Re: Who owns the patent for HTML, if there is one?

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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