• From: Jim Ancona <scarhill@y...>
• To: Ann Navarro <ann@w...>, jim@a...,Benjamin Franz <snowhare@n...>, xml-dev@l...
• Date: Fri, 05 Oct 2001 18:50:10 -0700 (PDT)

--- Ann Navarro <ann@w...> wrote:
> At 12:07 PM 10/5/2001 -0700, Jim Ancona wrote:
> >But with Benjamin's wording, that wouldn't matter. If the company 
> >inadvertently
> >fails to disclose, fine, they just granted the world a free license to use
> the
> >patent to implement the recommendation.
> 
> And the first time someone tries to claim an "instant free license", watch 
> the law suits fly -- nothing is that simple.

Of course, anyone can sue anyone else for anything. But if the patent holder
has signed a contract which obligates them to grant a free patent license to
any implementor of a W3C REC, the implementor will be in a much stronger
position in such a lawsuit than they would be without such a contract in place.
IANAL, so I won't presume to suggest precise wording for such a contract, but I
can't see why it couldn't be written. Granted, that getting Sun, Microsoft, IBM
et al to sign it may be a more difficult problem.

Jim


=====
Jim Ancona
jim@a...                     jancona@x...

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