Serge Knystautas wrote:
> Noel J. Bergman wrote:
> > As far as I am concerned, it would be desirable for the W3C should have
a
> > copyright on HTML, XML, etc., and be able to deny the right to use those
> > standards to anyone claiming IP rights over them. Other standards
bodies
> > should likewise adopt a policy to protect their standards as IP, make it
> > freely available (none of the nonsense where egregious fees are charged
to
> > gain access to the documents), and enforced only to protect the standard
> > from land grabs.
> The W3C does copyright all specs they publish
That's the first clause of the statement, but they don't protect them in
such manner as to use them in an IP battle (the second clause), and that's
the problem. To quote Simon Phipps from his blog today:
"one important dimension to the debate that I think is being
neglected is the lack of protection for standards. Once a
technology has, through an open process, been incorporated
into a ratified standard from a recognised body like W3C, it
should be impossible to assert patent rights over it unless
they were asserted during the standardisation process."
I want the Open part of Open Standards to have TEETH. I won't go so far as
to suggest that a standard should be treated similarly to eminent domain,
but isn't rights trading the way the big boys play the game? You want to
use my patents, you have to let me use yours. You want to use an Open
Standard? You assign your patent rights for use with the Standard, or you
simply don't get to use it.
Eolas, which actually claims a trademark for "invented here", stands for
"Embedded Objects Linked Across Systems." I'd like to know just how broad
Eolas expects patent coverage. What about systems where an object is
embedded in a database, and code is loaded locally from anywhere in an
enterprise as necessary to instantiate the object? Do they believe that
their patent covers query processing for such a system?
David says that "these guys aren't necessarily a bunch of money-grubbers."
I don't want to have to trust in anyone's largesse when it comes to Open
Standards. Look at the quote from Eolas that they raise in their own
defense: "What if only one best-of-breed browser could run embedded
plug-ins, applets, ActiveX controls, or anything like them, and it wasn't
IE?" This isn't my claim; it is their claim. Do we really want a world
where Best-of-Breed is defined by the fact that no one else can implement
the idea? Do we want a world where there is only one spreadsheet, one word
processor, one browser, one contact manager, one database, one PDA, because
patents protect them from competition? Ok, those already exist, but what
about the next generation of applications?
--- Noel
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