W3C Requests '906 Patent Re-Examination

I was surprised when I woke up and read my email to find one from the W3C's patent mailing list, a list which has been dead for a couiple of weeks. The content of the email was even more surprising:
[quote] 2003-10-29: Acting on the advice of the W3C [76]HTML Patent dvisory Group, W3C has presented the United States Patent and Trademark Office with prior art establishing that US Patent No. 5,838,906 (the '906 patent) is invalid. W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee has written an unprecedented request to US Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property James E. Rogan to take action to remove the patent to allow operation of the Web. Please refer to the [77]briefing. ([78]News archive)

[76] http://www.w3.org/2003/09/pagp
[77] http://www.w3.org/2003/10/28-906-briefing
[78] http://www.w3.org/News/2003#item173

of course there are also stories at places like Slashdot (sorry they woke up earlier than I)