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W3C Policy To Favor Royalty-Free Patents Only 104

Posted by timothy from the good-guys-in-the-corner-pocket dept.
A report on NewsForge notes that the Last Call Working Draft of the World Wide Web Consortium's patent policy has reversed the possibility found in earlier drafts of allowing patents in Web standards which required "Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory" (RAND) licensing fees. This draft is the result of the vote by the W3C's patent policy board mentioned last month, which came after a proposed loosening of the royalty-free standards in the Fall of 2001.
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W3C Policy To Favor Royalty-Free Patents Only More

W3C Policy To Favor Royalty-Free Patents Only

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  • Royalty free (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14, 2002 @04:43PM (#4671688)
    Free as in beer? or free as in syphilis?

  • WC3? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14, 2002 @04:44PM (#4671690)
    Sorry to nit-pick

  • This is good, but... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by vasqzr ( 619165 ) <vasqzr&netscape,net> on Thursday November 14, 2002 @04:44PM (#4671698)


    Who says you have to follow standards?

    People [b]will[/b] create their own, royalty-free or not. The market decides who wins.

    • Re:This is good, but... (Score:5, Informative)

      by sketerpot ( 454020 ) <sketerpot@gmail.c3.14om minus pi> on Thursday November 14, 2002 @04:54PM (#4671800)
      Despite that, the W3C still has significant voice in what happens. Check out some of the stuff at W3Schools [w3schools.com] and you will see the way the w3c is pushing--toward technical excellence with the ability to make your pages look good and gracefully degrade. And these technologies are being adopted! If you compare the Distributed Proofreaders [archive.org] site to the Cartoon Network [cartoonnetwork.com] site, there is no doubt which is more usable. (note for those of you who may be so dense that you have doubts: not cartoon network). Guess who uses more w3c-friendly html?

      Sited like that are everywhere because many web sites are made by people who care about such things, rather than fawning over browser-specific stuff.

      • Re:This is good, but... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by SirSlud ( 67381 )
        I'm pretty sure that web usability includes the notiong that hyperlinks exist, in part, because it allows you to package content in multiple areas.

        Your link to archive.org is a HUGE page with TONS of scrolling to get to the bottom. Thats a major transgression when youre talking about usability on the web. (Although, okay, I now see you're talking more about the compatibility and adherance to standards in the code. The design of the page itself nearly negates the advantage of using standards. ;)

        Nitpicking aside, I know what you mean. Folks who veer off from standards are essentially going it alone and usually are dismissing the tons of work and thought that goes into setting standards.
        • In my archive.org link I was referring more to the design of the entire site than I was to the design of the front page which, I admit, is pretty bad. They really should split it up more, but overall the site is easy to use. Nice hyperlinks that you click to get to another place, without the whole page moving around as if animated by evil web designers from hell.

          But yes, you're completely right--but only on the front page.

        • Huge? it only looks like about 10 screens to me. The slashdot comments page is an awful lot longer.


          I absolutely hate the mentality that everything has to have its own page. It leads to things like sites where articles are split into pages of 50 words apiece. I've got a scrollbar -- let me use it.

          • I absolutely hate the mentality that everything has to have its own page. It leads to things like sites where articles are split into pages of 50 words apiece. I've got a scrollbar -- let me use it.
            No, that's a somewhat similar effect caused by something completely different - the desire to get as many pageloads - and banner-loads - as possible out of each tiny bit of content. It's the web equivalent of magazine articles that get continued twice in different parts of the magazine just for the sake of making you turn pages more often.

            Russ
      • What's your point about these two sites? Which one do you think has more traffic? So, which one carries more weight with users? Also, it shows that by the current standard, pages can look slick, but those using the W3C standards look like they're right out of 1996. Oh yeah, let's definitely go back in time because of the all-important bogus "standards". Puh-lease. Get your head out of your ass. Gutenberg is a nice little project, but it doesn't pull any weight with most people. Most people go to a page like that, assume it's some grad student's doctoral thesis from 1996, and leave. That's progress?
        • I just don't think that in order for people to think of a page as "good" it should be made a hard-to-navigate nightmare.

          The one using the "current standard", as you amusingly put it, is not slick by my definition. When I think of a "slick" web site, I think of one which is fairly easy to look at and which allows you to see the content without waiting a full minute (128 Kbps) for an overly-ornamented page to load which only devotes about a third of the screen space to content.

          The reason I like w3c standard pages, in general, is not because of the magic word "standard", but because these standards lead to well-designed pages.

          Web pages can look like laughable science ficton movie GUIs. But I don't want them to. My personal web site doesn't have much content (just who I am, a few links, and something about RISC, CISC, and MISC), so I don't try to trick users into thinking that it does by using lots of pictures, javascript, and wiggling animations. Web sites that do this give a bad name to the internet.

          And as for the people who assume that any page which has a clean layout isn't worth their time, they are simply punishing themselves.

    • Re:This is good, but... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by rusty0101 ( 565565 ) on Thursday November 14, 2002 @05:19PM (#4672001) Homepage Journal
      Nothing says you have to follow standards. Unless you market the product as "Standards Based." Even then...
    • >Who says you have to follow standards?
      >
      >People [b]will[/b] create their own, royalty-free or not.


      ...so will you be charging everyone for implementation of your new bold tag?
  • This is much more in line with the over-arching ideology of the W3C as an organization than the archaich RAND system.

    Now when is WCAG2.0 final coming out?

  • WarCraft 3 Wont Charge Royaltys... (Score:5, Funny)

    by LordYUK ( 552359 ) <jeffwright821NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday November 14, 2002 @04:47PM (#4671732)
    woo hoo!! Now I can patent the Wisp Rush and don't have to pay Blizzard a penny!!!! hehehe :) Me [battle.net]

  • WC3 eh?? (Score:3, Funny)

    by LordYUK ( 552359 ) <jeffwright821NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday November 14, 2002 @04:49PM (#4671752)
    Someone has WarCraft on the brain...

    Zug Zug!

  • the good guys always win (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BroadbandBradley ( 237267 ) on Thursday November 14, 2002 @04:50PM (#4671755) Homepage
    it just takes awhile sometimes.
  • But getting rid of the Low and High Upkeep penalties better!!!

    Go WC3!

  • Oh no! (Score:5, Funny)

    by gpinzone ( 531794 ) on Thursday November 14, 2002 @04:53PM (#4671786) Homepage Journal
    "Oh no! There go all the royalty checks on my patented <blink> tag!" - Marc Andreessen
    • PLEASE someone patent the blink tag and then charge people $1000 per use, or make them remove it.
      =)

      --Azaroth
    • "Oh no! There go all the royalty checks on my patented tag!" - Marc Andreessen

      Luckily for the healthcare industry, despite a royalty-free patent, the <seizure> tag still generates a great deal of revenue.

  • Thank god! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by locarecords.com ( 601843 ) <david@@@locarecords...com> on Thursday November 14, 2002 @04:56PM (#4671818) Homepage Journal
    W3C stand up and be counted. At last they are actually stating a position and it is one we can all applaud!

    I hope they now start to be more proactive in naming and shaming those who subvert their standards (no names m$entioned).

    • Although, in terms of browser compliance, IE is not much worse than the alternatives, commercial and open source, and significantly better in some cases. See, for example, the decidedly odd way that Netscape/Mozilla handle table widths, and compliance with CSS standards.
      • While you may be correct about Mozilla's table widths (Although the bugs I know of are quite old, so they may have been fixed), in nearly every CSS case where IE and Mozilla differ, Mozilla's following the spec whereas IE isn't.

        There have been a number of threads in the Arstechnica forums where somebody thought they found a bug in Mozilla simply because it differed from IE, such as the way that Mozilla handles IMG objects in tables. It turns out that IE was incorrectly treating the IMG as a block object whereas it should be inline.

  • Nice, but (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Duderstadt ( 549997 ) on Thursday November 14, 2002 @04:59PM (#4671833)
    While I commend the W3C for demanding royalty-free licenses, I am not exactly sure that this makes a great deal of difference at this time.

    There are, AFAIK, currently dozens (hundreds?) of closed and open source implementations of virtually every defined W3C specification, all royalty free. Just as an example, I have used four or five XML/XSL parsers, some OSS, some not. Am I wrong about this?

    Perhaps someone out there can inform me if RAND licences are required to implement any of the existing W3C specs?

    • Re:Nice, but (Score:5, Informative)

      by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Thursday November 14, 2002 @05:22PM (#4672021) Homepage Journal
      To date, W3C has attempted to create unencumbered standards. You can't ever be sure that they are unencumbered, of course, some turkey could assert yet another patent on the Internet.

      But W3C was under pressure to create encumbered standards, mostly from big companies that would have made money from the royalties. Some companies that are usually considered our friends were working against us in this regard. Of course we didn't want to see them erect toll-booths on the Internet that would have, as a side-effect, locked out Open Source implementations.

      I think there may be a problem right now regarding the VoiceXML standard, which was chartered before this new policy is accepted.

      Bruce

    • I think you are confused (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14, 2002 @05:26PM (#4672069)
      There are, AFAIK, currently dozens (hundreds?) of closed and open source implementations of virtually every defined W3C specification, all royalty free.

      This is not about implementations. This is about patents.

      Perhaps someone out there can inform me if RAND licences are required to implement any of the existing W3C specs?

      No. They are not.

      The W3C policy has been for a long time that nothing with a patent encumbrance will be made a W3C standard. The story that you are replying to is on the subject that last month the W3C was considering changing this policy.

      Under the proposed policy change, the W3C would gain the capability to adopt as standards things which in order to create an implementation of that standard you might have to pay some RAND licensing fees. (And it is quite possible that whoever paid those RAND fees and created an implementation might then turn around and make that implementation available royalty free.)

      This policy change has been rejected, and things will continue as they were before, namely no patent encumbrances on anything that is going to become a standard unless implementing the patent is allowed universally royalty free. Meaning, no, it makes no difference, becuase nothing is different.

      Had they allowed RAND licensing into standards, it would have had a number of pretty big differences in things. For example, it would concievably be impossible to implement such standards in GPLed software, as the GPL bans the use in GPLed software of patent implementations unless you can ensure that patent is perpetually and unconditionally licensed royalty-free to all future GPLed programs.

      Does this answer your question?

  • Example of RAND in purposed W3C standards (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14, 2002 @05:00PM (#4671850)
    If you were wondering what they're talking about, it might be:

    in this submission [w3.org]

    An article talks about it on
    ZDnet [zdnet.com]

    which I probably found on an old slashdot article.

  • Hold your horses (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jki ( 624756 ) on Thursday November 14, 2002 @05:01PM (#4671857) Homepage
    This is good, but final celebration is to be held later. And there are still changes that find some new heave artillery against this. Anyway, good work!

    The Working Group hopes to advance to Proposed Recommendation in February or March 2003, with a final policy to be adopted by May 2003.

  • Heh? SVG? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by justsomebody ( 525308 ) on Thursday November 14, 2002 @05:04PM (#4671891) Journal
    I hope this puts flash out of bussines. It would be time for SVG to replace standard flash.

    Let the proprietary follow free standards.
    • Free standards don't matter much if people use them wrong. This site [dalim.com] would suck for usability in SVG or in Flash.
    • I really doubt it will put swfs out of business. 90% of browsers used allready are flash compliant, there's 10% for SVG

      (source data on SVG users)
      http://www.carto.net/papers/svg/comparison _flash_s vg.html

      Frankly I think swf simply has better tools to create them (In this case Flash). *shrug* I honestly haven't used much with SVG any links to a decent app so I can try it out/purchase one?
      • Maybe I said it a bit clumsy.

        I wanna see SVG set standard to other apps like flash.

        Free standard / Free or proprietary tool. I really don't mind paying for app, but I hate when format is not defined by defacto standard (hard to make it compatible with every software).

        As for tools.
        Many of them out there support stand still SVG. But I wonder if some editor supports post editing to add links and animations to web page in SVG.

        I'm not really a web developer, but nature of my work sometimes forces me to produce some.

    • Re:Heh? SVG? (Score:5, Informative)

      by cygnus ( 17101 ) on Thursday November 14, 2002 @05:54PM (#4672340) Homepage
      I hope this puts flash out of bussines. It would be time for SVG to replace standard flash.

      arg. everytime one of these stories comes up, i end up linking to this site [openswf.org].

      SWF, Flash's file format, IS a free and open standard.

      • It IS a good thing that the Flash viewer specification is publicly available. Good job! However, it's not publicly controlled - it's solely controlled by the (single) vendor, so it's not an open standard according to most usual definitions. However, that's still a great step forward; many may find that sufficient. PDF has a similar situation; Adobe owns the specification, but anyone can implement it.

        It's worth noting, though, that there is no open source software implementation of the viewer. That's different than PDF, because there are open source implementations of PDF readers and writers (which is why PDF has become so popular - implementations are available literally everywhere, and no one feels that locked in). I think most people don't believe that an open source implementation is a requirement for an open standard, but it does mean that the viewer is not included in many distributions (e.g., Red Hat Linux and Debian have policies specifically discouraging such things). It also means that the viewers sometimes don't work when you upgrade your operating system.

        • Re:Heh? SVG? (Score:2, Informative)

          by vsync64 ( 155958 )
          It's worth noting, though, that there is no open source software implementation of the viewer.

          You are wrong. [swift-tools.com] The really sad thing is how easy [google.com] it was to prove this.

          • Ah! That's great news! I retract what I said. It's not clear to me that this can handle most real Flash files, but I suspect the developers are already handling that.

            Thanks for the info!

  • A step up, but not good enough for RMS... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 3-State Bit ( 225583 ) on Thursday November 14, 2002 @05:09PM (#4671920)
    Software can't be Free as long as there are patent restrictions on it, even if you can use the patents royalty-free. Why?

    I'm not sure, exactly. I guess that there are some kind of restrictions that come with use of a patent, even if it's allowed for free.

    Right now, if I have in my hand a GPL'd project, I can do whatever I want with it, can modify it in whatever way I want, as long as I do not add in a third kind of copyright. (e.g., I cannot add the stolen source to the next version of Windows into my GPL project and GPL it.)
    As long as it's between me and the software in front of me, legitimately GPL'd, I can do anything to it, as long as I license the result under the GPL.

    For some reason, I'm not sure why, this is not true if there are patents in it, even if the patents are categorically royalty-free.

    Anyone want to explain RMS's position?

    I'm afraid I can't find a link right now...
    • What's "royalty-free" today can become expensive tomorrow. There needs to be a legally binding promise that the patent is effectively surrendered, that is there's never going to be an attempt to use the patent rights, before that technology can be freely used as part of something else.

    • Re:A step up, but not good enough for RMS... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by lakeland ( 218447 ) <lakeland@acm.org> on Thursday November 14, 2002 @05:24PM (#4672042) Homepage
      Software can't be Free as long as there are patent restrictions on it, even if you can use the patents royalty-free. Why?


      Simple. While they're royalty free now, what is to say they're royalty free next week? With free software nobody can take away your rights to use it. With free patents, the patent holder can stop giving out free usage at any time. Even if that allows your existing program to carry on using the patented technology, it can screw up interoperability.


      Say for example you wrote a l33t gif producing program, 'caus gif is licenced royalty free, right? Now, at some time in the future, some nasty, evil corporation might change the patent rules on gif, and render the output of your program useless to free software. And you can forget about releasing a new version of your program, say one that fixes a security hole, because for most free beer patents, that requires another free licence.

    • Re:A step up, but not good enough for RMS... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Thursday November 14, 2002 @05:24PM (#4672047) Homepage Journal
      The grant of patents with the W3C standards is not for all uses. It is only for the work necessary to implement the standard. So, you can use the algorithm in one place in your code, and not another. It's the best compromise we could get out of the patent holders. So, RMS has a valid point.

      Bruce

    • Software can't be Free as long as there are patent restrictions on it, even if you can use the patents royalty-free. Why?
      Because the "you can use" part is narrowly defined.

      Imagine that there's new standard for transmitting porn over HTTPS, that involves the use of my fictional patented "Sloppy Encryption Xtreme." I grant a royalty-free license to implement my encryption algorithm for HTTPS. Someone writes a GPLed web browser that uses it.

      Then next week, someone decides to take some of the GPLed code from the web browser, and use it in another project for puppy shredding machines. This other project doesn't involve web browsing or HTTP, but has some sort of use for Sloppy Encryption Xtreme (transmitting shredded puppy statistics to corporate headquarters, for example).

      Then I sue for patent infringement, because the license that I granted, is only for HTTPS implentations.

      Oops. That's bad. That's not Free.

  • Royalty free - how 'bout JPG, for example? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Weaselmancer ( 533834 ) on Thursday November 14, 2002 @05:10PM (#4671929)

    From the article: The draft policy now provides that all patents necessary to implement W3C specifications must be "royalty-free".

    What does this imply for the now patented and non-royalty-free JPG and GIF? If I read this right (IANAL), I believe it says that only royalty-free patents can be a part of spec. In a nutshell, it appears JPG and GIF are SOL.

    I think it would be great if W3C took a stand against abusive patents. This could be a really good thing, in disguise.

    Weaselmancer

  • Finally.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Flyskippy1 ( 625890 ) on Thursday November 14, 2002 @05:25PM (#4672051) Homepage
    Well, I must say that this is a good thing. The web, (and those who program) don't need companies that make you pay for their format. (read: Unisys sucks.)

    Actually, proprietary formats don't belong in the World Wide Web. They hurt it's development, and make it more difficult for developers to offer a wide range of support.

  • If there's a patent, why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) on Thursday November 14, 2002 @05:26PM (#4672064)
    Any standards body needs to insist that standards it declares are standards that are not restricted by any patent limitations. If they do not, then they risk putting out a standard that one company controls, or worse, you need the permission of serveral companies.

    If you want the benefits of having your technology as part of a sactioned standard, check your patents at the door.

    • Re:If there's a patent, why bother? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I should have replied here, maybe I should read before posting, this comment was replied to the main thread, so please don't mod it up here, or vice-versa.

      I don't think the W3C would have ever considered, that strongly, adopting a standard which required royalties. I support that claim with common sense and a quote from:

      W3C Patent Policy Working Group Chairman Danny Weitzner, "Despite the lack of a policy, there has always been an understanding amongst the various contributors that the Internet and the Web wouldn't be possible or scalable unless their contributions were available to everyone on a royalty-free basis."

      but now there's a policy

  • Quality Assurance of W3C Drafts :-) (Score:3, Funny)

    by Jouni ( 178730 ) on Thursday November 14, 2002 @06:22PM (#4672589)
    Am I the only one who finds it more than a little ironic that their current draft page on Quality Assurance [w3.org] is all fscked up? :-)

    This is linked to right from their main news page [w3.org], too. Introduction indeed.

    Don't you feel safer when you know that your Internet standards are in good hands?

    Jouni

  • Now it's official, not that it really matters.. (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't think the W3C would have ever consider, that strongly, adopting a standard which required royalties. I support that claim with common sense and a quote from:

    W3C Patent Policy Working Group Chairman Danny Weitzner, "Despite the lack of a policy, there has always been an understanding amongst the various contributors that the Internet and the Web wouldn't be possible or scalable unless their contributions were available to everyone on a royalty-free basis."

    So now there's a policy
  • Could someone give a quick explanation as to why I would want to spend $$ on a lawyer and have a royality free patent? What's the point? Don't say to prevent someone else from patenting the idea - I can release my invention into the public domain and document it as prior source.
  • No matter how bad things get, every now and then someone comes out and shows a little integrity/backbone. The next time I get wasted, I will specifically toast the W3C.

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