W3C Group Participation Home

Web Fonts Working Group Patent Policy Status

Participation

W3C Member Organizations
  • Adobe Systems Inc. (4 representatives)
  • Apple, Inc. (3 representatives)
  • Department of Information Technology, Government of India (1 representative)
  • Google, Inc. (8 representatives)
  • Microsoft Corp. (1 representative)
  • Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (2 representatives)
  • Monotype (2 representatives)
  • Mozilla Foundation (1 representative)
  • Opera Software AS (no representative)
Invited Experts
  • Khaled Hosny Ghetas
  • John Hudson
Team members
  • Chris Lilley

See also the list of individuals participating in this group.

Join or leave this group (see general instructions for joining this group). Advisory Committee Representatives of participating Members may also nominate or change representatives in the group.

The Call for Participation for this group was announced on 24 October 2012; see the Patent Policy FAQ for information about continued participation before re-joining the group.

Licensing Commitments

Participants in this group have made certain licensing commitments by joining the group. See the details about licensing commitments from current and past Participants and other parties.

W3C Members not participating in this group who wish to make the same licensing commitments for specifications developed by this group may do so through a form for licensing commitments from non-participating Members.

Other parties who wish to make the licensing commitments for this group should consult the instructions for non-Members to make licensing commitments for this group.

Specifications for this group

The following is the list of specifications produced by the Web Fonts Working Group that have associated disclosures obligations, and possibly licensing obligations under the W3C Patent Policy.

Drafts
Specification Policy Disclose Exclude Add licensing information Disclosure & exclusion
WOFF File Format 2.0 W3C Disclose No open exclusion opportunity Add licensing information 1 patents have been disclosed
Recommendations
Specification Policy Disclosures
WOFF File Format 1.0 W3CNone

See the detailed information on how to disclose a patent, how to exclude a patent claim and how to add licensing terms below.

Note: If a specification does not appear in this table, the group may have identified it as being "informative only." To add or modify an item in this table, please refer to the IPP instructions.

Patent Disclosures and Claim Exclusions

This section summarizes patent disclosures by participants in W3C's Web Fonts Working Group as required by section 6 of the 5 February 2004 W3C Patent Policy. Note: This disclosure mechanism applies to all W3C Working Groups after 15 February 2004, per the Patent Policy Transition Procedure.

W3C takes no position regarding either:

  1. the validity or scope of any intellectual property right or other rights that might be claimed to pertain to the implementation or use of the technology, or
  2. the extent to which any license under such rights might or might not be available from those not participating in this group.

W3C Members are obligated to disclose a patent when they receive a request for disclosure and have personal knowledge of the patent under the following conditions:

Where disclosure is required by a W3C Member, the AC Representative makes the disclosure.

Anyone else may also make a disclosure.

Known Disclosures

Disclosures for WOFF File Format 2.0

The entry in the first column links to details about the disclosed patent, including any excluded claims or additional licensing information that has been provided.

Patent for WOFF File Format 2.0LicensingNotes
Issued patent '6,031,622' (USA) held by Monotype disclosed on 2014-06-05 Royalty-Free Licensing details

How to Make a Patent Disclosure

W3C Members and Invited Experts (including those not participating in this group) wishing to disclose a patent for any specification produced by the Web Fonts Working Group should use the Web Fonts Working Group patent disclosure form.

Disclosures from the general public should be sent to the Staff Contacts of this group.

For specifications developed under the W3C Patent Policy, parties that commit to the W3C Royalty-Free Licensing Terms are not required to disclose patents. Any party (not just the Working Group Participants) may commit to the W3C Royalty-Free Licensing Terms and may do so by following the instructions in the next section.

Claim Exclusions

Only Web Fonts Working Group participants may exclude patent claims concerning specifications developed under the W3C Patent Policy, per section 4 of the W3C Patent Policy. To make an exclusion, participants should use the Web Fonts Working Group patent claim exclusion form, but only after first disclosing the patent.

Exclusion Opportunities

The Patent Policy FAQ provides detailed information about exclusion opportunities, that is, when a Working Group Participant can exclude a patent claim.

Each exclusion opportunity has a duration. See section 4.1 of the W3C Patent Policy and section 2 of the Patent Policy Transition Procedure for information on how the exclusion deadline is calculated.

At each exclusion opportunity, Participants may exclude patent claims with respect to a body of text. The Reference Draft is the reference body of text for the current exclusion opportunity.

Note: At each new exclusion opportunity (e.g., in the case of a second Last Call), exclusions are only with respect to differences since the previous reference body of text. These differences may be less than an entire document, and the summary below does not (yet) address that granularity. Also, in some edge cases (discussed in the FAQ), Participants, depending on when they joined the Working Group, will have different Reference Drafts; the summary below does not reflect this case.

History of Exclusion Opportunities

WOFF File Format 1.0
  1. Call for exclusion sent on 27 July 2010; opportunity ended on 24 December 2010
  2. Call for exclusion sent on 16 November 2010; opportunity ended on 15 January 2011
WOFF File Format 2.0
  1. Call for exclusion sent on 13 May 2014; opportunity ended on 05 October 2014
  2. Call for exclusion sent on 15 March 2016; opportunity ended on 14 May 2016

Additional Licensing Information

As described in section 5 of the W3C Patent Policy:

All Working Group participants are encouraged to provide a contact from which licensing information can be obtained and other relevant licensing information. Any such information will be made publicly available along with the patent disclosures for the Working Group in question.

Patent holders may:

  1. Provide additional licensing information for documents produced by this Working Group
  2. Provide the same additional licensing information for all documents with associated licensing obligations produced by this Working Group, or
  3. Provide additional licensing information for any W3C document with associated licensing obligations produced by any W3C Working Group under the W3C Patent Policy.

Please recall that, per section 5 of the W3C Patent Policy, a W3C Royalty-Free license:

may not impose any further conditions or restrictions on the use of any technology, intellectual property rights, or other restrictions on behavior of the licensee, but may include reasonable, customary terms relating to operation or maintenance of the license relationship such as the following: choice of law and dispute resolution.

Any additional licensing information that has been provided is listed below. The section below will be empty when no additional licensing information has been provided.

Additional licensing information for WOFF File Format 2.0

The following entities have provided licensing information for this specificiation :

Additional licensing information provided for all Recommendation Track documents produced by this group

Participants

Note: All actions carried out through this system are reported by email to the relevant parties; copies are sent to [email protected] (Member-readable archive).


Maintained by Carine Bournez ([email protected]) (originally developed by Dominique Hazaël-Massieux).
$Id: status.php,v 1.293 2018/01/30 13:17:38 carine Exp $