- From: Ralph Clark <ralphclark@ntlworld.com>
- Date: Wed, 01 Jan 2003 01:38:41 +0000
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
Sirs, On the whole the proposal looks good. However I have concerns about a detail of the proposed W3C Royalty-Free License (W3CRFL). In section 3 of the proposed policy draft, item 3 proposes that "[A W3C Royalty-Free license]... may be limited to implementations of the Recommendation, and to what is required by the Recommendation". This appears to have a (presumably unintentional) side effect wherein it allows for only limited types of implementation of the patented method or technique. In this sense it would be incompatible with the widely-used General Public Licence (GPL) and would therefore make it impossible for software authors to incorporate patented and W3CRFL-licensed methods or techniques into software licensed under the GPL - which requires that everything released under its protection must be unhampered by such restrictions. Furthermore it could prevent software authors from incorporating such W3CRFL'ed content into any kind of web-enabled software released under _any_ sort of free licence, outside of a very narrow range of application types, eg. traditional browsers. As the web matures as an application platform and an increasing variety of systems present a web-enabled interface, this could become a very significant restriction indeed. If the proposal is adopted as currently written, the abuses it would allow would effectively castrate the proposed licence in terms of its apparent intention to keep W3C conformant systems open and freely implementable. The W3C has so far demonstrated its bona fides to the public in drafting the proposal specifically to address the public's previously stated concerns. This makes me reasonably confident that the side effects outlined here must surely be unintentional. I therefore urge the committee to go the last mile and revise this section in order to ensure that technologies blessed by W3C _cannot_ be encumbered by such restrictions. Yours faithfully Ralph Clark 21 James Street Epping Essex CM16 6RR United Kingdom
Received on Tuesday, 7 January 2003 22:32:13 UTC