An Open Letter to Members of the W3C Advisory Committee
> We've proposed a simple solution, patterned after the existing W3C patent policy. The patent policy doesn't take a position on whether patents are good or bad, but it does hold that standards are more open if you don't have to license a patent to implement them, so W3C members are required to promise not to sue others for practicing their patents when implementing W3C recommendations.<p>> Our proposal does the same thing, except for anti-circumvention rights (rather than patents). Members who participate in the Media Extensions Working Group will have to make a legally binding promise not to use anti-circumvention laws to aggress against security researchers or implementers. All other rights and causes of action -- trade secrecy, copyright, tortious interference, breach of contract -- are intact.<p>This sounds like a reasonable compromise. Having a W3C standard that can't actually be implemented by anyone except those that are explicitly granted a license is not a standard: it's really just proprietary software, and feels like going back to the days of Flash, Java and Active-X applets, only worse, because it's a legal problem instead of a technical one.<p>I'm definitely against the idea of DRM in any W3C standards without this type of provision, but I'm not sure if this is enough or not.