[dsdl-discuss] Re: Papers for Philadelphia meeting

Martin Bryan wrote:

>Rick/Erik: Will we have revised drafts for Parts 3 or 10 to discuss?
>

I want to propose the draft I put out several months ago as committee
draft. I will
add James' RELAX NG schema for Schematron (+ a couple of changes) and
fill out some parts. Since this has been out for several months, I hope
member bodies
are in a position to comment on it after this time.

----------------------------------------

I should mention that I have had correspondence with an investigator
with the
European Patent Office who wrote:

"I work in the field of patents and I have identified a company
(ISPHERES) that is trying to get a patent covering a variation of the
Schematron.
I need a (dated!) document showing that the Schematron was arround
before 06.04.2000
if I want to prove that the patent application is not new. "

Schematron dates from October 1999, and most of the ideas had been
mentioned by
me (including in a paper available in some conference proceedings) early
in 1999.
I sent off a complete reply inlcuding references, and have not heard
more. One of
my comments was that Schematron should be too obvious for a patent, on
the grounds
that it (or something close) has been independently developed at least
four times.

I do not believe that this is a basis for halting ISO Schematron. I will
keep the
WG informed.

-----------------------------------------------------

However it does raise three points in my mind:

 1) The need for inventors to put out on paper or open source every idea
they do
not wish to patent themselves as soon as possible: in fact, I was very
aware of
this with Schematron and Hook, which is why I published them very soon.
(I probably should have put out more information concerning validation
with logic
programs, just in case.)

 2) I believe that the Western IPR systems for software, as being
promoted by the US especially, is to some extent a negative force
against standards and open specifications. I believe there is
moderately strong agreement that the further down the protocol stack
one goes, the more we all benefit from standards. Howwever, the
situation we face is that when a standard becomes successful,
there is a mad patent rush for the immediate next layer. The end result
is an encumbered protocol stack, just the thing standards are meant
to work against.

 The attempted patents on stylesheets, the Eolas patent, attempts
to patent schemas, and so on, I believe demonstrate a failure.
Of whom though? Of standards bodies for not providing as exhaustive
as possible examples and use cases so that there is some defense
against patents on the intended uses of standards? Of greedy
corporate users who don't buy that only really clever things
should be standardized? Or the IPR bodies for allowing patents
which involve international standards.

 In other words, we standardized markup languages, schemas
and transformation languages etc with the intent of making these
available for everyone to use, not (I believe) with the intent
of providing more material for greedy squatters. I wonder if
there is anything that SC34 can do: for example to write a letter
to all national IPR bodies requesting that International Standards
not be undermined. I don't know if there is a cogent way to
express this in legalese (where is Charles?) but certainly I
feel that there should be no patents on schemas or on techniques
that require a markup language.

  I would ask that this issue be put on the agenda, if possible,
please.

 3) How do we know that things we standardize are not the subject
of patents, especially with Europe signing up for sofware patents?

  By the way, I believe I will again not be representing Standards
Australia this meeting. I tried to contact the official who told
me Standards Australia no longer supports people to go to standards
meetings, but he was overseas at a standards meeting.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

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