- From: Frank Earl <fearl@airmail.net>
- Date: Sat, 29 Sep 2001 21:52:52 -0400
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
As a developer writing software that is intended for use with the Internet that is developed under Open Source licensing terms, I write to you with concerns about the proposal to allow reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) licenses on patents for W3C specifications. Much of the software that makes the Connected Internet, commonly referred to as "The Internet", work is of an open source nature as are most of the protocols proposed to date or that are in use. The development of the Internet as a whole as well as the World Wide Web has benefitted from the philosophy of non-patented or non-royalty technologies and specifications. To bring RAND as an option for protocols is to close off the Internet and development of systems for the WWW to those who have large sums of money and corporations. While it benefits those groups of individuals, it doesn't benefit the world at large (Claims of "better" technologies being offered because of them being patented, etc. not withstanding, it needs to be stated again- we got where we are right now WITHOUT this, so why do we need it again? Also, there is nothing said at this point about whether or not being patented really makes it any better than an unpatented implementation.) as there are groups of people that do development of technologies for educational and altruistic reasons. These groups would most likely prevented from participating because most "reasonable" licensing tends to involve some money outlay or licensing often includes extremely narrow allowances for use when it doesn't. Witness the "reasonable" licensing that MPEG uses for the Layer3 audio codec- the open source developers were required to pony up some $5US royalty per encoder developed and downloaded, hence they had to stop development even though they didn't use Fraunhoffer or Thomson's code. They haven't pursued the decoder developers yet, but the licensing is equally problematic- $50k-100kUS up front or $0.75US per player. The result from this was the development OGG Vorbis codec which is open source and has not patent encumbrances. Witness the "reasonable" licensing that is in place with the GIF file format that uses Unisys' LZW algorithm for compression. The royalty is 1.5% of the purchase price or $0.15US, whichever is greater, for the developers of software using the algorithm. If you run a web site, it's some $5000 dollars per server- IF you're running a non commercial site. If you are, it is much more expensive. The result was the development of the PNG image format. These royalties seem "reasonable" if you think in terms of traditional major corporation business. They aren't so in the context of Open Source or Free Software- in most cases, they are the kiss of death. The majority of the WWW is served by an Open Source program, called Apache. With RAND, it is very conceivable that it would not exist as it would very likely require a per connection or per server royalty charged to the _developers_ of the software. Most open source projects are made up of volunteers developing the code and do not comprise a group of individuals in the sense of a company doing business. Patents and royalties make no distinctions in most of these cases, so the work would very likely not get done or someone would come up with another defacto standard that doesn't have patent encumbrances. RAND only benefits a company or a group of companies that seek to gain by getting everyone use THEIR patent and by doing so pay them money. In many cases, it doesn't benefit the rest of the community because there's often no room to develop improvements and moreover no desire to do so (If you owe, even for a dramatically improved solution, why even bother...) or they spawn efforts to come up with non-patented alternatives that might be better spent developing improvements on the current ideas. RAND does NOT prevent discriminatory licensing- a company can sign any agreement saying that they'll license it, but it requires an expensive court case to prove that they didn't. Also it takes an expensive court case to prove that a given company cut another company a break on the licensing, and didn't on another, and so forth. The only way to really prevent patent problems is to require that the company submitting patented technology as part of a W3C specification officially grant a royalty free license to anyone implementing the specification as it's outlined in the documentation or any future W3C specifications that touch on the patent's coverage. I urge you to not consider RAND as a viable alternative to what is currently in place with regards to patents that is in place right now for W3C specifications. -- Frank C. Earl Earl Consulting Services
Received on Saturday, 29 September 2001 22:57:07 UTC