- From: Albert Lunde <albert-lunde@nwu.edu>
- Date: Mon, 23 Feb 1998 00:06:13 -0500 (EST)
- To: www-talk@w3.org
> Actually, any one serious about using my patent would probably want to > know in advance what a license would cost. By publishing but my > provisional patent and my full spec before the patent was granted, I > have given notice of the presence of the the possibility of their being > Intellectual Property in this area. I am not trying to bait and switch. > > Intellectual Property in the 'net area is not limited to software. What > danger does the presence of Intellectual Property present to the 'net > industry? Well if you are trying to make something a standard, you may have offer some assurances about licensing terms. You might want to take a look at the IETF's page on intellectual property notices at: http://www.ietf.cnri.reston.va.us/ipr.html Now this is the IETF, not the W3C, but it's a pretty good representation of the ideas of people deep in Internet standards. More informally, the prior history of things like .ARC and .ZIP or the GIF patent issue, indicate there's a lot of people on the net who will keep even further away from propritary technologies. The client side of the Internet, and much of the server side, is still founded on free or cheap software. It's like the comment that "The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it". If you try to assert rights on things that people think aren't valid, or that are over-priced, people will find other ways to do it.
Received on Monday, 23 February 1998 01:23:30 UTC