Dear WebApps members, This message was also supposed to be sent to the WebApps public mail list.
Per Fröjdh AC Rep of Ericsson -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Per Fröjdh Sent: den 7 maj 2009 14:59 To: [email protected]; [email protected] Cc: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] Subject: Patent licensing and avoiding late Exclusions of Essential Claims in the WebApps WG Dear AC Representatives, W3C WebApps Working Group, Re: Patent licensing and avoiding late Exclusions of Essential Claims Today Ericsson joined the W3C Web Applications Working Group. Some W3C members may be aware of the Ericsson preference to license some of its patents on FRAND terms and conditions. For the avoidance of doubt we would therefore like to state that we understand that the W3C Patent Policy applies to this Working Group and the licensing obligations of Working Group participants apply to Ericsson. There is a possibility that Ericsson in the W3C WebApps Working Group might be faced with a situation where we would have to exclude an Essential Claim with respect to a first public Working Draft or documents later in the W3C Recommendation track, e.g. due to a Submission by other member causing one of our claims to become Essential claim. Unfortunately an exclusion at that stage will initiate the Exception Handling in the W3C Patent Policy and may cause significant additional work by the Working Group to design around the Excluded Claims. Ericsson would like to find a way to avoid causing all the work associated with the Exception Handling according to the W3C Patent Policy. In case Ericsson representatives in W3C, long before the publication of the first public Working Draft, would be aware of a patent or patent application that they think might have or get claims that might become Essential Claims to a future first public Working Draft, Ericsson would like to draw the attention of the Working Group to such a patent in case we want to exclude such claims from the W3C RF licensing requirements, and instead license them on e.g. FRAND terms and conditions. The major purpose of this would be to enable the Working Group to avoid language in the first public Working Draft whereby claims of the patent might become Essential claims. In this way all the additional work associated with an exclusion after the publication of the first public Working Draft could hopefully be avoided. As a new member in the WebApps Working Group it has not yet been possible at this moment to identify which claims that might possibly be Essential Claims for specifications presently being developed by WebApps Working Group. We will look into this now. Hopefully there will be no Ericsson owned Essential claims. What Ericsson can do now at this moment regarding the WebApps Working group is to draw the attention to patents or patent applications. At the moment Ericsson representatives are only aware of three different patents and patent applications and corresponding patents and patent applications in other countries which we would like to inform the WebApps Working Group on. The first is US 6,321,250, the second is EP1310114 and the third is PCT/EP2008/064352 (not yet published). We understand that this document is not a formal exclusion in accordance with the W3C Patent Policy and we understand that the WebApps Working group can decide to ignore it. We can only hope that our efforts to avoid late exclusions are welcome. Hopefully we will not need to make an Exclusions at all. Per Fröjdh AC Rep of Ericsson --- Per Fröjdh, Ph.D. Head of Visual Technology Ericsson Research
