Discussion of all things related to Public Domain

[tom poe <tompoe AT renonevada.net>]

Hi:  I've spent the last week trying to communicate with the W3.org folks in 
an effort to get a handle on a clear and easy to read list of W3.org 
standards and categorized as to whether these standards are either 
royalty-free, or RAND [patent-encumbered].  Does anyone know where I might 
get such an organized list that's authoritative and can be relied upon?

I can't help but worry that the proposed legislative assault is going to 
somehow integrate controls that include utilization of patent-encumbered 
standards to the benefit of corporations such as IBM and Microsoft in the 
case of ebXML, and others.  A fellow named Thomas Fielding [of Apache fame] 
wrote a nice dissertation on http and did a good job of laying out some of 
the options for the future of the Internet.  In the face of such logic, we 
somehow are all caught up in attempts to move away from this standard for 
communicating, through proprietary protocols.  This begs the question, Why?  
I recommend the dissertation as some interesting reading.  
http://www1.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top

Thanks,
Tom
http://www.studioforrecording.org/
http://www.ibiblio.org/studioforrecording/
http://renotahoe.pm.org/