W3C Patent Policy
The rule that web standards must be implementable without paying patent royalties – and that anyone helping write them has to promise as much.
In 2001 the W3C floated a draft allowing standards to include patents licensed on RAND terms – "reasonable and non-discriminatory" fees, telecom-style. Developers responded with a record flood of objections, picturing a web where every browser needed a patent lawyer. The draft was reworked, and the policy adopted in February 2004 requires royalty-free licensing instead.
The mechanism: each member of a working group commits to license any patents essential to implementing a Recommendation, free of charge, to everyone. Excluding a patent must be done explicitly, within a deadline after early drafts. The policy is why HTML, CSS and SVG never acquired their own MPEG LA – and a large part of why audio and video codecs became the web's perennial fight.