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Subject: RE: [rights] Revisting the Patent and RF/RAND Issues
Bob, As far as I am aware I have not dropped out of the TC. I participate as my schedule permits me to. Secondly, as you stated, this discussion is out of scope for a technical committee. Regards, Peter Douma Sony -----Original Message----- From: Glushko, Bob [mailto:Bob.glushko@commerceone.com] Sent: Monday, December 02, 2002 1:10 PM To: 'rights@lists.oasis-open.org' Cc: 'Karl Best' Subject: [rights] Revisting the Patent and RF/RAND Issues A few events in recent weeks have caused me some concern and I'd like to propose that the TC discuss them in a courteous and careful manner. First, as we all have known from the beginning of this TC's efforts, there are patent infringement lawsuits underway between Microsoft and Intertrust. We've been repeatedly told by Content Guard that its patents were supreme in the DRM domain - I can clearly recall Brad Gandee saying that he'd welcome any direct challenge to the Content Guard patents - but the absence of Intertrust from our TC has always troubled me because of the uncertainty it raised about the implementability of our specifications. Whenever this issue was raised, we were told that it was "out of scope" for a technical TC. I disagreed, but like many here, perhaps I have engaged in wishful thinking that the Intertrust lawsuit would just go away. But it is hard for me to believe that Sony and Phillips would spend nearly half a billion dollars to acquire Intertrust, whose only assets are its patent portfolio (26 according to some news reports), if the infringement claims against Microsoft were baseless. Sony had a representative in this TC for a while, but it is no coincidence to me that he seems to have dropped out just before the announcement of the Intertrust acquisition. So we have to assume that the litigation will proceed and that it will be successful, and we have complete uncertainty about the viability of our work products in this TC until this is resolved. I have google'd many times looking for any statement by Microsoft or Content Guard about the Sony/Phillips move but haven't seen any. Can anyone in this TC interpret this with any more precision? In any case, I think it is irresponsible for the TC and OASIS to proceed to develop a DRM standard while ignoring the implications for potential implementers of the infringement litigations. I can believe that this discussion may be out of scope for the TC, but it is surely in scope for some part of OASIS, and I think we deserve more than the "heads in the sand" response we have gotten. We need to demand that the OASIS board provide some leadership. I believe that it is essential for OASIS to take up this matter given the W3C's recent decision to impose a royalty-free requirement on all of its recommendations. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing on the RF vs. RAND debate for crucial Internet and XML specifications. OASIS has become an outlier, and it needs to respond to the will of its members to stay in synch with industry preferences. A few months ago this TC, by a very narrow margin, refused to allow the RF requirement to be considered. I think it is time to revisit this issue. In addition to the uncertainty created by the Intertrust patents, I believe we now face greater uncertainty with respect to the Content Guard ones. Some people in this TC might still be confident that Content Guard will license its patents on RAND terms. But we have been shaken by Content Guard's recent last-minute declaration to OASIS (Bruce Gitlin, November 26) that it believes that its patents are relevant to any implementation of the XACML specification. This disclosure was not made until AFTER the committee had approved the specification to be submitted to OASIS. Furthermore, the Content Guard disclosure offers no useful information about what RAND really means. I am particularly troubled by the "escape clause" of "then current" in the phrase "These licenses will be provided under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions, in accordance with ContentGuard's then current licensing practices. I do not wish to impugn Content Guard's motives in acting this way - perhaps it is a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing - but it raises even greater concerns about the implementability of the specifications we are developing here. So I respectfully request that these issues be on the agenda for the next TC meeting. Robert J. Glushko, Ph.D. Engineering Fellow One Market Street, 13th Floor Steuart Tower San Francisco CA 94105 415-644-8731 ---------------------------------------------------------------- To subscribe or unsubscribe from this elist use the subscription manager: <http://lists.oasis-open.org/ob/adm.pl>
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