- From: Lucas Bajrasz <lucas@proimage.mb.ca>
- Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2001 14:52:46 -0500
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
Dear W2C staff. I am profoundly disturbed by a proposal pending before W3C which would allow inclusion of patented software technologies into W3C backed World Wide Web standards. Let me enumerate some of the more obvious results that would be produced by such a plan. As the intent of RAND is clearly to promote propagation of "competition via the courtroom", with use of patents on algorithms, the inevitable outcome is of WWW contents being predominantly encoded in proprietary formats of one kind or another. Elimination of non-profit/free-software products such as KDE's Konqueror/Kmail (using witch I am writing this missive). Since free of charge products have a total income of $0 per "license" with (for the sake of argument)1000000 copies distributed, a "non-discriminatory" approach of, say, $1 per license would result in $1 million loss to the project and subsequently its inevitable extermination. Assuming significant proliferation of the patented delivery systems, an attempt to not include the patented technologies would put the project at a severe functional disadvantage, and as a result make it a distant-second choice at best or outright unusable at worst. Introduction of proprietary secret recipes, which combined with the desire of certain industries to achieve complete, total and unbreakable control of information will inevitably result in a situation where significant portion of the information on the Web will be available in the secret-recipe pay-per-view format. This naturally will drive another nail in the coffin of any Free Software attempting to access this information since Free Software by necessity means openly available source code. Open and free are directly contradicting partented and secret. Since you are prepared to take the stand with the patented side of the equation, logically you must wish for all open and free to perish. There is no other choice. RAND then is certain to severely disadvantage or eliminate Free Software. One might ask, who then are beneficiaries of this idea? Small business that drives vast majority of the economy? Not likely, such small companies do not introduce nor require patented content delivery. It is hard to imagine that an owner of a doughnut shop would be concerned with what format her doughnut pictures are in. All she wants is for the consumer to be able to access the information about her shop. More widely and easily the better. The same applies to scientific and educational information. Product literature. Customer Service information. And so on. In fact, vast majority of Web contents falls into this category. Who does then benefit? The answer is simple: those who seek to restrict access to information. Large media companies spring instantly to mind. Oh, I almost forgot another small beneficiary of your brilliant idea. A certain software company whose efforts to destroy the only threat to its software monopoly aspirations had so far failed. No amount of mis-information could do it. No amount of proprietary lock-in strategies could do it. There was always the insolent ability for the opposition to produce code that follows "open-standards" by which the software company in question was also forced to play. No more! RAND will change all that! Now by introducing trivial but patented contents delivery mechanism into its web browser it will be able to leverage its near-monopoly position to force the use of its matching, "W3C approved!", "Standard!", server technology. "Look at those Linux losers scramble!", "Its OFFICIALLY standard and WE control it!", "Apache is as good as dead!" - I can already hear the sounds of joy emanating from Redmont. Finally we will be able to enjoy complete and unbreakable monopoly. This must be worth something to the small software outfit in question. On a personal level, since a large portion of my business is based on Linux-related services, I see your proposal as a direct assault on my company. I am certain that all other small businesses and service companies stand to similarly "benefit" from its introduction. For those not involved with Free Software, a drastic increase in software costs combined with loss of basic freedoms such as freedom of choice and right of fair-use. For those who depend on Free Software - extermination. As you can (hopefully) see, the few beneficiaries of such process would be pre-existing large software/media conglomerates and an occasional litigation (as opposed to software) startup. At the expense of the small business owner and the general public. Naturally. Given these facts I have no choice but to question your motivation in this. I do not wish to draw conclusions without direct proof, but all the indications one can logically draw from your proposal lead only in one direction. Hence my question: Are you truly so blind and incompetent as this proposal would indicate or was the payoff amount just irresistible? Sincerely, Lucas Bajrasz Small business owner
Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 15:47:32 UTC