Always 20/20, especially if you're a greed-focused farging bastage.

It takes a monumental denial of reality to say something that stupid; anyone with even partial brain function is fully aware that if the underlying technologies of the web had been patented by Sir Tim (or similar) and licensed then we wouldn't be posting on Slashdot right now because nobody outside of large multinationals would even be *using* the web for anything.

He talks about the possibility that the burden of developing the web could have been shared by the users. Well, it was shared. The development of the web was as shared as it could have been. Hundreds or thousands of open source developers contributing pieces to it. Some commercial companies trying as well. All users paying for their share of the bandwidth. The web is a wonderful example for how sharing the burden can work without a traditional organization apportioning the shares. This guy simply doesn't get that. He may know something about the P in WIPO, but the I seems to be somewhat underdeveloped.

Your government voted for him.

The "UN" and it's myriad institutions is a figleaf for your rulers. It lets them do what they want and blame it on "The UN" or "WIPO" or "the WTO" or "the FMI" or "the World Bank".

Which is reason enough that the folks in the UN should not be dictating Internet policy.

A surgeon who will recommend to operate when it's not necessary, will lose his license, can be sued for malpractice and may even face criminal charges if he knew that he endangers a patient without a good reason for it.

This asshat, on the other hand, has no oversight over his whoring to corporations, and should never be placed into any such position.

...is to keep people from resolving their differences at the point of a gun.

If you turn laws into something that people can no longer turn to for fairness, then what?

--
BMO

Head of Intellectual Property at UN thinks Intellectual Property makes things better.

Pope thinks Catholicism makes the world better.

News at 11!

...and ignore that the web might not have grown quite so popular if everybody had to pay for everything and stick to some individual's arbitrary rules.

It'd be more akin to Pope claiming that the human race would have been more successful if everyone back in the 2nd century had followed Paul's advice to remain childless. Remaining true to an ideology is one thing; asserting ideology in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is an entirely different matter.

Hardly. Unlike real property which you can hire people with guns to protect, Imaginary Property is only 'property' because you have a magic certificate from the government claiming that it is. The entire structure is artificial, it functions like a parasitic vine [Public domain abolitionists] growing around a tree [legislation/government], shaping the direction the tree grows so that the vine can reach higher above everything else whilst slowly strangling it. The tree will eventually collapse under its own dead weight, what exactly happens after that is not going to be pleasant.

This whole thing started as a trade off, a deal, the idea wasn't to give artists 'ownership' of anything, it was to allow them to make a living and be able to afford to eat whilst they worked on something new. The idea of perpetual copyright and the seemingly vast collection of patents on simplistic or vague ideas is antithetical to the entire point.

Good post. I would have posted before you if my ISP had licensed the AppleTalk to IPX bridge that would have allowed me to view Slashdot from my connection at home. Fortunately at work we have can afford to buy a browser that supports the mark-up used by Slashdot. I may be late responding to replies; the email clients here don't support the protocol my ISP uses.

Except that there is often a significant degree of subjectivity and room for disagreement on decisions of whether to operate, so the surgeon who recommends unnecessary operations won't face any consequences 99% of the time.

For your basic corporate conservative, the only things that have value are those things that are owned by somebody. And that's a private owner, not a government.

So, for instance, breathable air is worthless under this philosophy. Worthless, that is, unless you can charge people to breathe it, maybe put it in cans [youtube.com]. I wish this were a joke, but the corporations, with the World Bank practically forcing the government's hand, already tried to do the same thing to rainwater [youtube.com].

I expect that would be WIPO's goal. The idea that people give stuff away, particularly intellectual property, undermines their whole existence. That something could become a standard, ubiquitous and free is their worst nightmare and they probably feel that the web's success is their failure.

The job of Director of WIPO is still open for applications (closes 18 Oct): https://erecruit.wipo.int/public/hrd-cl-vac-view.asp?jobinfo_uid_c=25114&vaclng=en [wipo.int]

And never forget that your government that you elect[ed] is in favour of all this crap. If you don't like it, the proper remedy is to take the matter up with your friendly local pubic representative.

His opinion completely overlooks the fact that it's my intellectual property right to choose whatever licensing I want for my product, and if I *choose* to release it to the public domain OR under any other terms, that is my right.

You are right, but it's not just WIPO. If the government officials KNEW what they were getting with the Internet 20 years ago, they would have outlawed the entire thing back then, it was much easier - nobody knew what it was.

The cat is out of the bag. The absolute power corrupts absolutely, and when you are a representative of an organization that is responsible to nobody, that consists of politicians who are there specifically because that type of power is responsible to nobody, realize - they are playing with this 'world government' idea - nobody elected them.

These are little dictators, stealing your sovereignty one step at a time.

Its the United Nations. The same U.N. that chose North Korea to head the U.N. Conference on Disarmament. The same U.N. that chose Gaddafi's Libya to chair the U.N. Human Rights Commission.

Bingo you made the real point. Nobody is preventing anyone from creating a new HTML type concept, or network and patenting it. Even before HTML, CompuServe, and the likes of AOL there were alternative networks, protocols and technologies for delivering, displaying and navigating and interacting with data, such as the early BBS's.

The Internet and open formats like HTML have been winning and most likely will continue to win because of people like us.
I think it just chaps their hides these smart nerds with no business plans and not financially driven has given away billions of man hours for free and thus slowly infiltrated and taken over their world.

They don't understand us and we despise their ways, lets just make sure we are the ones who keep WINNING!

Actually it would be just as popular, but it wouldn't be using HTML. And it wouldn't be called 'the web'. But the same functional result would be here.

Unless perhaps it was licensed for free, and control was used just to help keep the garbage out... donno.

Yeah, all those RFCs are a complete waste of time.

All open standards should be written up in patent-speak (which nobody but patent lawyers can decipher) and never discussed in public beforehand (because that would make them unpatentable).

Well, his note makes it clear that he's completely ignorant about all the drawbacks of intellectual property systems. The example of violin and saxophone does make sense but what he says about patenting WWW is completely idiotic. In a nutshell, he says that if WWW had been patented with flexible enough licensing that doesn't cripple its use (probably as flexible as if it wasn't patented at all), we'd see huge investments into WWW innovations (basically what we've seen in the past 20 years even without patents).

The single most important thing to remember about intellectual property systems is that while they create incentives to make innovations, they also as a side-effect create environment hostile to actually getting those innovations into general use. When you're dealing with intellectual property, you can never have the former without the latter.

Years ago I had some serious back trouble that could have been addressed quickly with some painful surgery, or slowly with painful therapy. My surgeon (Dr. Charles Grado, and if you're reading this, thank you) was adamant that he wouldn't touch a scalpel until we'd exhausted all other possibilities. I thought that was weird and told him so. He told me that he took an oath to first do no harm, and that surgery stood in opposition to this. You can't claim you're "doing no harm" while you're cutting into flesh: you're clearly, obviously, doing harm. The only question is whether your actions are the least harmful way of restoring health. Doc Grado is one of the best doctors I've ever known.

My father and cousin are both judges. Despite their polar-opposite political views, they're agreed that any lawyer who starts off by saying, "well, let's file some legal papers" is an incompetent. A lawyer's job is to solve your problems, and jumping straight to court is a great way to multiply them instead.

My gunsmith is a career soldier who characterizes his experience in Vietnam as "99% boredom I don't mind remembering and 1% terror I'm trying to forget." Per him, only fools try to solve problems with firearms. You see, if you do that, they might try to solve you right on back with one, and you won't like that at all.

Finally, I'm an ivory-tower academic who left a Ph.D. program because I was convinced I could do better work, more meaningful work, in the private sector. My job nowadays involves taking cutting-edge research and integrating it into real-world production systems. So, "never" a connection to ground level? My own career says otherwise.

tl;dr version: Maslow said when all you have's a hammer the whole world looks like a nail. This is true only until you find nails that explode into shrapnel and maim you horribly when you hit them. Once you hit one of those nails, you get real careful before you swing that hammer again.

While I'm always for cynicism, there is a 'basis' for this.

There is a long history, especially in the progressive movement to monetize everything. It's an essential part of modern politics. We must monetize all work so that all work is treated equally. Child-rearing must be monetized. House work must be monetized...

From this context, intellectual property is just a way to monetize the retention and spread of knowledge.

Remember back in the day when the telco monopolies dominated, a lot of R&D was in fact subsidized by telecom service revenue. You got the great bell labs and everything that way... including languages like C++. Most of the open source movement dreams of this era when software was giving out for free... while forgetting it was pretty much all subsidized by being integrated into a telecom monopoly. That provided long term stable cash flow.

With the telco monopoles broken up, how do you fund long term jobs and ensure the money reaches those contributing these products?

Intellectual property. It prevents the products from having their cost drop to 0 and thus keeps money in the system. Would less money be made in the grande scheme of things by fewer downstream products and companies? Who knows... but they do have a rational for their obsession with intellectual property and its the monetization of all work.

A worryingly narrow starting point, as it do not allow any re-examination of the concepts within the term "intellectual property". Seems similar to how the mission statement of the Norwegian group tasked with updating the nations copyright law, specifically leaving out any chance of the group to re-examine the reasons behind the laws existence. This is the kind of deification of old thoughts that worries me these days. We are unwilling to go back and have a long hard look at the words of the founders of modern society, and evaluate their continued validity (or lack there of). As such, we are no better then the people that run their lives by a holy text that has stayed unchanged for a millennium or more.

If he was completely ignorant there's no way he would have made it to the head of WIPO.

He knows damn FUCKING WELL about the drawbacks.

He willfully chooses to disregard them so that the people whose pockets he's in don't get pissed off.