Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 03/30/07 11:07

Scripsit Toby A Inkster:

> Grant Robertson wrote:
>
>> Was that ever patented?
>
> No, why would it have been?

Who knows? Companies patent things for various reasons. And I haven't
checked the patent registrations in all the countries of world (patents are
normally country-specific, with some exceptions like community patents in
the EU) to see whether HTML has been patented. But it could hardly have been
patented by W3C, since HTML was invented and published years before the W3C
was established.

> The whole point of the Web is that it
> should be free and open.

In any case, it's not completely free and open. But there would be little
point in making HTML patented.

> Patenting HTML would be contrary to the spirit of it.

In any case, the W3C uses the trademark sign ("TM" in superscript style) to
indicate "XHTML" as protected by _trademark_. Of course, there's a good
reason to that, and a real reason. To add to the confusion, their "legal
notice" at
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/ipr-notice-20021231
indicates both "HTML" and "XHTML" as "generic terms", which looks very much
like nonsense, especially when compared with their use of the trademark
sign.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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