Working Group and Interest Group Charters Comment

Comment

From: Fri, 5 Aug 2016 17:46:08, Ian Jacobs Comments on Process 2016

5.2.6 Working Group and Interest Group Charters

  "Intellectual property information. What are the intellectual
  property (including patents and copyright) considerations affecting
  the success of the Group? In particular, is there any reason to
  believe that it will be difficult to meet the Royalty-Free
  licensing goals of section 2 of the W3C Patent Policy [PUB33]?"
  This text is disconnected from reality. Our charters include
  boilerplate text about the Patent Policy and, on occasion,
  document licensing information. I believe the questions quoted
  above, while they may be considered while discussing the work,
  never result information actually included in the charter (which
  is what this bullet list is about).
  Proposed: Replace the bullet with:
   * Intellectual property information. Include information about
     the governing patent policy and document license.

  Discussion
  CMN: I disagree. The point of putting this into the requirements 
  was so that charters would provide information to members, instead 
  of them being asked to commit to something, unaware that e.g. some 
  important rights-holding organisation has privately insisted this 
  work be structured to make it easier for them to avoid participating.
  Failure to inform members of the relevant information - even at the 
  level of "we believe there are organisations who *claim* to hold 
  patents in this area" - seems at best irresponsible.
  IJ: Ok. I found the text confusing as written and it feels 
  like a header + short explanation + consolidation would go a long way.
  SZ Assessment The Patents and Standards Interest Group has 
  reviewed the text in question, has accepted it and getting a re-review
  is impractical at this point.
  Deferred