[ox-en] Fwd: FSF's Position on Proposed W3 Consortium "Royalty-Free" Patent Policy
- From: Stefan Meretz <stefan.meretz hbv.org>
- Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 16:10:41 +0100
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Subject: FSF's Position on Proposed W3 Consortium "Royalty-Free" Patent
Policy
Date: Mon, 02 Dec 2002 15:34:26 [PHONE NUMBER REMOVED]
From: "Georg C. F. Greve" <greve fsfeurope.org>
To: discussion fsfeurope.org
Cc: announce fsfeurope.org
Hi all,
in case you haven't read (and done) this already, please take a look
at the patent policy proposed by the W3C consortium and make sure you
protest that draft.
Otherwise we risk seeing an increasing amount of W3C standards that
cannot be implemented as Free Software.
Regards,
Georg Greve
FSF Europe, President
[ http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/w3c-patent.html ]
FSF's Position on Proposed W3 Consortium "Royalty-Free" Patent Policy
25 November 2002
The Free Software Foundation, represented by its General Counsel,
Professor Eben Moglen of Columbia University Law School, participated
in the W3 Consortium Patent Policy Working Group from November 2001
through the current Last Call draft. The Foundation regards the
current Last Call draft, which proposes the adoption of a
"royalty-free" or "RF" patent policy, as a significant step in the
direction of protecting the World Wide Web from patent-encumbered
standards. But the proposed policy is not an adequate final outcome
from the Foundation's point of view.
The proposed policy permits W3C members participating in W3 technical
working groups to commit their patent claims "royalty-free" for use by
implementers of the standard, but with "field of use" restrictions
that would be incompatible with section 7 of the GNU General Public
License. Such "field of use" restrictions, in other words, would
prevent implementation of W3C standards as Free Software.
Section 7 of the GNU GPL is intended to prevent the distribution of
software which appears to be Free (because it is released under a
copyright license guaranteeing the freedoms to use, copy, modify, and
redistribute) but which cannot, in fact, be modified and redistributed
because of patent license restrictions that limit the use of patent
claims practiced by the software to a particular purpose. Though other
Free Software licenses may not happen to contain provisions equivalent
to GPL's Section 7, this does not imply that programs released under
those licenses will be Free Software if the patent claims contributed
"royalty-free" to the standard those programs implement are limited to
a particular field of use.
As an example, W3 members may contribute patent claims to a standard
describing the behavior of web servers providing particular
functionality. A Free Software program implementing that standard
would be available for others to copy from, in order to add
functionality to browsers, or non-interactive web clients. But if, as
the present proposed policy permits, the patent-holder has licensed
the practicing of its patent claims "royalty-free" only "in order to
implement the standard", reuse of the relevant code in these latter
environments would still raise possible patent infringement problems.
For this reason, the proposed policy does not actually protect the
rights of the Free Software community to full participation in the
implementation and extension of web standards. The goal of our
participation in the policy making process at W3C has not been
achieved. The Foundation urges all those who care about the right of
Free Software developers to implement all future web standards to send
comments to the W3C urging that the policy be amended to prohibit the
imposition of "field of use" restrictions on patent claims contributed
to W3C standards. The address to which such comments should be emailed
is <www-patentpolicy-comment w3.org>. The deadline for receipt of
comments is Tuesday 31 December 2002.
--
Georg C. F. Greve <greve fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe (http://fsfeurope.org)
GNU Business Network (http://mailman.gnubiz.org)
Brave GNU World (http://brave-gnu-world.org)
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