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FSF's Position on Proposed W3 Consortium "Royalty-Free" Patent Policy
By brian, Section News
Posted on Thu Nov 28th, 2002 at 17:15:31 GMT
The FSF is asking people to send comments to the W3C on the new "Royalty-Free" patent policy proposal. It does not protect the rights of the Free Software community to full participation in the implementation and extension of web standards. More information at www.gnu.org.

 

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.
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FSF's Position on Proposed W3 Consortium "Royalty-Free" Patent Policy | 2 comments (2 topical, editorial) | Post A Comment
[new] broken link (#1)
by brian (#54) () on Thu Nov 28th, 2002 at 18:29:19 GMT
(User Info) http://www.network-theory.co.uk/

should be http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/w3c-patent.html
--
Brian
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[new] Archives of the patent policy mailing list@W3C. (#2)
by jbn (#168) () on Tue Dec 3rd, 2002 at 06:40:37 GMT
(User Info)

Check out the patent-policy comment mailing list archives too. I think this is one instance when it's okay for many people to all chime in saying they want a patent policy that is compatible with the GNU GPL.

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FSF's Position on Proposed W3 Consortium "Royalty-Free" Patent Policy | 2 comments (2 topical, editorial) | Post A Comment
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