Patent Policy Feedback

First in refernce to the areas that were singled out in the Response
document.

A requirement for disclosure:

This is an absolute must, no Person(s) or corporation should ever be
allowed to propose something to be considered as a defined standard
without first telling the rest of the public what they might potentially
gain from the patent.

However this should be further extended to specify that they can not after
acceptance EVER claim to have any onwership or patent of the standardized
ideas that was not disclosed prior to the acceptance of the standard.
By this I mean that should a company sponsor a new standard and then at a
later time aquire another company, or individual who has developed
relating tech they can't make a claim to royalties.

Procedure for launching activities RF:
Procedure for launching activities RAND:

I will be honest for a moment and admit that I am an individual who is on
the side of the individual and think's that corporations and big business
should stay out of these procedings.

To that end I firmly believe that if something is to be proposed as a
standard then it MUST be unencumbered of any restrictions to its use by
the public as a whole.  I know from my job in the Technical world, where
my company does business and must pay Royalties and licences that RAND to
many of these patent holders may very well fall far outside what an
individual or even small startup development team can afford.  Please
consider cases such as Apache Web server(by far the must pervasive server
on the internet).  If a new standard for the http protocol should be
introduced, and it requires tech from some patent owned by a large
corporation, how does that get paid for so it can be developed into the
Apache software?  I oppose any fees on the things that are required to
work in the growing/evolving web.  Web, infact internet standards as a
whole must remain free to use and contribute into as whole.
To do otherwise would signal the death of open source development, which
is the bedrock upon which the internet and the W3C's  very existance is
founded.

It should be a provision that anything that becomes a standard for the
development of the internet, and related technologies that the proposers
and all members of W3C give up all rights  to royalties, and infact that
this technologies patent and copyright restrictions are lifted as of the
acceptance of the standards proposal.  The technology from that point
forward released into the public domain.  Money should be made from
selling the implimentation of ideas, not the concepts themselves.

William E. Dunn Jr.
508-832-6139 Home
508-898-7125 Work
haplo@epithna.com

Received on Friday, 5 October 2001 14:20:08 UTC