The Web, which was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 while employed at CERN (l'Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire), has brought brought about many fundamental changes in today's economical, cultural and societal scenes. For education the Web has opened numerous possibilities to cross borders and to learn from one another.

But how come that the Web is free?

The fact that the Web is free and available to all is mostly accredited to the use of open standards. To guard this, to keep the web open and to lead it to its full potential, a governing body was created. This body, called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has the central role in managing the growth, the risks and the opportunities that the Web faces. There are different working groups in the W3C who give recommendations that aim at a widespread adaption of new innovations and recommendations.

What is important for open standards is that they are available for all. When new innovation of Web standards and protocols are at stake, one of the biggest peril comes from the patent industry. In the early days, when Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, he foresaw that his innovation is best left without a patent. CERN, his employee, agreed to make Tim's code available to all free of charge.

"However, as the Web became more commercially prominent and the number of software and business process patents increased, some patent holders sought to require license payments as a condition of implementing Web standards. In some cases, these patent holders had also participated in the development of those standards. Based on its experience, the W3C community came to the conclusion that it is essential to have a clear patent policy governing standards development." Thus, the development of W3C Royalty-Free (RF) Licensing Requirements. The goal of the patent policy is to enable continued innovation and widespread adoption of Web standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium.


About the World Wide Web Consortium

The W3C was created to lead the Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability. It is an international industry consortium jointly run by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in the USA, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) headquartered in France and Keio University in Japan. Services provided by the Consortium include: a repository of information about the World Wide Web for developers and users, and various prototype and sample applications to demonstrate use of new technology. More than 350 organizations are Members of W3C.

To learn more, see http://www.w3.org/

Sign a Birthday card:
http://www.w3.org/2004/09/birthdaycard/

Press release:
http://www.w3.org/2004/11/w3c10pressrelease

W3C Patent Policy:
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20040205/

European No software patents-movement:
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com