Intellectual property is an important legal and cultural issue. Society as a whole has complex issues to face here: private ownership vs. open source, and so on.

Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee OM KBE FRS FREng FRSA (born 8 June 1955) also known as "TimBL" is a British computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989 and he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet sometime around mid November.