UN Bigwig: The Web Should Have Been Patented and Licensed 411
An anonymous reader writes "Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing has unearthed an amazing video where the head of WIPO, the UN agency responsible for 'promoting' intellectual property, suggests that Tim Berners-Lee should have patented HTML and licensed it to all users. Amazingly this is done on camera and in front of the head of CERN and the Internet Society, who look on in disbelief."
No he didn't (Score:5, Informative)
The relevant quote:
Intellectual property is a very flexible instrument. So, for example, had the world wide web been able to be patented, and I think that is a question in itself, perhaps the amount of investment that has gone into or would be able to go into basic science would be different. If you had found a very flexible licensing model, in which the burden for the innovation of the world wide web had been shared across the whole user community in a very fair and reasonable manner, with a modest contribution for everyone for this wonderful innovation, it would have enabled enormous investment in turn in further basic research. And that is the sort of flexibility that is built into the intellectual property system. It is not a rigid system...
What he says is that *if* the web had been able to be patented, (which is not clear), and *if* you could find a flexible licensing model which is fair (which is certainly not clear to me, though he doesn't seem to make an opinion), then you could spend any money received from licensing on basic research.
He does not state that the web should have been patented. He even goes so far as to say that he's not sure it could have been patented. He's simply discussing how money received from licensing could be used. I don't really want to download a 240 meg video just to clear up this issue, but just looking at the wording it's clear that he's responding to something about licensing fees. My guess is that somebody commented that the purpose of patenting the web would be to get rich. I'd appreciate it if someone who's seen the video could comment.
Anyway, I'm rather rabidly anti-software patent. But this kind of bullshit "reporting" doesn't do us any good. Whipping up a frenzy over a non-issue just makes us look stupid.
Re:Hindsight (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hindsight (Score:4, Informative)
WTO, IMF, World Bank Not UN (Score:3, Informative)
WTO, IMF (which I'm guessing you meant) and the World Bank are in no way part of the UN.
Check your facts before blindly blaming anything and everything on the UN. Same goes for the moderators.
Remember Hyper-G/Hyperwave? (Score:4, Informative)
Case in point: Hyper-G/Hyperwave [mprove.de]. It was developed at about the same time as the WWW. It was technically pretty solid (renaming documents didn't break links, integrated search engine, powerful authoring tools) and even didn't use an abbreviation that took longer to pronounce the the full name.
AFAIR it soon moved out of the academia and was turned into a commercial product, so it basically did what the WIPO head suggested.
These days it doesn't even have an Wikipedia article anymore. According to its homepage [hyperwave.com], it found a niche for corporate intranets and now competes with SharePoint.
There are plenty of other early hypertext systems [wikipedia.org] comparable to the WWW (going back to the 60ties). I seem to recall that Douglar Engelbart's [wikipedia.org] NLS was heavily patented, though I cannot find a reference for this right now. (Though partially these systems certainly failed because of insufficient technology and lack of a target group. You can't blame everything on patents).
Re:Impressive (Score:2, Informative)
Actually - there is good evidence that Paul was referring to Christians in that specific city and that specific time period. At the time that letter was written the church was being persecuted very heavily by the Romans - if you married you or your spouse would very likely be widowed in a short period of time.
In another place Paul refers to people in the church who forbid marriage as teaching a doctrine of the devil and also writes that pastors and bishops should be married. The Catholic church's teaching that it is more holy not to marry is contrary to what Paul wrote - and has caused all kinds of problems.
Re:No he didn't (Score:4, Informative)
No, Cory Doctorow gets it right. I've watched the video and, to promote my own posts for moment, I summarise above [slashdot.org], but he's responding to comments by both Rolf-Dieter Heuer [nature.com] and Lynn Saint-Amour [isoc.org]. You can see when he starts to compose his response, it's at 44:10 on the video just after Lynn Saint-Amour says "if it [the web] was patented, the internet community would have found a way to route around it." His remarks also reply to Rolf-Dieter Heuer, who asserted that patents, as a commercial tool, do not serve as a way to measure the basic research which produces "substantial change" instead "incremental change" (13:40) Therefore primary research serves, Heuer believes, as the most important driver of innovation.
In this context, Gurry is speaking up for the idea that traditional IP instruments should be used as the primary tools to drive innovation and to measure it. Don't be fooled by the mild tone of these kinds of meetings, it really is a tunnel-vision view. He's disagreeing with everyone who spoke before him.