[MPEG-OTSPEC] Patent policy and process

Wed Aug 19 04:59:31 CEST 2020

I am mostly in agreement, with few comments inline.

On Tuesday, August 18, 2020 3:15 AM Norbert Lindenberg wrote:

I’d like to have a forum where font rendering implementors, font developers, font tool developers, text application developers, script experts, and others with relevant expertise can collaborate on roughly equal footing. It’s unavoidable that implementors in the end have a stronger voice because without them it’s all just talk, but I think it’s essential to get out of this situation where a single company or person can control the process.

Agree completely that we need to make sure that every voice is heard on equal footing. On a few occasions, I mentioned that this AHG strives to make our decisions based on consensus, which means that anyone who has a valid concern should be able to bring it for consideration of the group, and these concerns have to be resolved to make a progress. At the same time, the mechanism to resolve a blocking objection should also be in place if reaching a consensus decision becomes impossible – I very much like [and for many years have followed] one of the basic HTML design principles<https://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#priority-of-constituencies>: “In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity.” I believe we can adopt it pretty much verbatim.

I’d like to have a forum that produces a range of documents, some very formal, such as a standard on OpenType text shaping (as being defined in the scope discussion), some less formal, such as orthography documentation or guides on developing fonts for specific scripts. There need to be different processes for different kinds of documents.

While I agree in principle, I am not sure this can be easily implemented in practice. Almost every industry standards organization has significant processes and policies in place, some of them are more rigid than others but none of them (as far as I am aware) have processes in place that would allow such a broad range of output documents be published. We may end up facing a reality that “a forum” will end up collaborating with different organizations to achieve different goals and publish different documents. I do not really see it as a big issue, I think it would be perfectly fine to have a single forum for discussion where input proposals are discussed, and then submitted to different entities (e.g. ISO and Unicode). The mechanisms for such collaborations already exist (official liaisons between different entities), if and when these dependencies need to be formalized.

Standards produced by the group should have a specification, a conformance test suite, and at least two conformant implementations. There should be defined stages from idea to standard, as used by the W3C or Ecma TC39.

Again, this is a decision that may not be in “one size fits all” category – there is always a tradeoff between spec publication steps and implementation / test requirements. I mentioned earlier about WOFF2 development at W3C and the effect W3C implementations & conformance tests requirements had on final Recommendation approval – it took roughly three more years until the WOFF 2.0 Recommendation was officially finalized [to progress from its  Candidate Recommendation stage to Proposed Recommendation presented for Advisory Committee approval].

The outputs of this forum, and all inputs used in decisions, should be available to anyone with an internet connection, free of charge, in HTML or PDF format. I know that people commonly rely on second-hand information about ISO standards because they don’t want to pay €€€ for a PDF document. I also find it ridiculous that this AHG is supposed to work on a mandate whose input most of us don’t have access to.

Agree in principle, the caveat is in different processes. Some organizations like W3C have all their working documents and most [but not all] of their communications available to general public. Some other organizations (e.g. ISO) prefer to keep their internal working documents accessible only to those who have proper credentials. It doesn’t mean it is impossible to make them publicly available, it means that one need to take an extra step to make it happen. In fact, in most cases when intermediate ISO documents (such as OFF Committee Draft or DIS) would be up for approval via ballot, I often requested to make that document publicly available in order to share it with this group. It’s doable, just doesn’t happen automatically by default.
And as far as final output documents are concerned, there is another mechanism in place that allows submitting a request to make the ISO standard publicly available, free of charge. The ISO/IEC 14496-22 OFF standard from its 1st edition and up until now (4th edition with amendment #1) has always been publicly available<https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/> free of charge, but it is also on the official ISO bestsellers list, even though the ISO store page where you can buy the PDF text has a link right next to the “Buy” button that says you can download it for free.

I don’t care whether standards produced by the forum eventually become ISO standards. I know that parts of the Unicode Standard are published as ISO 10646, but in my work in software internationalization, that’s never been relevant to my work – all I need is on the Unicode web site. Similarly I know that ECMA-262, the standard for JavaScript, is re-published as ISO 16262, but I never even looked at it while working in TC39. HTML and CSS seem to be doing quite well without ISO standards.

Many engineers / developers may not care about official document status for as long as the info they need is readily available, but the industry (OEM) and their lawyers do care, a lot! OpenType 1.4 had seen limited adoption by major consumer electronic device makers, but as soon as the 1st edition of ISO OFF standard was published (the same exact text, with the only difference that OpenType references were replaced by OFF) – the adoption skyrocketed through the roof, and virtually all consumer devices became font-friendly. No technical differences whatsoever, the only reason is that ISO publication meant this spec is here to stay and there are proper IPR policies in place … voila, the world has changed! There are now many industry standards that mandate OFF support for conformance.

I understand that the forum needs an IP policy and other rules to keep the lawyers of the participating companies happy. Copyright of any standards, or other jointly produced documents, must be owned by the forum. The forum will likely also publish documents that are contributed as inputs to the standardization process, or other documents, whose copyright may be retained by their contributors.

The IP policies are there to primarily protect the implementers, not the contributors. In fact, they are sometimes the biggest stumbling block that makes participating company lawyers very concerned. This is why creating an IP policy and getting it approved by membership is such a difficult process. Using W3C as an example of organization that has very strong and most liberal (for implementers) IP policy – any W3C Recommendation can be implemented free of any IPR concerns. What it really means is that every member has to agree that any IP they own would be made available free of charge if any member representative makes a technical proposal that is accepted. There are caveats in place, but this is the crux of it. And, as far as copyrights are concerned, there must be proper arrangements in place that would allow a standards organization to modify, publish, maintain and extend a spec they produced. Forum (whatever that means) can’t own the copyrights independent of the organization that established that forum.

Hope this helps,
Vlad

Best regards,
Norbert
Lindenberg Software LLC

> On Aug 17, 2020, at 09:37, John Hudson <john at tiro.ca<mailto:john at tiro.ca>> wrote:
>
> On 15082020 10:28 am, Dave Crossland wrote:
>> On Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 11:55 AM John Hudson <john at tiro.ca<mailto:john at tiro.ca>> wrote:
>> what we mostly want
>> institutions to do is get out of the way.
>>
>> Yet, the rubber stamping and "setting in stone" with a us patent policy is necessary (but not wholly sufficient) for implementation and adoption:
>>
>> A cycle from de facto, to de jure, to de facto.
>>
>> That's the essential problem with commontype.org and GitHub.com/Opentype<https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/gZmXCL92DvfRqGQkCmfWTM> and all the others right now, it's all too de facto with no clear route to de jure.
>
>
> I agree that having clarity over IP and a patent policy in place is important*, and that this is one of the attractions to collaborating under the auspices of an existing organisation that has such a policy and to which a number of participating companies and individuals may already be signed up.
>
> That said, a patent policy is one of the easier things to write and agree on, and I think for companies currently considering whether and how to engage in what we’re scoping, the IP considerations will be the same regardless of the organisation.
>
> So from that perspective, I think it makes most sense for us—as we scope the work—to also consider to what kind of process do we want, collectively and voluntarily, to submit ourselves. How do we want to collaborate? And then we look at existing organisations and determine which, if any, provide that kind of process (and will they have us?).
>
> JH
>
>
>
> * Was surprised to note that UFO doesn’t appear to have a patent policy.
>
>
>
> --
>
> John Hudson
> Tiro Typeworks Ltd
> www.tiro.com<https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/TMzaCM82gJsqPwz2HQkwAI>
>
> Salish Sea, BC
> tiro at tiro.com<mailto:tiro at tiro.com>
>
>
> NOTE: In the interests of productivity, I am currently
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