FSF's Position on Proposed W3 Consortium "Royalty-Free" Patent Policy |
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By brian, Section News
Posted on Thu Nov 28th, 2002 at 17:15:31 GMT |
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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.
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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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