Patent and Web Standards Town Hall

Michael Champion is a Research and Development Specialist at Software AG, working out of Ann Arbor, Michigan. He graduated from the University of Michigan and did graduate study specializing in data analysis and computer simulation of international conflict. He has been a software developer in the U.S.A. for 20 years, working primarily in the area of middleware for client-server document and image management systems. He has been active in the World Wide Consortium’s Document Object Model (DOM) Working Group for more than three years and was a principal author of the core XML portion of the DOM Level 1 Recommendation.

Champion joined Software AG in early 1999 and now works in the Technology Enablement group, focusing on technical business development activities, writing articles on XML technology, and building example integrations between XML applications and Software AG’s database and enterprise integration products. He continues to be active in the W3C DOM working group as well as the W3C XML Protocols working group.

Biography

Daniel Weitzner is Director of the World Wide Web Consortium's Technology and Society activities. As such, he is responsible for development of technology standards that enable the web to address social, legal, and public policy concerns such as privacy, free speech, protection of minors, authentication, intellectual property and identification. He is also the W3C's chief liaison to public policy communities around the world and a member of the ICANN Protocol Supporting Organization Protocol Council. As one of the leading figures in the Internet public policy community, he was the first to advocate user control technologies such as content filtering and rating to protect children and avoid government censorship of the Intenet. These arguments played a critical role in the 1997 US Supreme Court case, Reno v. ACLU, awarding the highest free speech protections to the Internet. He successfully advocated for adoption of amendments to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act creating new privacy protections for online transactional information such as Web site access logs. Weitzner holds a research appointment at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science and teaches Internet public policy at MIT.

Before joining the W3C, Mr. Weitzner was co-founder and Deputy Director of theCenter for Democracy and Technology, an Internet civil liberties organization in Washington, DC. He was also Deputy Policy Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Mr. Weitzner has a degree in law from Buffalo Law School, and a B.A. in Philosophy from Swarthmore College. His publications on communications policy have appeared in the Yale Law Review, Global Networks, MIT Press, Computerworld, Wired Magazine, Social Research, Electronic Networking: Research, Applications & Policy, and The Whole Earth Review. He is also a commentator for NPR's Marketplace Radio.

Abstract

In recent months, the W3C has released a working draft of new framework governing the potential use of patented technology in W3C Recommendations. As the working draft of 16 August states, "the root of the challenge posed by patents in any standards arena is that participants in a standards body will be unwilling and unable to work collaboratively if, at the end of the process, the jointly-developed standard can only be implemented by meeting licensing terms that are unduly burdensome, unknown at the beginning or even the end of the design process, or considered unreasonable." There has been an unprecedented response to the proposed policy, indicating that there is widespread disagreement in the Web community on the desirability of incorporating patented technology and on what terms are "reasonable."

This Town Hall forum will be open to the public as well as XML 2001 attendees and will provide an opportunity to listen to speakers describe the issues at stake in this controversy and to participate in the debate over the best way for the Web community to respond. The forum will concentrate on the W3C patent policy and how it can be defined to be practical and workable in the current legal environment.