu.dk
Off the Desktop - http://converge.cti.dtu.dk/news
'and what is the use of a computer' thought Alice 'without pictures or
conversation'     with apologies to Lewis Carroll
*************************************************

Received on Tuesday, 2 October 2001 07:59:55 UTC