[Patents] More on RAND and W3C

[seth.johnson@realmeasures.dyndns.org (Seth Johnson)]

(Forwarded from Interesting People list, ip-sub-1@majordomo.pobox.com)

-------- Original Message --------
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2001 14:31:03 -0400
From: David Farber <dave@farber.net>


From: "Jonathan S. Shapiro" <shap@eros-os.org>
To: <farber@cis.upenn.edu>, <ip-sub-1@majordomo.pobox.com>


Dave:

As one of the people who responded to the call for comments on the W3C
RAND proposal, and as one of the people who worked on some of the early
parts of what is now the web (netnews) I'ld like to respond briefly to
what Daniel Weitzner just posted.

W3C is in the standards business. One key reason that the web is so
useful is that W3C's standards have been open and accessable to all on a
royalty-free basis. Most of the tools in daily use on the web started as
efforts by individuals or small companies who had no means to pay
royalties. The introduction of an endorsed royalty structure of any kind
by W3C is a basic violation of trust between W3C and the people who made
the web happen. More importantly, it is an abrogation of W3C's duty to
the user base to promote the advancement of the web through open and
widely deployed standards.

I agree with Daniel that the W3C's royalty-free policy has been somewhat
informal in the past, and that in the emerging legal environment of the
web it may need improvement and clarification. The RF policy is a good
start at this. While constructive suggestions have been made in regard
to the specific W3C proposal, the only objections have come from large
concerns that wish to seize, coopt, and benefit from the prio work of
others -- the companies who advocate RAND.

The RAND policy is another matter entirely. What is happening here is
that certain companies are saying "Now that a bunch of people have built
a market for us, we would like to create conditions in which (a) further
evolution of that market will be impeded, and (b) we will get to profit
from the work of those other people. We didn't have the foresight to
invest in the web, so we don't control it now. Our only defense is to
make further changes to the web impossible by using the monopoly
leverage of standards to generate royalties."

In short, this is like software patents -- and equally destructive.

If you are an end user of the web, you benefit from the ideas and labor
of hundreds of people. The designers of the web have created an
environment that defines your online experience, and most of you seem to
like that experience. That process occurred in an open, royalty-free
environment; it could not have occurred any other way. In fact, there
were competing commercial attempts at the time. All of them failed.

Royalties destroy innovation by making it impossible to combine good
ideas in new ways. It isn't broken. Don't fix it.

Respectfully,

Jonathan S. Shapiro, Assistant Professor
Johns Hopkins University

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