Larry Rosen on W3C Patent Policy

[Seth Johnson <seth.johnson@RealMeasures.dyndns.org>]

(Forwarded from Open Source License Discussion list)

-------- Original Message --------
Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2002 11:03:46 -0800
From: "Lawrence E. Rosen" <lrosen@rosenlaw.com>
To: <license-discuss@opensource.org>, <fsb@crynwr.com>
CC: "'Robin 'Roblimo' Miller'" <robin@roblimo.com>,"Eben
Moglen" <moglen@columbia.edu>, <bruce@perens.com>

W3C (www.w3c.org) has just released the Last Call Working
Draft of its patent policy
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-patent-policy-20021114) for
"Last Call" review.

Some of you may remember that an earlier draft of that
policy provided for the possible payment of "reasonable and
non-discriminatory" (RAND) royalties in order to practice
W3C specifications.  That dreadful prospect is no longer in
the policy.  The draft policy now provides that all patents
necessary to implement W3C specifications must be
"royalty-free" (RF).

If this draft is adopted by W3C, all specifications
published by W3C can be implemented by anyone, anywhere,
without payment of royalties.  This is a major victory for
open source.  The open source community was represented on
the Patent Policy Working Group by Eben Moglen, Bruce Perens
and Larry Rosen.

The community now needs to be heard supporting this policy
so that it is not undone during the public input and W3C
Advisory Council phase.  Address your comments to
www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org.

We hope that this RF policy will be adopted by other
standards organizations around the world.

/Larry Rosen

--
license-discuss archive is at
http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3