News Berners-Lee comes out fighting to save Web

From el Reg:

Inventor of the World Wide Web and head of the W3C, Tim Berners-Lee, has taken the unprecedented decision to actively fight a patent case, claiming it will undermine the Internet and wipe out huge swathes of Net history.

Berners-Lee is well known for his robust defence of open, royalty-free standards as the only way to progress with the Internet, but in the case of US patent 5,838,906, he has written personally to the director of the US Patent and Trademark Office, James Rogan, to insist he review the awarded patent.

"Removing the improperly disruptive effect of this invalid patent is important not only for the future of the Web, but also for the past," Berners-Lee writes. He goes on to argue: "The practical impact of withholding unrestricted access to the patented technology from use by the Web community will be to substantially impair the usability of the Web for hundreds of millions of individuals in the United States and around the world."

Full story here

Although I was all for someone taking a bite out of MS, (which is what Eolas did to the tune of $521m), I'm glad that Tim is trying to get it reversed. Because he's right - the only reason Eolas did this was to tuck their bank account up. If they had been so incensed by the infingment of their patented technology, why did they wait so long to bring the suite? The Patent was filed in '94 and granted in '98...