News: Standards group beats back patent foes
An attempt to persuade a key Internet standards body to abandon its use of patented technologies has ended in defeat.

The intellectual property rights (IPR) working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) late Wednesday made official what members had known for some time: There is no consensus within the group to restrict the use of patented technologies in IETF standards.

"It's clear that there is no consensus to recharter to change the IETF's IPR policy," Steve Bellovin, the working group's chairman and an AT&T network security researcher, wrote in an e-mail to working group members. "In fact, there is likely consensus the other way, that we should not recharter at this time."

The IETF's vote to maintain its status quo, which lets working groups continue to use patented technologies with so-called reasonable and nondiscriminatory (RAND) licenses, comes after the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) went through more than a year of public controversy over the same issue.

The use of RAND technologies in standards has attracted widespread and organized criticism in the age of open-source development. Open-source developers claim that the threat of being charged royalties for using a standard makes it useless in the context of open-source licenses, which are usually granted free of charge.…
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