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W3C Adopts Patent Policy

W3C Adopts Patent Policy: “After years of wrangling over whether it should recommend standards which could include royalty conditions, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Tuesday created a policy which provides a narrow method for including non-royalty free technology in exceptional circumstances.” From InternetNews.com. This is a huge issue to watch going forward. The internet has been a success only because individual companies, obviously Microsoft but also many others, have been prevented from claiming ownership of key standards and demanding royalties. Instead, the W3C has organized competing parties to develop common standards (e.g., TCP/IP, HTML, CSS, XML) and left companies to build proprietary tools and software that used the standards. It will be be important to see if patents and open standards are compatible or if they’ll slow or shut down future innovation. So far promoting the common good over self-interest has led to tremendous innovations and benefits for everyone. The internet as we know it would be impossible without the cooperative model.

URLs:

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/2210201
http://www.internetnews.com

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2003 at 7:56 am and is filed under Headlines, Legal Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.