[DMCA-Activists] FSF on W3C Patent Policy

[Seth Johnson]

> 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
<address@hidden>. The deadline for receipt
of comments is Tuesday 31 December 2002.