- From: Siva Mahalingam <sysnet@ntlworld.com>
- Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2001 22:28:37 +0000
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
Dear Sir, Special attention has to be paid to the handling of extensions or alterations of W3C patents. For example say W3C establishes an standard based on RF patents say for an authenication protocol. Once the W3C standard becomes popular as a result of it's royalty free status, what is to stop a vendor using an extended or altered standard with deliberately broken compatibility so as to allow their extended standard to exploit the W3C standard while breaking the compatibility of vendors of W3C compliant products to access their product. I can see this happening very often, and killing or fragmenting a lot of commercially important standards. What is required for the protection of RF patent standards against this type of proprietisation is a GPL style condition that RF patent standards may be used commercially only if any extension or alteration is made public and is also made available under the same RF terms. Commercially means anything that is distributed to any other party whether it is charged for or not. S. Mahalingam UK
Received on Wednesday, 27 February 2002 17:24:42 UTC