W3C investigating Apple’s patent

There’s a rather interesting report on the UK ZDNet website about Apple’s refusal to licence royalty-free a patent for use in a proposed web standard. US Patent No 5,764,992 relates to a method for automatically updating software programs on a computer.

Web standards are set up by the World Wide Web Consortium. Their website states that Apple have apparently noted that this patent applies to the Widets 1.0 specification and have exluded all claims from the royalty-free license commitment of the W3C Patent Policy. The W3C is now asking for prior art to be submitted for review by the patent advisory group for the Widgets
specification.

Clearly the W3C group is taking this issue very seriously and its call for prior art to be submitted in an effort to at least potentially invalidate the patent is the first time known to this author that such a procedure has been valid. The patent policy of W3C is, however, different than that of many other standard-making organisations. The patent policy states clearly that any licence may not be conditionable on payment of royalties, fees or other consideration (see section 5 No 3 of the patent policy). Most standard-making bodies seem to state that it is adequate to be prepared to grant licences on FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms.

So what will be the outcome? At least a highly interesting discussion – and wouldn’t we all like to be a fly on the proverbial wall during those discussions. Potentially the patent could be declared invalid – if somebody files a request for re-examination at the US Patent Office. It is also possible that companies may choose to license the patent from Apple directly (if Apple is willing to license). In the extreme, the attempts to standardise the widget updating process may fail – since W3C may chose not to adopt any standard at all, rather than a standard which requires a license.

Potentially, of course, the Europeans (or Japanese or Chinese) don’t need to worry – Apple do not seem to have filed the patent outside of the US. However, the moment those updating bytes fly into US territory they could be served with an injunction by nasty Apple bug.

Tagged as: apple, Patents, Standards, Wordl Wide Web Consortium