Standards, Patents and the Dynamics of Innovation on the World Wide Web

Daniel Weitzner, Principal Research Scientist MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

6/27/2008
(Original Publish Date: 11/1/2004)

The key challenge posed by patents in any standards arena is that participants in a standards body will be unwilling and unable to work collaboratively if, at the end of the process, the jointly-developed standard can only be implemented by meeting licensing terms that are unduly burdensome, unknown at the beginning or even the end of the design process, or considered unreasonable. At the same time, many commercial and academic participants in standards processes are unwilling to simply waive all of their patent claims at the door of the standards group. So, careful policies are required to establish whether and on what terms patent claims may be used by those who participate in the design of standards. As this paper will explore, standards involving network interoperability for the World Wide Web raise an variety of challenges new to traditional standards-setting environments. In order to enable the ongoing development of the Web as an open, global, decentralized information space, a patent policy for Web standards must consider both the development dynamics of Web standards themselves, and the environment in which Web standards have been implemented over the lifetime of the World Wide Web.