[jstepien]

I'm wondering what would be an effect of moving a standardisation organisation to a software-patent-free country. In such case software patent issues wouldn't be any obstacle for the organisation in their standardisation processes. On the other hand, created standards would be useless in countries where technologies covered in the standard had already been patented.

As a result, isn't it so that software patents in some countries inhibit the development of standards on a global scale? That's troubling.

[aristidb]

I think just creating the standard is not the problem. If W3C had a policy "We don't care about patents", nobody could sue THEM.

However, if anybody wanted to actually use those standards, he/she would get sued.

[CaveTech]

Even if the standards process could be carried out in another country, as you said, countries where patents exist would not be able to implement the resulting standard. The end result would be an api that is anything but standard.

It's important that the groups work slowly to clear all legal issues so that standards can truly be used on a global scale.

[bzbarsky]

In this case the standard would be largely implemented by 4 or 5 organizations, all but one of which are based in the US (Mozilla, Opera, Apple, Google, Microsoft, if you count Google and Apple separately).

I can't speak for the validity of the patents involved in Norway or whether Apple could pursue Opera for distributing a browser infringing on their patents in the US. But for the others, the patent situation is very relevant.

So it wouldn't matter if the standard just decided to standardize something that Apple claims patents on, if Microsoft and Mozilla then couldn't implement the standard due to those patents....