A commitment to royalty-free standards on the web was pledged on
Wednesday as the World Wide Web Consortium announced approval of
its Patent Policy. It aims to reduce the threat posed by patents to
key components of web infrastructure.
A commitment to royalty-free standards on the web was pledged on Wednesday as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced approval of its W3C Patent Policy. The new Policy aims to solve a specific problem: to reduce the threat posed by patents to key components of web infrastructure.
W3C is an international industry consortium, created to lead the web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability.
Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and the man credited with founding the World Wide Web, explained the background to the Policy:
â€W3C Members who joined in building the web in its first decade made the business decision that they, and the entire world, would benefit most by contributing to standards that could be implemented ubiquitously, without royalty payments".
According to the W3C, the Policy lends support to the basic idea that has driven innovation on the web from the beginning. Companies, researchers and independent developers make contributions of design insights, valuable engineering resources, and hard work in order to develop technical interoperability standards upon which a worldwide information infrastructure can be built.
The intention is that these standards are patent and royalty-free.
Open-source development, as this is known, has always been controversial because commercial businesses wish to make money from their innovations. In the past, technology that has been approved for use by the W3C has sometimes later been shown to have a sting in its tail, as a patent is revealed and royalties demanded.
The primary goal of the Policy is therefore that W3C Recommendations be implemented on a royalty-free basis. The Policy also requires patent disclosure by W3C Members when they are aware of patents that may be essential to the implementation of W3C Recommendations. Inevitably, however, there have been some concessions to business.
The Patent Policy provides that:
All who participate in the development of a W3C Recommendation must agree to license essential claims (that is, patents that block interoperability) on a royalty-free basis.
Under certain circumstances, Working Group participants may exclude specifically identified patent claims from the Royalty-Free commitment. These exclusions are required shortly after publication of the first public Working Draft, reducing the likelihood that surprise patents will jeopardize collective Working Group efforts.
Patent disclosures are required from W3C Members and requested of anyone else who sees the technical drafts and has actual knowledge of patents that may be essential.
Patent claims not available with terms consistent with the W3C Patent Policy will be addressed by an exception handling process.
The Policy provides for the situation where technologies proposed for inclusion in Web standards are not available according to the conditions defined in the Patent Policy. This could be, for example, when a patent holder wants to charge a fee.
In this case, W3C will convene a "Patent Advisory Group" (PAG) to investigate the issue and the PAG may recommend a legal analysis of the patent, instruct the Working Group to attempt to design around the patent or remove the patented feature, or may suggest stopping all work in the area.
There is a controversial alternative.
If all avenues to reach a result consistent with W3C licensing requirements have been exhausted, the PAG may recommend to the W3C membership that the technology be included anyway. Such a recommendation requires that the precise licensing terms are publicly disclosed and will be subject to review by the public, the W3C Membership, and the Director.
Daniel Weitzner, chair of W3C's Patent Policy Working Group, explained that, "nearly unanimous support is required for such exceptions. This should only be used in rare cases and is only available after all other alternatives have been tried."
Bruce Perens, a champion of the open-source movement, and an invited expert on the Patent Policy Working Group, told CNET News.com “It’s not bulletproof. But it’s an improvement.â€
