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Final W3C patent policy draft

[Posted March 19, 2003 by corbet]

The World Wide Web Consortium has released yet another patent policy draft; there is a review period going through the end of April. According to the press release: "The W3C Royalty-Free license requirements are now consistent with generally recognized Open Source licensing terms." The policy still allows patent holders to impose field-of-use requirements, however. For details, see the policy draft or the "last call issues list" which gives the working group's responses to concerns with the previous draft.

(Log in to post comments)

their royalty-free requirements are still not open source(?)

Posted Mar 19, 2003 22:29 UTC (Wed) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link]

Their definition of a royalty-free license includes the proviso that:

The patent license "may be limited to implementations of the Recommendation, and to what is required by the Recommendation."

I don't see how this is "consistent with generally recognized Open Source licensing terms," since it still apparently conflicts with the "no discrimination against fields of endeavor" and "must be technology neutral" clauses of the Open Source Definition, as well as similar terms of the Free Software Definition. (It also would be legally incompatible with the GPL.)

If they argue that their RF requirements are "good enough," that is one thing, but this seems like a deliberate distortion (considering that criticism of precisely this issue was already brought to their attention).

Final W3C patent policy draft

Posted Mar 19, 2003 22:38 UTC (Wed) by log2 (guest, #10024) [Link]

First, the "last call issues list" referenced by the LWN posting above
does not address the objection that the license is revocable if
the licensee sues the licensor. I feel, like some (many?) others,
that there are so many ambiguities surrounding this provision (at
least as written) that it is a dangerous and undesirable provision
for a standard.

Second, the same "last call issues list" mentions the so-called "field
of use" concerns, but does not alter them. The response just points out
that the W3C itself has no control over what its members might try to do
to those who implement the standards. The response simply confirms that
there is indeed a great degree of uncertainty about the "field of use"
restriction, so get used to it!

Third, most of the responses on the issues list address disclosure
requirements and exactly what degree of secrecy that W3C members may
count on when participating in the standard creation process. Although
I appreciate the occasional need to keep tentative proposals under
wraps, I feel that such secrecy should be more strongly discouraged in
the W3C. This is not a forum like JEDEC, say.

Fourth, I seems to recall that a request for clarification on a decision
making mechanism was "clarified" by simply stating that such cases are
expected to be quite rare and would be decided on a case-by-case basis
by the membership and the chair. Hardly a clarification, but perhaps I
have misread something or crossed two separate points together.

In all, I feel that the objections since December have not resulted
in changes that I can support. Bruce Perens' claim (back then) that
"this is as good as it's going to get," remains true, in my opinion.
However, rather than accept it as-is (as Bruce urged), I am oposed to
the policy unless I see changes to the field-of-use and revoke-if-lawsuit
clauses. I will keep looking for such changes, but I simply don't think
they have happened.

What to do?

Posted Mar 20, 2003 10:10 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

The FSFs postion paper is, as it was, a good document for understanding
the implications of the patent policy document as it stands.

When the previous draft was published, I emailed them my thoughts on the
matter, got some responses, and clarified my points. They'll be hearing
from me again, later today.

The community has made an impact but to call it a "success" is damaging,
and it isn't "good enough", and it isn't "as good as it gets".

Send an email with your comments.
The address is: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
The FSF paper is at: http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/w3c-patent.html

Ciaran O'Riordan