[whatwg] Removal of Ogg is *preposterous*

[Charles McCathieNevile]

On Tue, 11 Dec 2007 17:11:57 +0100, Geoffrey Sneddon  
<foolistbar at googlemail.com> wrote:

> On 11 Dec 2007, at 13:36, Maik Merten wrote:
>
>>
>> The old wording was a SHOULD requirement. No MUST. If the big players  
>> don't want to take the perceived risk (their decision) they'd still be  
>> 100% within the spec. Thus I fail to see why there was need for action.
>
> There's a question within the W3C Process whether patents that are  
> covered by a SHOULD via a reference are granted a RF license similarly  
> to anything that MUST be implemented. Both Nokia and MS raised concerns  
> about this relating to publishing the spec as a FPWD.

And these concerns are total rubbish (as pointed out by Apple and others):

[[[
8.1. Essential Claims

"Essential Claims" shall mean all claims in any patent or patent  
application in any jurisdiction in the world that would necessarily be  
infringed by implementation of the Recommendation. A claim is necessarily  
infringed hereunder only when it is not possible to avoid infringing it  
because there is no non-infringing alternative for implementing the  
normative portions of the Recommendation. Existence of a non-infringing  
alternative shall be judged based on the state of the art at the time the  
specification becomes a Recommendation.
]]] - http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20040205/#def-essential

In other words, the patent policy makes it clear that to be covered,  
something must be required in order to implement. A SHOULD-level  
requirement is clearly not required.

So any such concern about the wording that was in the spec is more FUD  
than fact.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
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