frivoal / w3c-ipr Goto Github PK

Documents under the current Patent Policy should be able to trivially transition to the new Patent Policy by republication of a Review Draft. This particular republication would need to make all previous commitments live.

The classic W3C Patent Policy has specific rules for FPWD (and subsequent WDs prior to "Last Call"). The WHATWG has no equivalent to FPWD (or to WDs), and therefore no specific clause in their IPR Policy, but they do have a requirement that a Review Draft be published within 6 months of the Workstream being formed. Evergreen has "Preliminary Drafts", which are equivalent to WDs (and of which there is a first one). Even if an Evergreen REC is published without Preliminary Drafts first, it may be 24 months from the First Everegreen REC before the first Review Draft, during which there's no clarity on the Patent situation. The Contribution Licensing Obligations provides some measure of comfort, but there could still be WG participants who did not contribute but have claims they will eventually exclude, but are keeping initially silent about. The concern is stronger if incubation of that specification happened outside of the Working Group. An Evergreen Patent policy should either:

• restore the relevant clauses from the classic W3C Patent Policy into the Evergreen Patent Policy (pros: reusing the existing rules probably results in easier acceptance by the AC, especially given that we want to apply the improvements of the evergreen/whatwg policy to the REC track as well; cons: the rules are more complex)
• declare the first publication of an Evergreen REC (or even possibly of the first Preliminary Draft?) to be a Review Draft (pros: simple, maximum coverage; cons: more limited exclusion opportunity than in the classic Patent Policy)
• Require a Review Draft within 6 months an evergreen deliverable being included in a charter (pro: same as WHATWG; cons: more complicated than First-Draft=Review-Draft, 6 months without clarity)