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W3C Patent Policy - Alerts and Analysis
Posted by Ernest Miller on Friday, October 05 @ 20:27:46 EDT Governance
The patent policy dispute within the W3C [see LawMeme's previous coverage (W3C Patent Policy Fight Gets Worse)] is analyzed by C|net News (Will W3C mean dollar signs?). The upshot? Only large companies are likely to benefit - and the cost of various externalities will be high. However, William F. Zachmann, vice president at META Group, a consulting company, thinks that opposition to the proposal is mostly ideological - seemingly unaware that any fee-based royalty system will not work in the open source world. The good people at EFF have issued an action alert encouraging comments opposing the proposed patent policy (Web Technology Patents Could Exclude Non-Commercial Implementations [Deadline Oct. 11]). The UK Register continues its series of scoops on this issue with a few questions about how the W3C handled this major change in policy (W3C denies misleading world+dog on RAND license status) and by breaking the story that IBM initiated the push for fee-based patent licensing for web standards (IBM risks billion dollar Linux strategy with W3C RAND demands). There must be some internal lack of communication because this initiative conflicts with IBM's support of the open source GNU/Linux platform (Linux at IBM). Hewlett-Packard, on the other hand, is the first major player to publicly oppose the proposed policy - as HP employee and open source guru Bruce Perens reports (HP Supports Royalty Free Standards for Web Infrastructure).
 
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