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.