- From: Russell Sears <sears.42@osu.edu>
- Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2001 12:05:10 -0500
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Some media outlets (such as C|Net in this story: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-7412848.html) paint the argument against standards that rely upon patents as an ideological battle, with no pragmatic importance. This could not be further from the truth. Use of standard communication protocols should not be subject to fees! This would hamper electronic communication and eventually make standards-compliant products such as apache and linux illegal (At least in their fully-functional forms). This open source software has dramatically lowered costs in many industries, and has contributed to recent economic growth. If you increase the cost of operations for businesses involved in telecommunications, you greatly hamper their ability to compete in the market. Even with reasonable fees for these patents, you will force law-abiding companies to move to expensive, proprietary, and sometimes un-maintainable systems, which will cause more damage than the actual patent charges ever could. If you must charge for the usage of basic internet protocols, I suggest that you mandate that the price of a patent liscence be proportional to the Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price of the software system. This would allow independent programmers to develop software for internal use without fear of legal repercussion, and also allow the open-source movement to continue to contribute to the usefulness of W3C compliant protocols. If you don't, I can only see two results from this proposal: 1) Development of communications infrastructure will be pushed into areas without patent enforcement, in the same way that encryption and security software projects have begun to move outside of the US. At that point, users will simply download the software from overseas sites, or base their operations in areas with more advantagous laws. or 2) Patent-free / patent-bypassing alternatives to your protocols will be developed, hampering communication between various organizations, and undermining the authority of the W3C, and eventaully making these royalty-based proposals irrelevant, and causing numerous compatibility nightmares. You can argue about how wide-spread these effects will be, but I don't think you can honestly deny that this sort of thing will happen. Personally, I would rather see the internet to continue to "just work." - -Russell Sears -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE7vehXtB66iKFx3LkRAsA7AKDJRYQ+oGQYjD2mXmmcpRz1h+JMWwCfSwwC OP7RpoGNeH1pT4ct7/oWRq0= =LP9M -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Received on Friday, 5 October 2001 11:56:36 UTC