non-monetary license terms

• From: Stuart Ambler <stuart@zulazon.com>
• Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2002 01:31:59 -0700
• To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
• Message-Id: <p05111b02b95adbf04b89@[192.168.1.101]>

Hi,

Please forgive me if you have addressed this issue already.  To me, it is
not only the money involved in royalties that leads me to think that RAND
should not be allowed at all, but other possibly objectionable license
terms, such as auditing, not publicly criticizing, or other things that may
be reasonable to lawyers and companies seeking to enforce their intellectual
property claims, but not to ordinary people.  Off the top of my head, I
can't think of any kind of license restriction that would be really OK,
other than that the use be confined to the scope of the standard in
question; and can't easily imagine benign license restrictions designed to
help enforce that one.  Of course, more thought might yield a larger number
of benign license restrictions, but I fear that concentrating on money may
lead people to ignore other evils.  Not that money should be ignored,
either.

Thanks,
Stuart

Received on Wednesday, 17 July 2002 04:31:51 UTC