W3C patent license policy question

I'm writing as a volunteer for Xiph.Org, developer of free multimedia
technology like Ogg Vorbis and Theora.  We're part of an IETF audio codec
effort called "Opus" that may soon end up in the W3C through the
WebRTC/RTC-Web effort.

At the IETF, we have licensed several patents related to Opus under the
strongest royalty-free license we could devise [1].  I think our license
is similar to what the W3C expects.

How can we make sure that our license would be acceptable at the W3C?
We'd like to be sure it is, because we may start recommending it as a
template for others interested in royalty-free licenses.

Thanks,
Ben Schwartz

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/1524/
[2] http://www.webmproject.org/license/additional/

P.S. I think there's a bug in the patent policy text.[3] Section 5.6 of
the W3C patent policy ("may be suspended with respect to any licensee when
licensor is sued by licensee")[3] is incompatible with the "non-normative
summary"[4], which says "The license may require a royalty-free "grant
back" or reciprocal licenses either to the original patent holder or to
all other implementers".  I imagine that "or to all other implementors" is
the actual intention.

[3] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20040205/#sec-Requirements
[4] http://www.w3.org/2004/02/05-patentsummary.html

Received on Tuesday, 2 August 2011 21:20:38 UTC