[Discussioni] Fwd: [Patents] eWeek: Web Patents Still Not a Good Idea

[Alessandro Rubini]

> Subject: [Patents] eWeek:  Web Patents Still Not a Good Idea
> 
> 
> (Old news, but still pertinent.  -- Seth)
> 
> 
> http://www.eweek.com/article/0,3658,s=1864&a=26103,00.asp
> 
> Web Patents: Still Not a Good Idea
> 
> April 29, 2002 
> 
> 
> We've argued before that critical web infrastructure needs
> to come without a patent-royalty price tag attached. 
> 
> That battle was fought and won in the World Wide Web
> Consortium last year: The latest draft of the W3C patent
> policy, dated Feb. 26, 2002, states that the "W3C will not
> approve a Recommendation if it is aware that Essential
> Claims exist which are not available on Royalty-Free terms."
> 
> However, a number of key Web standards developers, most
> notably IBM and Microsoft, have now shifted some Web
> services standards development work away from the
> royalty-free W3C into new organizations that just happen to
> allow RAND (Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) patent
> licensing.
> 
> For example, the UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and
> Integration) 2.0 registry standard, edited by IBM and
> Microsoft, states needed patent rights will be
> RAND-licensed, not royalty-free.
> 
> Although the UDDI.org site states, "The oversight and
> leadership of UDDI will be turned over to a standards body
> in 2001 after the base technology is developed with wide
> industry support," it's now 2002, UDDI 3.0 is in active
> development and no signs of the fist loosening are in
> evidence.
> 
> Moreover, on April 5, Microsoft, IBM and VeriSign released a
> new set of extensions to SOAP (Simple Object Access
> Protocol), the core Web services technology, to allow for
> secure Web service requests. Given that SOAP currently has
> no security features at all, the extensions in this
> WS-Security (Web Services Security) proposal are essential
> to all those interested in deploying Web services in
> production.
> 
> WS-Security 1.0 was released directly to the Web without the
> blessing of any standards body, even a newly manufactured
> one. It grants no intellectual property rights at all to
> third parties on a RAND basis or otherwise.
> 
> A shift of development away from the W3C is not good for
> anyone in the Internet community, and the recent end run
> around the W3C by Microsoft and IBM must stop.