[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: More patent funnies!
The broadness or age of a legal patent doesn't change the patent situation with respect to W3C policy other than to say the W3C must be very thorough and that this will be expensive. It has another benefit. If the charter of the W3C is to "bring the web to its full potential" then encouraging real and exceptional technology by holding out the possibility of getting a patent in a web technology with the option to license is an enormous incentive to further that end. This is ostensibly the reason for patents to begin with and what the W3C would be doing is amplifying that effect as well as post-processing the patent office work and filtering out the bad patents. I don't think anyone has suggested they would do other than that. Why would the W3C create a spec around a bad patent or even a very loose one? Because the patent exists? No, they would only accept a patent because a member who held it could prove it was good and within scope and because other members choose to accept it. Part of selecting patented technology must include a decision by the members (not the Director - too simple to capture) to select it. The disclosure policy works for the members and I think everyone accepts the value of early disclosure. The issue is the RF or non-RF terms. What can be done effectively is have a policy for disclosure, broad exhaustive review, membership choice and negotiated terms. What a non-RF-only policy does is remove incentives to bring the best technology to the W3C and encourages moving to other venues. That is a reasonable outcome for some as Tim says, but an avoidable one and to be avoided if the result is to make the end user have to settle for less capable tech when using the W3C version of the web. Driving down the quality of the web, away from its potential is the surest way to cause a fracture into multiple competing systems that cannot interoperate. Reasonable licensing is one means among others to keep that from happening. "From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs" sounds good but as Ayn Rand illustrated, works against progress for all because over time each does less and each needs more. len
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