Process2020/Legal-more
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Do we really need to address these issues?
While we are not aware of lawsuits due to the W3C Patent Policy's limitations with respect to licensing obligations prior to REC, W3C Members have expressed discomfort about them, particularly in the light of other standardization venues having addressed them. In particular, some have argued that these limitations could be motivations for not standardizing at W3C, for keeping work in CGs instead of moving to WGs, or for refraining from implementing features not yet in a REC, especially (though not only) those marked as at-risk.
What's the story for license obligations on immature / heavily changing specs?
With the proposal to apply license obligations earlier in the Process, there are some concerns with apply license obligations to specifications that may change significantly over time. There are two currently-proposed mitigations:
- Have Working Drafts accumulate only promises, as they do now: license obligations only apply later, when a specification is expected to be more stable.
- Consider suspending licensing obligations if material Reasons not to include a contribution-based license:
- It's an additional feature that needs to be added to the Patent Policy, but is less critical to W3C's operations than applying licensing obligations to CRs.
making a claim essential is removed, and unsuspending if that material is re-added. (Note: As with a Rescinded Recommendation, any licenses already granted continue to be valid, just new licenses are not granted while a licensing obligation is suspended.)
Additionally, the Patent Policy already mitigates this, by limiting the patent license to implementations of the specification, rather than patent licenses in general. If a specification has changed, and the latest version no longer depends on a patent claim, it may not be particularly problematic that a license was granted for an earlier version, since that is no longer the one people will find useful to implement.
It remains up to W3C's legal community proposed new Patent Policy will actually look like, and whether it will include such clauses. If you have an opinion on potential changes to the Patent Policy, please join PSIG.