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 <title>FSF's Position on W3 Consortium &ldquo;Royalty-Free&rdquo; Patent 
 Policy - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
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 	content="The W3C RF patent policy seems on its surface to be helpful to Free Software, but in fact it is not.  FSF encourages the public to say so in response to the last call." />
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 <h2>FSF's Position on W3 Consortium &ldquo;Royalty-Free&rdquo; Patent Policy</h2>
 <p>
 <i>Rewritten 1 June 2003</i>
 </p>
 
 <h3>Our Position</h3>
 
 <p>
 The Free Software Foundation, represented by Professor Moglen of
 Columbia University Law School, has participated in the W3 Consortium
 Patent Policy Working Group from November 2001 through the present.
 The current W3C patent policy, which in most cases requires
 &ldquo;royalty-free&rdquo; or &ldquo;RF&rdquo; patent licenses, is a
 significant step in the direction of protecting the World Wide Web
 from patent-encumbered standards.  But it falls short because a
 loophole allows conditions on these patent licenses that would
 prohibit free software implementations of the standards.</p>
 
 <p>
 The problem comes from the &ldquo;field of use&rdquo; restrictions
 that patent holders are allowed to put in their royalty-free patent
 licenses.  Such restrictions say that you are allowed to practice the
 patented idea, but only for implementing the standard precisely as
 specified&mdash;not in any other way.  Thus, if you change the code
 to depart from the spec even slightly, the patent license no longer
 protects you from against being sued for infringing the patent.</p>
 
 <p>
 The W3C has policies to reject some kinds of &ldquo;field of
 use&rdquo; restrictions.  For instance, it won't allow a patent
 license to be limited to a certain kind of software or a certain kind
 of platform.  (We were informed of this in 2012.)  However, that still
 allows other kinds of restrictions that can cause a problem.</p>
 
 <p>
 One requirement for Free Software is that users have the freedom to
 modify and redistribute it.  But we can hardly consider that users
 have freedom to publish modified versions of the program if, for a
 part of the program's behavior, modification is prohibited.  Thus,
 these &ldquo;field of use&rdquo; restrictions would prevent
 implementation of W3C standards as <a href="/philosophy/free-sw.html">
 Free Software</a>.</p>
 
 <p>
 &ldquo;Field of use&rdquo; restrictions are also legally incompatible
 with section 7 of the <a href="/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html">GNU
 General Public License (version 2)</a>, since it does not allow the user's
 freedom to modify to be shrunk to zero in this way.</p>
 
 <p>
 Many other Free Software licenses have no provisions equivalent to the
 GPL's Section 7, but you can't solve the problem merely by using one
 of those licenses.  Section 7 is intended to prevent the imposition of
 side restrictions (for instance, by patent licenses) which would deny
 the freedoms that the GPL itself gives you.  If the software license
 does nothing to prevent this, you can find yourself in a situation
 where the program's license appears to give you freedom, but this
 freedom has been taken away by restrictions not stated there.</p>
 
 <p>
 Freedom to modify software can always be limited by third-party
 patents in ways that the software copyright license doesn't disclose.
 This is why software patents are <a href="https://ffii.org/">so
 dangerous to software freedom</a>.</p>
 
 <p>The FSF plans to continue to participate in the implementation
 process.  We will try to convince patent-holders not to impose
 &ldquo;field of use&rdquo; restrictions, and we encourage all those
 who care about the right of Free Software developers to implement all
 future web standards to do the same.</p>
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 <p>Copyright &copy; 2002, 2003, 2012, 2021 Free Software Foundation, Inc.</p>
 
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 <p class="unprintable">Updated:
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 $Date: 2021/09/22 09:19:58 $
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