- From: Anselm Hook <anselm@hook.org>
- Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2001 19:31:36 -0700 (MST)
- To: <www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org>
The W3C Patent Policy Framework Proposal is poor. Statements referring to the 'one click patent' or how the 'telecommunications industry has flourished under patents' are ridiculous and disingenious. Using a public vehicle such as W3C represents in many peoples minds to promote products that 'may be conditioned on payment' is a conflict of interest. Statements suggesting that free is somehow lesser than non-free are not looking at the individual right to resell 'free' as opposed to the loss of that right when attempting to resell 'non-free'. The W3C cannot support proprietary standards and still continue to be trusted to reflect the public interest. W3C Standards define a 'knowledge commons' among human beings. If these standards are held hostage to third party interests then the community as a whole may suffer. Fundamentally the issue here is that the value of standards is entirely different from the value of inventions. Both embody similar technical aspects but the value of standards is in their mass adoption, not in any of the technical methods or techniques used to devise them. Standards define rules that people can live by; they're a guarantee of certain qualities that all parties can conform to in order to minimize interaction friction. Standards enjoy a unique law of utility effect; the more people that use them, the disproportionately higher their value becomes according to a non-linear relationship. Inventions on the other hand embody solely efficiencies in methods and procedures. An invention consists of a unique arrangement of parts to solve a problem. Inventions have a linear value; if they have a specific utility to one person then the total utility is equal to the number of instances of that invention. A standard owned by a community expresses a higher total value than a standard, or extension, owned by a single vendor. The problem with even "reasonable and non-discriminatory" standards is that the definition of reasonable is inadequate. What is at one point free may later becomes non-free. This often seems to occur once sufficient mass adoption has taken place and vested interests see an opportunity to turn a profit. Frank Herbert refers to this as "hydraulic despotism". Offer people a river, allow them to become dependent on it, and then take it away and charge a tidy sum to the poor unfortunates who were not wise enough to demand full and guaranteed ownership from the start. Free and for sale don't mix. Let me put it this way: As a games developer I'd like to develop rich media web games for a variety of operating systems. As of today this is difficult to do - Macromedia Flash is proprietary; owned by one organization - creating any number of unknown liability issues. Flash players are not available across all platforms and the future direction of Flash is unknown. Scaleable Vector Graphics from W3C constitutes a potential alternative, but it also appears to incorporate proprietary extensions. Does this mean that I have to license those extensions? Does my legal counsel have to become involved in evaluating the feasibility of my next entertainment title? Do I have to advise my investors about potential legal liabilities - thus hampering my investment opportunities? What happens if I want to sell a flash player as well as just the content? Do I have to pay or license technology? Clearly, even the whiff of legal issues creates barriers that dissuade developers from going down these paths. Given this example; just how much do proprietary standards limit economic growth as a whole? Recommendations: 1) Parties that want to submit standards to the W3C should be required by the W3C to guarantee that those standards will remain in the public domain ad-infinitum. This includes extensions to those standards. 2) The W3C should reject standards that require proprietary components in any part. 3) The W3C should seek to replicate proprietary intellectual portfolios in a legal manner and thus liberate those technologies to benefit all people. 4) W3C should seek to overtun the software patenting structure by actively working with the U.S. Government and the U.S. Patent Office. Software patents should either not exist or have a dramatically limited duration without possibility of renewal. 5) There should be a public interest organization, with a specific charter to protect the public interest, to whom the control of the standard is assigned. Said organization could be the W3C however some work would have to be done to re-inspire confidence in the W3C as reflecting the public interest and not the interests of the commercial advisory boards that allowed this proposal to reach this stage. Without broad public support the W3C begins to look like the OpenGIS or OMG group - often reflecting private interests and simply being another coalition of corporations operating with a pretext of reflecting the public interest. - a
Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 21:21:17 UTC