“Twenty years ago this week, researchers renounced the right to patent the World Wide Web. Officials at CERN, the European research center where the Web was invented, wrote: ‘CERN relinquishes all intellectual property to this code, both source and binary form and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify and redistribute it.’ It’s a dull sentence from a dull document. But that document marks the moment when the World Wide Web entered the public domain — a moment that was central to creating the Web as we know it today. Could the Web have been patented? And how would the world have been different if it had?”
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