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RE: More patent funnies!

• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• To: jim@a..., xml-dev@l...
• Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 10:00:42 -0500

Now we have to ask if Digital Rights Management 
should be a specification or standard, and if this is a 
technology that the W3C should be working on.  Is DRM a 
low-level technology (I would think so) or is it high 
level?  IOW, would only .NET be affected or do the patents 
affect a much larger percentage of the Internet users who 
are involved in some way in the B2zed industry? 

<rant>
Free doesn't work if any one defects.  Defections 
are inevitable.  Some Pigs WANT To Be Pigs in fact, 
are Pigs By Birth.  Do we all become 
pigs or do we accept that perhaps the farmer was a 
useful guy to have around precisely because he exacts a bacon 
toll?

If I were in the W3C, I'd be looking seriously at patent 
pool concepts, not to exact penurious fees, but to 
protect the common interests of the members (whose 
interests include their customers and that includes us) 
when better options aren't available.

Otherwise, just give the web to Microsoft because that 
is what we are doing now.  They will pay for bacon 
in the raw, process it, package it, sell it to us 
and we will serve it up on the pizza.  It may not 
all be about cash but cash gets pizza or we have 
to rob the delivery dude. Pigs Is Pigs.
</rant>

Here are the options so far:

1.  RF.  The best thing.  It may make privately 
funded research a thing of the past or something 
only BigCOs and the government do.   It won't 
stop small fast pigs from getting patents.

2.  Non-RF goes into a patent pool similar to 
MPEG/MHEG.  This is the rare exception used 
because the technology is brilliant or because 
they got the patent first, it is valid and 
there are no acceptable alternatives found 
after very serious efforts to find them (essentially, 
this is TimBL's principle of independent 
invention plus the principle of law). 

To get the standard or spec, owner accepts a much lower 
fee and the patent pool conditions.

3.  PAS.  Publicly available for implementation 
but privately controlled definition.  (NOTE: 
This is how Adobe PDF works.)  A W3C spec can cite 
this but the W3C doesn't control it.  Avoid 
this if at all possible but know it can be done.

4.  Drown it.  No spec or standard from the W3C 
and no citation. All members will hold this 
line as a condition of membership.  This option 
may prove to be illegal (anti-competitive) but IANAL.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Ancona [mailto:scarhill@y...]

Another one which might lead to confused rooting interests for some:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/22404.html

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