Extension or alteration of standards containing RF patents.

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