Member → The Art of Consensus →

Linking to Patent Policy Disclosure Pages

This Guidebook is the collected wisdom of the W3C Group Chairs and other collaborators.

Status of This Document

This document is part a series of documents that describe W3C Technical Report Publication Policies.

Guidelines

• If a group is managed under the Implementation of the Patent Policy (IPP), the status section SHOULD include a link directly to the group's IPP "status page". For example, see the Voice Browser Working Group status page.
  • If a group has a history of disclosures prior to being managed under IPP, the group MUST provide public access to the history. Suggested approaches (which may all be used):
    • Include a link from the public group home page to the historical disclosures.
    • Link from the status section of the document to the page with the historical disclosures. At the top of that document, inform users that after some date, disclosures are managed through IPP (and link to the IPP status page).
• Otherwise, the group should link to an instantiation of this disclosure page template and should create a WBS form based on this WBS disclosure template that may be used by anyone.

Background

Once the W3C Patent Policy Transition Procedure became operational (15 February 2004), all W3C groups follow the disclosure procedures of section 6 of the 5 February 2004 W3C Patent Policy. In particular, section 6.3 states:

Disclosure requests will be included in the "Status of This Document" section of each Recommendation track document as it reaches each new maturity level (Working Draft, Last Call Working Draft, Candidate Recommendation, Proposed Recommendation, Recommendation).

W3C's Publication Rules ("pubrules") requires a link to instructions for how to disclose. The details are left to pubrules proper in order to allow for evolution. This document provides guidelines for linking to disclosure instructions.