RAND licensing should not be allowed

Dear W3C Patent Policy Working Group:

     I'm concerned about the recent Patent Policy Framework draft, which
     could allow W3C members to charge royalty fees for technologies
     included in web standards.

     In particular, I object to the inclusion of a "reasonable and
     non-discriminatory" (RAND) licensing option in the proposed policy.
     I believe that the exclusive use of a "royalty-free" (RF) licensing
     model is in the best interests of the Internet community, and that
     RAND licensing would always necessarily exclude some would-be
     implementors, especially among open source and free software
     developers.  The inevitable effect of RAND licensing would be to 
     fracture the internet into proprietary and non-proprietary formats
     and place leading-edge web development outside the reach of the
     individual.

     I applaud the W3C for its tradition of providing open-source
     reference implementations and its work to promote a wide variety of
     interoperable implementations of its open standards. The W3C can
     best continue its work of "leading the Web to its full potential"
     by continuing this tradition, and saying no to RAND licensing.

     Sincerely,

	Nathaniel Gray
	Graduate Student in Computation and Neural Systems
	Caltech
-- 
Nathaniel Gray

California Institute of Technology
Computation and Neural Systems
--

Received on Tuesday, 9 October 2001 17:55:17 UTC