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[ Policy Updates and Analysis from the Internet Standards World
[ Provided by
[ The Center for Democracy & Technology's
[ Internet Standards, Technology, and Policy Project
Welcome to the Standards Bulletin, a publication of CDT's Internet Standards, Technology, & Policy Project. This series is intended to provide updates and analysis about public policy implications of the work of the organizations that design the technical standards on which the Internet is based.
This Bulletin provides an update on significant developments at the recent Advisory Committee meeting of the World Wide Web Consortium ("W3C"), and the 55th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force ("IETF"), both of which took place during the week of November 18 through 22, 2002. John Morris of the Standards Project attended and participated in both meetings.
The question of whether intellectual property rights such as patents should govern technical standards in the Internet area continues to be an important topic of debate. The most significant discussion on the question took place at the W3C Advisory Committee meeting concerning a newly proposed "patent policy" for the W3C. At that meeting, the W3C took steps toward adopting a open patent policy that is viewed as favoring "open source" software and promoting competition.
The key issue raised is which of two approaches to patents should the W3C adopt for its standards -- to answer the question of whether restrictive patents can ever cover technology in a W3C standard. Some believe that W3C should allow standards that would be covered by "RAND" (or "reasonable and non-discriminatory") patent license. With RAND licensing, software developers would likely have to pay license fees to the patent holder in order to implement a particular standard, effectively preventing an "open source" or "free software" developer from using the standard.
Others believe that the W3C should adopt a patent policy that would require "RF" (or "royalty free") patent licensing, meaning that patented technology could only be included in a standard if it were made available to software developers on a "royalty-free" basis. RF licensing would generally support open source development and would permit broad use of the standard.
The decision by an organization as important and respected as the W3C to embrace royalty-free requirements for standards is likely to be viewed as a major commitment to openness and innovation in Internet standards. It remains to be seen, however, whether the W3C will suffer any long-term harm (from, for example, a loss of corporate membership or participation) because of the royalty-free decision.
As background, two years ago the W3C decided that it needed to clarify its patent policy. The prior policy was largely unwritten, and although most W3C standards were RF, the policy effectively permitted either RAND or RF. The impetus for the move to clarify the policy was the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) development effort. Late in that development effort, a company that had been participating in the effort claimed that it held a patent over part of the technology in the proposed standard. That patent claim seriously delayed the development and release of P3P, and was resolved only after W3C obtained a legal opinion that the claimed patent would not in fact cover P3P technology.
After an initial draft (in 2001) that favored but did not require RF patent licensing, the W3C Patent Policy Working Group received extensive public comments, most of which argued that W3C should embrace a RF-only patent licensing policy. The Working Group revised the draft policy over the past year, working with three "invited experts" who represent portions of the free software and open source communities. The Working Group released its new proposal in conjunction with the Advisory Committee meeting that took place on November 19 and 20.
The newly released draft policy adopts a royalty-free approach. The draft policy states:
"In order to promote the widest adoption of Web standards, W3C seeks to issue Recommendations [for standards] that can be implemented on a Royalty-Free (RF) basis. Under this policy, W3C will not approve a Recommendation if it is aware that Essential Claims exist which are not available on Royalty-Free terms."
This draft is a significant step away from W3C's 2001 patent proposal, which would have allowed W3C working groups to incorporate technology covered by RAND licenses. By adopting a RF approach, the W3C policy will ensure that any W3C standard can be implemented without incurring patent licensing fees.
The draft patent policy, however, includes a number of provisions that seek to address concerns of patent holders (which includes many large corporate members of the W3C):
This last provision - limiting the RF use of patented technology to implementations of the W3C standard - is drawing fire from the Free Software Foundation and others in the open source community. Although the W3C policy would allow its standards to be used on a RF basis, the limitation on "other uses" would be problematic under some existing open source licensing agreements.
The draft W3C patent policy is now open to public comment until the end of 2002. The Patent Policy Working Group expects to finalize the patent policy by May 2003.
The same week in which the W3C considered its new draft patent policy, the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) also met. Although the focus of the working group meeting was on clarifications to IETF's existing patent policy (to ensure that patent holders clearly and timely declare their patents), there was also debate about whether the IETF should follow the W3C's lead and embrace a royalty-free patent policy.
There is much less support within the IETF for a "RF only" approach, for at least two reasons. First, many within the IETF have the general view that the current IETF approach to patents has not caused significant problems and thus does not need to be changed. The IETF does permit RAND technology to be included in patents, but in practice there is a strong preference for RF technology and the great bulk of the output of the IETF is RF.
Second, some of the work of the IETF (unlike the W3C) is on technical standards that are implemented in hardware (instead of software). Patents are far more common in the hardware manufacturing business, and most hardware manufacturers hold patents and cross-license them to their competitors. The hardware environment is significantly different than the world of software, where free or "open source" software can be created and distributed, often by individuals or very small companies.
The IETF IPR working group decided to complete its clarifications of the existing patent policy before further considering whether to make any major changes to the policy. At this point, however, it appears unlikely that the IETF will follow the W3C's lead on the patenting issue.
The W3C draft patent policy can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-patent-policy-20021114/.
The charter of the IPR working group can be found at http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/ipr-charter.html.
The GEOPRIV working group of the IETF is developing technology to protect the privacy of location information that will increasingly be used in Internet communications. The working group met at the IETF meeting in Atlanta, and made progress on three important documents: a "scenarios" document detailing the situations in which location privacy is an issue, a "threats document detailing the types of privacy and security attacks that should be prevented, and a "requirements" document detailing the key elements of the privacy protecting protocol being developed by the working group. Standards Project Director John Morris was a lead co-author of two of the documents (scenarios and requirements), and a participant in the drafting of the third document.
The GEOPRIV working group has made a key decision that certain privacy rules must be able to be transported WITH the location information, instead of simply relying on a reference to an external set of privacy rules. Although the exact number and format of the rules to be carried with the location data has yet to be determined, the "location object" will be able to carry a core set of rules.
On which rules to include in with the location information itself, CDT's Standards Project has advanced within the working group a detailed proposal of rules. The relevant document is "Core Privacy Protections for Geopriv Location Object," Internet-Draft, November 2002, http://www.cdt.org/standards/draft-morris-geopriv-core-00.txt (original text format). This document will become a starting point for later working group discussion of this issue.
The work of the GEOPRIV working group was discussed in more detail in Standards Bulletin 1.01, http://www.cdt.org/standards/bulletin/1.01.shtml.
The most recent submission by the Standards Project to the GEOPRIV working group can be found at
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Standards Bulletin 1.03 Copyright 2002 Center for Democracy and Technology
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