W3C Publishes "Current Patent Practices" 135
jdaly writes "Given the interest Slashdot readers have shown in W3C's
Patent Policy, I would like to provide an update and pointer to the
most recent document published by W3C on Patent Issues.
The W3C has published Current Patent Practice as a W3C Note. Reviewed by the W3C Advisory Board, the Note represents the current state of W3C patent practice as implemented by the Team for W3C Recommendations.
"
From the document: This current practice has evolved in order to satisfy the goal held by a number of W3C Members and significant parts of the larger Web community: that W3C Recommendations should be, as far as possible, implementable on a Royalty-Free basis [AC]. The current practice described here seeks to
- establish Royalty-Free implementation as a goal for Recommendations produced by new and re-chartered Working Groups;
- encourage maximum disclosure of patents that might prevent a W3C Recommendation from being implemented on a Royalty-Free basis;
- provide a process for addressing situations in which the goal of Royalty-Free implementation may not be attainable.
Cop-out time (Score:4, Interesting)
Why can't they take a stance and say that without exception patents registered by the w3c will become public domain property (by filling the patent it prevents any other group trying the same thing without the public interest)
Re:Cop-out time (Score:3, Insightful)
Most patents are created or applied for in order to make the applicant some money in licensing fees, or as part of a larger effort in leading up to another fee.
The "prior art" clauses would indicate that if one wanted to place an invention in the public domain, one would simply post about it in a public forum, like what Mr Torvalds did many years ago. No-one could patent Linux now, becuase it's in the public domain.
A third possibility is closer to Linus' trademark idea, i.e. he owns the trademark, but will only legally enforce that fact if he disagrees with someone's {ab}use of it. In patent-land, I could do the same with my invention, put it in the public domain and let others use it freely, as long as they conform to some license agreement such as the GPL.
That opens a whole other can of worms, but we're starting to see some convergence here, where licenses to use a technology (software or otherwise) are freely doled out under certain conditions. I'm surprised the FSF hasn't come up with something like this before.
Re:Cop-out time (Score:1, Interesting)
You mean like if some hardware company named themselves "Something Linux", and then conspired with their corrupt investment bankers to pull an IPO scam on uneducated investors? Or was Linus paid for that one.
Re:Cop-out time (Score:2, Informative)
That idea is more or less the sort of thing I want the Open Patent License [openpatents.org] in progress at openpatents.org [openpatents.org] to do.
Re:Imagine if it was a cop-out (Score:2)
the real lyrics are here [bagism.com].
Re:Cop-out time (Score:5, Interesting)
That is not the position at all. You are talking typical Slashweenie nonsense driven by some innane paranoia.
The policy says the exact opposite of your claim. The presumption will be in favor of royalty free.
Why can't they take a stance and say that without exception patents registered by the w3c will become public domain property (by filling the patent it prevents any other group trying the same thing without the public interest)
The policy is not about patents filled by W3C, it is about patents filled by others, some of whom may be members, others who may not.
There are very few W3C members who actually want RAND terms, in fact I can only think of one that has advocated collecting royalties and that is IBM. There are quite a few W3C members who work in areas that are heavily patent encumbered, in many cases due to the negligence of the USPTO there are multiple overlaping patent claims.
What most companies in those encumbered areas do is to file lots of defensive patent collateral for trading purposes. In most cases everyone holding the patents realise that ultimately the probability they are enforceable is quite slim but they can't disarm unless everyone else does. A quite reasonable objective of the W3C patent policy is to encourage negotiation of patent pacts so that a royalty free license is available to anyone who is willing to reciprocate.
Incidentaly, the reason I apply for patents on technology that we intend to make royalty free is to block attempts by others to do so. Whenever I publish a specification some snot comes out of the woodwork and runs off to the USPTO with a perjured patent application claiming it was their idea. Then they try to sell my idea back to me. I am getting so fed up with this that we are actually thinking of bringing a civil perjury suit against the next perpetrator.
The theory of patent law is to encourage use of new ideas. In fact the effect is now the reverse. I spend a lot of time looking at old mailing lists etc. for OLD ideas that might be tweaked to answer a current need.
Re:Cop-out time (Score:1)
Re:What are the key points in terms of licensing? (Score:3, Interesting)
OTOH, so is a refusal to agree to them without reading them.
Consider, say it takes a lawyer a week to write up some particular document. How long is it going to take you to understand it? But the lawyer is asking hundreds or thousands of people to read and accept this document, and there are hundreds or thousands of lawyers.
This is one of the reasons that I am so in favor of the GPL. It simplifies the licenses that I need to understand.
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ok (Score:1, Redundant)
So basically they're saying "pretty please tell us about your patent that might ruin our scheme so we can have enough time to prepare to defeat your patent."
Sure, that'll work.
Re:ok (Score:2, Insightful)
basically they're saying "pretty please tell us about your patent that might ruin our scheme so we can have enough time to prepare to defeat your patent."
Fortunately the W3C have (up to now) been relatively open and ethical about their products. I say relatively, because certain other protocols, languages etc. have been hidden beneath a wash of legalese and DMCA-isms both recently and in the past.
The fact of this whole patent drive seems to be getting up the nose of /.ers simply because they are advocating patents. This could be a good thing (remember: not all software patents are bad), or it could be a sign of their fall to the dark side. If so, it'd be a pity - they've been a stalwart of the open-standards community for some time now.
Re:ok (Score:1)
That debate continues, but there's an important line here between patented products and patented standards. IMHO recommending communication standards that anyone has a legal right to prevent anyone else from implementing absolutely undermines the W3C's long-term goal of universal access.
Seeing too much negative (Score:1)
I just don't see the evil here folks.
At first, I read the headline as . . . (Score:1, Funny)
~~~
What's wrong with patents? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:What's wrong with patents? (Score:1)
Probably because that's the only way to be fairly certain that you're not infringing on some bogus patent, hmm?
You're damn' right ! (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, the problem is that you can't claim to be of public utility if you create proprietary stuff from which you'll get money by preventing public organisations not only to use them but also to learn and teach pothers to use them.
IMHO only public international organization should be involved in such researches and thus *not* make a life out of it.
We're not dealing with some home luxury device here but with a communication standard and if such standard accessibility is hindered by a royalty-hog patent, then it should no more be considered as a communication standard.
Now, you can see the obvious problem with patents when handled by multinational profit-seeking entities if you consider these bio-piracy exemples [everything2.com] from the real world.
Re:What's wrong with patents? (Score:4, Insightful)
It is a foundation of open standards which have allowed for innovations like streaming media over the Internet. It is open standards which allow for rapid development of these services. What? You think it'll be better if companies X, Y and Z get 50 patents over one technology and then allow them to fight it out in court so we can have feature A in our web browsers? Or, after they've finished bickering, that it is ok for a corporate created browser to claim compliance because they can afford the licensing fees but a browser like Mnemonic can't because it's created by a bunch of hackers?
Patents are not needed or wanted for a standard like the one drafted by the W3C. Ever. If a company wants a product to become a standard for the WWW then they need to be willing to give up control of that "intellectual property." Otherwise, take your chance in the market and get eaten by MS (you know this just had to be included. it is /. :) like every other smoe out there.
Patents do have uses and I am all for them but not in software. As long as there is copyright and trade secrets available it's an axiom I won't accept.
Re:What's wrong with patents? (Score:2)
Re:What's wrong with patents? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a lot that is wrong with software patents, not with patents in general.
The problem is that everyone can make a small contribution, and when you write software, your standing on other developers toes, not their shoulders.
There are only a few things that are big enough to be patented. For example, the Web. But the web wouldn't have existed if it had been patented. TimBL has made this very clear, over and over. And TimBL has also made it very clear that you're wrong: It's the common standards that encourage growth, because it makes it possible for everybody to compete on a level playing field.
Software patents had been OK if they costed no more than $100 to get (so that everybody could get them), took a week to get granted, and expired after a month.
That's what it takes for software patents to hinder continued development. However, this is completely unrealistic, so better drop them.
OTOH, I'd like you to come up with good examples of software patents that encouraged growth. And we'll see how important they were compared to e.g. the Internet and the Web.
Re:What's wrong with patents? (Score:3, Insightful)
The biggest problem by far is that corporate patents are not "use it or lose it", like trademarks are. This allows corporations to essentially kill any products that might compete with them by simply buying the patent and never using it ot licensing it to anyone. The energy industry is particularly guilty of this, and has been known to be doing this for years.
Then, of course, there's the length. While seventeen years was a decent amount of time in past years, when the pace of technology moved fairly slowly in general, in this world they last far too long. Patents are supposed to encourage innovation, but not at the cost of competition. They need to be shortened to ten years at the longest, to fit the current state of technological advancement.
And finally, of course, the ability to patent software. Software is a written work, not a device (if anything is a device, it is the computer itself, but that is not software). The difference is basically the same as copyrighting a novel and patenting an entire genre. What if Tolkien had patented fantasy? It sounds absurd, but this is exactly what is going on in the software industry. Copyright provides adequate protection against stealing one's work in this case; there is no need for patents. never mind that you're not supposed to be able to patent math problems anyway, but the corporate whores in Congress seem to have ignored this for the time being.
Besides which, open patents should all be royalty-free; that's the critical part of why they are open. If you want to patent something, that's fine, but you shouldn't be allowed to charge for it if you want it to become part of an open standard.
Patents aren't bad in and of themselves. But they've been abused, most commonly in the software industry but others as well, for many years now. The system needs to be reformed to prevent this.
Part of the problem (Score:2)
Let's hope they also mean restriction free as well as royalty free. Royalty is money. Patent Licenses can have other restrictions on usage.
Workable, if we do our part.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Not as strong as I might have liked, but it does make our path clear. Whenever a RAND encumbered specification is recommended by a PAG (the extra committee), we should review the justification, and voice our opinion. IE: if a PAG says, "we should make WMA the standard audio streaming architecture because Bill says it's better.", we should make a large and public effort to discredit the members of the PAG group, and have the recommendation overturned by the W3C director.
Re:Workable, if we do our part.... (Score:2)
Not as strong as I might have liked, but it does make our path clear. Whenever a RAND encumbered specification is recommended by a PAG (the extra committee), we should review the justification, and voice our opinion. IE: if a PAG says, "we should make WMA the standard audio streaming architecture because Bill says it's better.", we should make a large and public effort to discredit the members of the PAG group, and have the recommendation overturned by the W3C director.
I'm with you there, I don't think that W3C is going to back down anymore than this, since IBM is reportedly pushing hard to keep the RAND option open. We should let this go on advisement, just as you say. But we should not forget who the bad actor is here and bring that up next time they want something from the open source community.
Keep in mind that there are two already-RAND- encumbered W3C standards: SVG and Voice Browser, both of which were quietly pushed through before the RAND policity was even opened to public discussion. These two standards now need to be re-examined, that is, withdrawn and ammended in line with W3C's revised patent policy. W3C isn't going to do that without a good, strong push.
Zero change (Score:2)
How about a clear statement such as the free software foundation has about US patent laws being insane, the patent office being incompetent and then refusing to support the insanity?
Punishment for violation? (Score:3, Interesting)
Will the member company be removed from the committee or fined?
What does this means?? (Score:2, Insightful)
What do they mean with "situations in which the goal of Royalty-Free implementations may not be attainable"???
This is bullshit.
Proprietary "Standards" aren't Standards (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but I don't see any way around this. A standard is a way of doing things that everybody is supposed to use to accomplish some purpose. A limitation on usage is an automatic effective limitation of the "standard". I.e., it becomes non-standard (some people are unable to use that approach). So the spec should be stricken from the list of standards.
If only some people are allowed to do something, then is just isn't a standard way of doing it. And to the extent that they even hedge on this the W3C should be ashamed of themselves. If they go against this, then the need to be replaced. It may be difficult, but they have violated the turst placed in them.
This isn't the first time that they (or one of their committees) have taken this stand. They can't be trusted. They need to be replaced.
This is not to deny that they have in the past done some good work, and that they may still do some good work. But we can't take their word as to what a standard usage is, because they have proven themselves unreliable.
This is what one should expect of them. Up until this year, or very late last year, every member was the representative of a large company, so it was to be expected that they would act for the benefit of those companies. The two Open Source members that they have added are going to be in the minority whenever a vote is taken. Company values will dominate this group. We can't expect otherwise given their structure and organization. But we can decide that they are not an acceptable authority for us to decide standard usage on.
This is made more complex because most of their past decisions were acutal standards, and much of the web and the net has been formalized based on those standards. But this doesn't act to mitigate their recent decisions. They can not be trusted. So some parallel group is needed that can act to specify acceptable standards. Even though most of what they would do originally would be to rubber stamp the pre-existing W3C standards (this one is unencumbered, that one is unencumbered,
It has been said by members of the W3C that a fork would be extremely bad. Well they are the ones who have created the fork by chaning their definiton process. A fork in the standards is less bad than accepting pseudo-standards as if they were the real thing.
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Re:Proprietary "Standards" aren't Standards (Score:4, Insightful)
In his book, TimBL, very clearly said that software patents is the number one threat to technological progress in the software world.
Further TimBL has made it clear that the main reason for WWW's success was that CERN released it to the public domain. If they hadn't, there wouldn't have been any web.
Unfortunately, the US government has decided that profits are so important that technological progress must be sacrified for it. US corporations are using that for all that it is worth. European governments (I'm in Europe) is following suite, because they fear that if US corps can profit from undermining technological progress, European corporations will die.
What a great situation! But, unfortunately, the W3C can't turn the blind eye to all this. They have to work up a policy that takes software patents into account. Also, you know, if the W3C hadn't attempted to gather the big ones in the industry, the big ones wouldn't have listened to anybody anyway.
TimBL, Dan Weitzner, Jane Daly or the World Wide Web Consortium folks are not the enemies in this. The government bodies that allow patents that suck are the ones that needs to be blamed.
The W3C knows perfectly well that they are in a balancing act. If they accept patents too easily, M$ will take over the web with a few obvious, but well-chosen patents. If they don't work with M$ and the like over patents, M$ will take over the web by disregarding W3C alltogether.
But that is not to say that I don't agree that the web should remain in the public domain. In fact, I made a post to Shouldexist [shouldexist.org] long ago forwarding the concept of Human Communications Carrier [shouldexist.org], where the basic point is that protocols that become popular for communication must be released to the public domain.
I may also agree that a fork may be needed if this gets out of hand. I have been thinking along the lines of making a high-quality network, where user agents will reject anything that doesn't validate, isn't digitally signed, etc. Also, protocols for making payments needs to be added very fast. Documents could be downloaded from anybody's cache, so that availability of a document is not impacted that much by the availability of a single server.
OK, let me round off by posting flamebait (yeah, I'm Karma Kapped, so don't even try modding me down! ;-) ): Why don't we move the whole standards process to Europe, and just let the USians rot in their software-patents infected hole? Lets do it right now before software patents go through, and show the officials that patents hinder growth. So, when technology flourishes in Europe, USians can just sit by and watch, cause there are a few small little details they have to spend a few years in court deciding whether or not they are allowed to use.
Patented standards are unuseable as standards (Score:4, Insightful)
If you doubt this, just consider the problems that the ogg-vorbis people are having because of so many patents in that area. The existence of patents renders an area unuseful for standards. Calling a government granted monopoly a standard degrades the language, and the meanings of the terms beyond usefulness. That a monopoly, not a standard. It's only a standard if it can be adopted as the standard approach.
Companies that attempt to sneak their patented approaches into the standards should be immediately removed from all participation in the process. They are deadly to it. This isn't even punishment, this is merely self protection. A standard needs to be able to be used. Otherwise it only confuses things, and pollutes the data-space.
Move the whole process to Europe? It could be in Europe for all I know. The location doesn't really matter. But it you care about this at all, campaign to keep Europe from recognizing the validity of software patents.
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Re:Patented standards are unuseable as standards (Score:2)
Also, W3C has never pretended to be a standards body, W3C is an industry consortium. It issues Recommendations, not standards (though I admit that I usually refer to them as standards too). Some of its Recommendations has been adopted by standards, for example, a subset of HTML 4.0 Strict has been adopted by ISO, known as ISO-HTML.
WARNING: Acronym Over-load (Score:2, Insightful)
Through the use of my Not-Quite-Patented® 'Acronym Counter', I have identified no less than TWENTY-FOUR used and abused acronyms within this document that didn't even amount to 2500 words!!! That is an unprecedented 1% of the total words!
Here an now I would like to propose the formation of a committee dedicated to ending the abuse of acronyms in technical documents concerning the I/T industry as a whole. We will be called the "Word Implementation Negating Division of the Operating World Subcommittee" (WINDOWS). On second thought, big, bad Bill might take exception to that...
Simple solution for $$ vs. OSource or Free SW (Score:2, Interesting)
While this doesn't prevent problems with license restrictions -- that would have to be dealt with separately -- it DOES mean that free software alternatives would be relatively unburdened.
Of course, RMS and co. wouldn't be happy, and I'd be inclined to agree with them -- this is a compromise, and compromising is the art of leaving everyone unhappy, but less unhappy than they would be if someone else at the table got everything their way.
Not as simple as it looks. (Score:1)
This reminds me of another software difficulty: software which is available for free (and often available in source form), with license terms that forbid distribution for fee or other consideration. After all, does "sale price" include the media price? Shipping and handling fees? What about aggregate media? That opens another can of worms.
A better solution would be that the patents would be licensed Royalty-Free for implementations covered by a license meeting the Open Source Definition [opensource.org] requirements. This would allow flexibility for open-source implementors while preserving the proprietary products value chain. The only major complaint from patent holders I can think of with this approach is that open source may outcompete proprietary products, drying up the royalty stream.
Open the doors (Score:2)
The Patent Office should open itself up (or open itself up more). It's gotten rather old to hear about some crazy patent that was just awarded, then read a few hundred messages on
Bad patents _do_ sometimes get revoked (Score:1)
Support Free Software (Score:1)
Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the illegal Microsoft monopoly: here [deadly.org], here [monkey.org], here [tuxedo.org], here [oreillynet.com], here [oreillynet.com], here [lwn.net], here [oreillynet.com].
Let's all work together to improve free software.