Re: Restrictive Patent Usage

<tompoe@renonevada.net> asks:

>I would like some assistance in locating the topic under discussion, 
>please.  I brought up the document at:
>http://www.w3.org/TR/patent-policy/
>and ran a search for the phrase "fields of use" but got zero results.

I think the relevant wording is in Section 3.3:

"may be limited to implementations of the Recommendation, and to what is
required by the Recommendation;"

which means that you might grant a royalty-free license of a patented technology
for use in a W3C standard on the condition that any implementation implents the
standard, only the required parts of the standard, and nothing but the standard,
so help me god (forgive the paraphrasing of the oath of British courts...)

This cannot be compatible with Free Software whose whole aim in life is to be
used and extended by whoever wants to.

I think there are a couple of other worrying things in there about suing people
and demanding reciprocal license agreements. What's going on?

Michael Pacey

Received on Tuesday, 26 November 2002 15:19:38 UTC