[Linuxtrent] [Discussioni] Slashdot | W3C Patent Board Recommends Royalty-Free Policy
- From: Emanuele Olivetti <olivetti@xxxxxx>
- To: linuxtrent <linuxtrent@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2002 12:16:46 +0200
Penso possa interessare a tutti. Non ho ancora avuto il tempo di leggerla
tutta. Se qualche anima pia ha il tempo di fare un breve report...
Ciao
Emanuele
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<http://slashdot.org/articles/02/10/07/1159206.shtml?tid=95>
[IMG]W3C Patent Board
Recommends Royalty-Free Policy
The InternetPosted by Hemos on Monday October 07, @07:58AM from the
making-the-smart-choices dept. Bruce Perens writes "A year ago, the
World Wide Web Consortium proposed a policy to allow royalty-generating
patents to be embedded in web standards. This would have been fatal to
the ability of Free Software to implement those standards. There was
much protest, including over 2000 emails to the W3C Patent Policy Board
spurred on by a call to arms published on Slashdot. As a result of the
complaints, I was invited to join W3C's patent policy board,
representing Software in the Public Interest (Debian's corporation) --
but really the entire Free Software community. I was later joined in
this by Eben Moglen, for FSF, and Larry Rosen, for the Open Source
Initiative." Bruce has written more below - it's well worth reading.
After a year of argument and see-sawing, W3C's patent policy board has
voted to recommend a royalty-free patent policy. This recommendation
will be put in the form of a draft and released for public comment.
There will probably be a dissenting minority report from some of the
large patent holders. Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C Advisory Committee,
composed of representatives from all of the consortium's members, will
eventually make the final decision on the policy. My previous
interaction with the Advisory Committee and Berners-Lee lead me to feel
that they will approve the royalty-free policy.
The policy will require working group members to make a committment to
royalty-free license essential claims - those which you can not help
infringing if you are to implement the standard at all. There is also
language prohibiting discriminatory patent licenses. The royalty-free
grant is limited to the purpose of implementing the standard, and does
not extend to any other application of the patent. And there is a
requirement to disclose whether any patent used, even a non-essential
one, is available under royalty-free terms, so that troublesome patents
can be written out of a standard. The limitation of the scope-of-use on
patents, and some other aspects of the policy, are less than I would
like but all that I believed we could reasonably get. Eben Moglen may
have some discussion regarding how GPL developers should cope with
scope-of-use-limited patent grants from other parties. For now, it
should suffice to say that while this is less than desirable, is will
not block GPL development.
I'm not allowed to disclose how individual members voted, but I'll note
that the vote did not follow "friends-vs-enemies" lines that the more
naive among us might expect - so don't make assumptions.
Now, we must take this fight elsewhere. Although IETF has customarily
been held up as the paragon of openness, they currently allow
royalty-bearing patents to be embedded in their standards. This must
change, and IETF has just initiated a policy discussion to that
effect. We must pursue similar policies at many other standards bodies,
and at the governments and treaty organizations that persist in writing
bad law.
For me, this process has included two trips to France (no fun if you
have to work every day) and an appearance at a research meeting in
Washington, a week in Cupertino, innumerable conference calls and
emails, and upcoming meetings in New York and Boston. That's a lot of
time away from my family. Larry Rosen has shouldered a similar burden
while nobody has been paying him for his time and trouble, and Eben
Moglen put in a lot of time as well. Much of the time was spent
listening to royalty-bearing proposals being worked out in excrutiating
detail, which fortunately did not carry in the final vote. We also had
help from a number of people behind the scenes, notably John Gilmore,
and the officers and members of the organizations we represent.
I'd like to give credit to HP. Because I was representing SPI, and HP
had someone else representing them at W3C, I made it clear to my HP
managers that they would not be allowed to influence my role at W3C -
that would have created a conflict-of-interest for me, as well as
giving HP unfair double-representation. HP managers understood this,
and were supportive. During all but the very end of the process, HP
paid my salary and travel expenses while they knew that I was
functioning as an independent agent who would explicitly reject their
orders. Indeed, HP allowed me to influence their policy, rather than
the reverse. This was the result of enlightened leadership by Jim Bell,
Scott K. Peterson, Martin Fink, and Scott Stallard.
For most of the existence of Free Software, technology has been of
primary importance. It will remain so, but the past several years have
seen the emergence of the critical supporting role of political
involvement simply so that we can continue to have the right to use and
develop Free Software. I do not believe that we will consistently be
able to code around bad law - we must represent what is important about
our work and involve ourselves in policy-making worldwide, or what we
do will not survive. I hope to continue to serve the Free Software
Community in this role.
Respectfully Submitted
Bruce Perens
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