- From: Shamim Mohamed <shamim@languid.org>
- Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2001 19:08:42 -0700 (PDT)
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
The proposal to allow "reasonable and non-discriminitory" patents into W3C standards is misguided and ill-advised. 1) The current US Patent system - at least as applied to software - is a sorry mess. Trivial patents, overlapping patents, invalid patents all fill the register. 2) Patents are by definition discriminatory. Can a group supporting free software - say the Apache group - afford to pay patent fees? Can third-world institutions who can't afford to pay commercial software license fees, and therefore must use free software, pay royalties? 3) There is absolutely NO reason to believe that "innovation" - that favourite word of a certain behemoth in Redmond - will be stifled without financial reward. I give you some examples of true innovation: TCP/IP, SMTP, HTTP, HTML. Not a patent in sight. For a protocol to be patented is like having a patented language: all who would speak that language must pay royalties. Let us not allow greed, avarice and marketing buzzwords like "convergence" drive the poor out of what may be their only chance to participate in the Web. -s -- Shamim Mohamed, Ph.D., D.D. http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/unicon/
Received on Thursday, 4 October 2001 22:08:44 UTC