Patent policy draft severely flawed

Re: http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-patent-policy-20010816/

Clearly the Patent Policy has struck a nerve with the Web 
community, which, IMO is the W3C's number one constituency. The 
Patent Policy Working Group clearly owes the Web community an 
explanation of this draft, and I hope will clear these issues.

However, I ask the the Patent Policy WG, and Tim Berners-Lee not 
advance this draft any further in W3C process until these issues 
are resolved. At this point, taking this draft any further 
without working with the Web community to explain these issues 
is a serious mistake.

It's clearly essential that a standards body like the W3C ensure 
that all relevant patents are not used to prevent 
implementations of their specifications. These ideas should be 
available, royalty-free, without restriction to anyone. Anything 
else would make the W3C's work just another means of dividing 
people, rather than bringing the Web together as we all hope.

I've been blogging links on the Patent Policy on the #rdfig scratchpad:

http://rdfig.xmlhack.com/index.html

(will be archived at: 
http://rdfig.xmlhack.com/2001/09/30/2001-09-30.html )

Thanks for considering these comments,

--
       "Aaron Swartz"      |              The Semantic Web
  <mailto:me@aaronsw.com>  |  <http://logicerror.com/semanticWeb-long>
<http://www.aaronsw.com/> |        i'm working to make it happen

Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 17:39:45 UTC