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."
Hindsight (Score:5, Insightful)
Always 20/20, especially if you're a greed-focused farging bastage.
Re:Hindsight (Score:5, Insightful)
...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.
That's what WIPO want (Score:5, Insightful)
web might not have grown quite so popular
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.
Re:That's what WIPO want (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
You do realise that people elected the representatives of governments which then went on to form the UN, yes?
It's like business only your vote isn't weighted by your material wealth.
Re: (Score:3)
money.
Re: (Score:3)
Al Gore had a pretty good idea what he was getting into. He wanted to change the world.
Re:That's what WIPO want (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Ok, so all those companies that provide a product for free are going down the pan? High grade support is where the money seems to be for a lot of things.
Sure, some things help to have the IP paid for, but some find other avenues. Knowing the price of everything doesn't necessarily imply you understand the value of anything.
Re: (Score:3)
You can't give intellectual property away. You can't give it at all. It doesn't exist, not as a tangible, physical thing and not even the law treats it as such.
Basing entire industries and economies on licensing products would lead to the special kind of madness espoused by the WIPO boss in the article. Imagine it, the tremendous and world changing development of the internet shackled and mired by law
Re: (Score:3)
Without exaggeration, humanity itself would have been set back a decade. And for what? So a handful of private companies and lawyers could make a little more money.
And not even that. Locking things up is a pie-shrinking enterprise. The company that does it gets a bigger slice than they would have otherwise, but they only come out ahead if they're the only one doing it. If everybody does it, well, what do you get when twenty different companies each do something that increases their own share by 25% but shrinks the whole pie by 10%?
Re:Hindsight (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Hindsight (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
it would have been just as popular. nobody would remember lee though except as a huge turd mentioned only in few wikipedia articles and pc mag archives from '90s.
it's just that it would be "sss" or "hyper-gopher" or "annotated ftp" or something similar that would have been used, to get around the licensing issues. or just very complex ansi markup if the href was the point of the patent.
hyper text being a seperate invention from the web-serving techniques(which are very simple protocol rules) - and being so
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Hindsight (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Hindsight (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot groupthink at its best in this thread. The tone are personal attacks. "Patents are evil! Burn pro-patent people! UN is stupid!". How sad. Nobody saw the video, or tried to understand the argument he was trying to make.
He made the point that IP are useful because patents document an invention, information otherwise lost.
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).
Re:Hindsight (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Hindsight (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Let's just say I've seen a lot of experts in other areas get coopted by corporate interests. Our own congressional political system is a well known example.
To be blunt, de-ja-vu means his ignorance in a field his position would require expertise in, doesn't really pass the smell test.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Hindsight (Score:5, Interesting)
Patents document things sufficiently to mount legal battles - not so well that it makes it easier to reproduce an invention.
Claim - a method in which atomic nuclei are fused together releasing energy capable of destroying cities.
Go ahead and try to build a hydrogen bomb now...
Chemists often mine old patents looking for ways to make things, but they're usually only useful as a starting point. If somebody wants to patent some molecule they'll publish some method that creates the molecule in 0.1% yield or whatever - enough to prove by spectral observation that they made it. They don't actually publish a practical method that can be used to make it, since they don't actually want anybody to make it.
Look here [uspto.gov] for an example of this in action. The patent (#4,444,784) describes Simvastatin/Zocor - one of the more popular drugs ever taken and due to its expiry probably one of the most commonly prescribed medications around. The first method in the patent starts with 200 gallons of mold and ends up with enough compound to make about 10 pills - at one of the lower dosages. Suffice it to say this is not economical even at $5/pill.
I didn't spend enough time digging through it to figure out which of the large family of compounds described in the patent ended up being the final pill and how you'd have to make it following the patent, but this is just illustrative. The patent was really just intended to cover the molecule, and the method just proves that they indeed had made it and tested its activity.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Yup, though in this particular case good luck suing somebody who actually manages to build a couple of hydrogen bombs. I suspect that their disputes will get settled in a somewhat different court.
Re:Hindsight (Score:4, Interesting)
In this case, the groupthink is right on and Francis Gurry's [wipo.int] counter-history, such as it is, is patently(!) absurd. People are responding to his specific point about the web, which Cory accurately summarised. Thanks for the reasoned deviation from the party line, though. (I see it's been modded flame bait, now, but I disagree) You deserve an equally good counter-argument and I'll try to give it.
The context is a question posed to the panel: "How can countries, how can organisations improve in the area of innovation." In response to that question, and to the idea of measuring innovation that the Global Innovation Index aims to realise, everyone else on the panel talked about the important of things other than (you could say: in addition to) patents and traditional intellectual property tools. Daniele Archibugi [danielearchibugi.org] included in his discussion of business innovations, an emphasis on the importance of institutions like schools (17:49) and of the infrastructure for innovation -- including the commons of the internet. Naushad Forbes [stanford.edu] called patents a "limited indicator of new product innovations and an almost non-existent indicator of new service and new business model innovations" (25:53), meaning that they do not account for the range of different kinds of innovation. Leonid Gokhberg [www.hse.ru] talked about "differentiated policy mixes for different industries" as well as for different types of companies (33:57) because "innovation should be taken in its broad sense, including its non-technological, social, and environmental [effects]" (12:14).
Rolf-Dieter Heuer [nature.com] talked about how the Index fails to measure true innovation because it measures patents and not basic science, which he argues is the essential driver of innovation, essentially an inaccurate indicator instead of the thing itself (13:32). He values "substantial change" over "incremental change" (13:40). As an example of this problem, he cites the invention of the world wide web, which because it was not patented would not have shown up in this index, and yet reflects an important innovation of current age (to understate the case).
Francis Gurry addresses his concluding "white card" comments in response to Rolf-Dieter Heuer, but they apply as much to Lynn Saint-Amour's [isoc.org] remarks, indeed you can see him begin to compose his words at 44:10 after she says "if it [the web] was patented, the internet community would have found a way to route around it." She talked generally, not terribly on-topic, about how innovators can use openness to their advantage and the value of non-traditional channels of innovation (the last point at 17:48).
In the context of everything that came before, Mr Gurry's specific comments about the world web web reflect a dogmatic misunderstanding of how the web came to be and how it worked, especially in the 1990s. It's a bizarre and irrelevant counter-history, as I assume is being argued elsewhere in this thread as I compose this long and detailed reply. In brief, if the web had been patented and commercialised it would indeed have been routed around, as Lynn Saint-Amour said. Also, it would not have returned the patent profits to basic research, as Francis Gurry suggests, because then it would have become applied research and the funds would have funded incremental change in the commercial environment, to use Professor Heuer's words. Gurry does not seem to have been listening to the academics and policy advisers around him. They're all saying "tradition IP instruments can't do it all." His response is that "intellectual property is a very flexible instrument" (50:13), essentially "oh yes it can too do it all."
I fancy you can get a measure of the in
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Hindsight (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hindsight (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Hindsight (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hindsight (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
My response (Score:3)
Considering I wouldn't have my current career if this guy had his way, I would just like to say a hearty "fuck you" to Francis Gurry and all that agree with him on this issue.
Who... (Score:3)
...voted for this guy?
(Yes, pedants, I'm aware we don't get to vote for them)
Re:Who... (Score:5, Funny)
I think some woman in a pond threw a sword at him.
Perhaps she should have thrown it harder.
Re: (Score:3)
What!? And hit Al Gore?
Re: (Score:3)
It beats the pants off using Diebold kit!
Re:Who... (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
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.
Re:WTO, IMF, World Bank originate in UN (Score:3, Insightful)
The United Nations, and the global banks tied to it, are tools by the elite to usurp national sovereignty and wealth. They should all be destroyed.
Re:Who... (Score:4, Insightful)
(Yes, pedants, I'm aware we don't get to vote for them)
Which is reason enough that the folks in the UN should not be dictating Internet policy.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Where are the /.'s who said UN should control ... (Score:3)
(Yes, pedants, I'm aware we don't get to vote for them)
Which is reason enough that the folks in the UN should not be dictating Internet policy.
Where are the /.'s who said the UN should control internet governance a couple of weeks ago in an article regarding such governance? Maybe they will reconsider now.
Patenting the web you say? (Score:2)
what a ridiculous idea... it's not like anyone would try patenting ridiculous ideas such as 1 click purchases or pre existing stuff and sue others... it's been completely patent free haha
Impressive (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Impressive (Score:5, Insightful)
Head of Intellectual Property at UN thinks Intellectual Property makes things better.
Pope thinks Catholicism makes the world better.
News at 11!
Re:Impressive (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
It's akin to keep claiming that the earth is the center of the universe 200 years after Galileo was punished for saying otherwise. Don't put such feats of, well, belief beyond the Catholic church.
Shachar
The same UN that chose North Korea ... (Score:4, Insightful)
It takes a monumental denial of reality to say something that stupid ...
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.
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:5, Insightful)
Oh, maybe we would be posting on Slashdot, but Slashdot would be a news server where the summary was the first message posted to each new group. Links would of course be manual, i.e. a description of how to get at the article.
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.
I patent frst posts! (Score:2)
n/c
Re: (Score:2)
There appears to be some prior art...
Easy enough to get around, just add "on a computer" to the end of it and you're all set
Re: (Score:2)
Just like a Hollywood blockbuster.
That's OK. We'll just start the posts with #2.
Second post!
Gurry simple doesn't understand "sharing" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
damn... (Score:2)
...no mod points today. That was insightful, I wish the poster would get a /. account.
Re: (Score:3)
The web is indeed probably the best example of a miracle of the commons, where everyone using non-rivalrous goods builds a larger, greater ecosystem that would otherwise be possible.
Re:Gurry simple doesn't understand "sharing" (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Agreeing with your insightful post, but a nuance about him not 'getting it': take notice how he talks about "sharing the burden among the users". We may be witnessing a new approach by WIPO and a fresh Newspeak idiom in gestation, where appropriation of the public good by private entities is presented as 'sharing'.
WIPO == Idiots (Score:5, Interesting)
If only... (Score:5, Funny)
This certainly might have prolonged Gopher's viability.
Well? What do you expect? (Score:5, Interesting)
A surgeon will recommend to operate. A lawyer to do legal work. A soldier to kill someone.
This guy is at WIPO, patents and such is what this guy does. You won't get creative commons out of him.
The problem is not even this guy, the problem is his opposition. There isn't one. As always, "Yes Prime Minister" has the example. Story: Hacker is given the task of coming up with a new transport policy involving road, rail and air. He soon learns that each sector is represented by a civil servant fighting not for the common good but for HIS sector.
This story alone does not cover it. In another story his chauffeur comments on a radio story and points out that all the decisions for public transport, public schools and public healthcare are made by people that go to private hospitals, send their kids to private schools and have chauffeur driven cars. Which Hacker sayed they need because else they would have to make public transport a lot more reliable...
The problem ain't sector reps fighting for their sector, the problem is the common man, the non-commercial, the non-status quo, has no such rep fighting for their cause.
People who are in ivory towers have plenty of sky bridges connecting them to other ivory towers. But never ever a connection to ground level. I have seen it myself, even if some newbie tries, the disconnect is already so great once they have enough power that any contact attempt is extremely uncomfortable so they soon learn not to do it again.
This is just how the system works, calling this guy an idiot only helps keep the system in place. Sadly getting a useful opposition in place is nearly impossible.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Well? What do you expect? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
No, the difference is that doctors are licensed and can lose a license if they do something exceptionally negligent. This guy has no backstop.
Re:Well? What do you expect? (Score:5, Interesting)
I also experienced very nice example of this during the fight against the software patents directive in Europe. I had a discussion with a guy from WIPO and at one point said that software patents were generally bad for small companies. Rather than denying this like EICTA (the organisation representing mostly large ICT companies), he fully agreed with that.
But then he went off the cliff: he argued that this is actually how the system is supposed to work. By making sure that most small companies will be driven out of business or swallowed by larger ones, you get a consolidation in the market. And consolidation is good for efficiency, cost cutting etc. Basically, he considered software patents as a market optimisation tool to get rid of all the fragmentation, to speed up the "natural" evolution that any economic sector is supposed to go through (starting out with many small time independent businesses, followed by a consolidation phase that leaves a few giants to rule it all).
That said, WIPO isn't the worst. Countries such as India and Brazil also have a say in there, and they're far less extremist than the Western world (at least for now). WIPO is in fact so annoying to the current extremists that the US, EU and friends completely bypassed it with ACTA. So anyone arguing against UN bodies with the argument that those people are not accountable should be careful, because there at least you have countries from all over the world that have a say rather than only the interests of your own administration (or rather your own "IP"-lobbyists) and some self-selected partners.
Re:Well? What do you expect? (Score:4, Funny)
A surgeon will recommend to operate. A lawyer to do legal work. A soldier to kill ...this guy
I strongly object extrajudicial killings. Brain surgery looks like a human and compassionate way to deal with this guy.
Re: (Score:2)
A surgeon will recommend to operate. A lawyer to do legal work. A soldier to kill someone.
- a good professional surgeon will recommend to weigh in options and only operate if it is truly necessary. A lawyer will recommend to seek legal advice, and he probably would be correct. A soldier would not recommend to kill someone, that's the job of Ministry of Offense. Donald Rumsfeld would recommend to kill a bunch of people and he would insist to do it with very few soldiers to ensure that the civilian population wouldn't object much against a bigger invasion.
A soldier would recommend to NOT go to
Maslow was wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm so tired of seeing this argument. Politically voting with your wallet almost never works, precisely because of what you have already noticed: not enough people will do it. Mostly because they don't care, but even if every single person bothered to become moral buyers 100% of the time, it still wouldn't work. You have a very limited amount of time to concern yourself with researching everything you buy, so while you're avoiding Sony products because of the PS3 Other OS debacle and Apple for their excessi
Their Goals (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet these people are still given free rein of our legal system and allowed by the weak minded to claim that copyright and patent infringement is "theft," while the real theft is that of the copyright and patent holders from society as a whole. It's time that stop, before the next big innovation is prevented. End these archaic systems this decade, support the abolition of imaginary property.
Re: (Score:2)
How would writers (novelists for example) make a living without copyright? Isn't society enriched by their work? My mind is enriched by their work - isn't it fair that they are compensated for the work and value that they create?
Re: (Score:2)
And as for patents, they have a purpose of guaranteeing publication of . If you abolish them altogether get ready for more black boxes and permanent monopolies on ideas via trade secrets.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it might just be some form of super extreme capitalism...
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
Re: (Score:2)
And it's also worth noting that artists existed and survived just fine prior to the invention of copyright... They worked a job just like everyone else, they got paid while they performed their work and if they stopped performing they stopped being paid.
William Shakespeare was able to write his plays without needing copyright protection, why can't modern artists do the same? In fact, it's partly due to copyright that its unlikely any of todays works will go down in history the way Shakespeare did...
A lot of
Re: (Score:3)
WIPO (Score:2)
Its not the World Intellectual Freedom Organisation.
What a absolute failure. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Tim Berners-Lee did have a vision
Well he was working at CERN. I wonder if Tim wants to tell us more about those FTL neutrinos?
Re: (Score:2)
Tim Berners-Lee did have a vision
Well he was working at CERN. I wonder if Tim wants to tell us more about those FTL neutrinos?
Sorry, the patent on FTL is held by God and not licensed for use by mere mortals.
And yet it works. We had a glimpse..
The point of laws and courts... (Score:4, Insightful)
...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
Re:The point of laws and courts... (Score:5, Funny)
One way or another, a whole bunch of people get shot up and you start all over again.
It isn't the first time it happened, and it won't be the last. Hell, it's happening right now in the Middle East. It's starting to brew here. Granted, it's a bunch of rail-thin, jobless hipsters who think they can bank a liberal arts degree towards a white collar salary, but it's starting nonetheless.
In related news (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Your new to this internet thing aren't you? Cory Doctorow - a big proponent of Open Source, Creative Commons and one of the founders of the blog Boingboing is the guy who REPORTED the UN Guy's comments, not the guy who made them. I mean I know its common practice on /. not to RTFA, but you got it thoroughly ass backwards here dude.
With regards to the revolution, what exactly has been our source of information on the Arab Spring revolutions? The internet and TV mostly in my case :)
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: (Score:3)
No, you have to read between the lines. It's clear that he is trying to pander to his audience with the promise (or admonishen) that, had they patented it, they would all be taking treasure baths right now. And he justifies it by saying that proper management would have fleeced every single user on an ongoing basis in an amount that was small enough that everyone would be willing and able to pay it.
It's classic evil genius. Just remember - the easiest way to tell if a lawyer is lying is if his lips are movi
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.
Hey Mr. UN guy... (Score:2)
... the UN, through the ITU-T, already has its own set of protocols (X.400 et al) it can play around with, instead of giving bad advice to people inventing internet protocols and specifications. The internet does not need you, you are damage.
Where do they find these guys... (Score:2)
For some reason, we always succeed to plant clueless people in positions like this. If it wasn't so very dangerous it would be funny...
The perfect expression of conservative philosophy (Score:3, Insightful)
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].
Historically, no (Score:2)
France had MiniTel (expensive, slow, clunky and hard to use). I think they turned it off a few years ago.
Europe had the ISO networking standards. These were intellectual train-wrecks written in ivory towers by architecture astronauts; too complex to implement or use, and by the time people starting implementing then, the "RFC" world had solidly taken over. (We're left with the awfulness of X.500, X.509 and so forth).
This guy isn't necessarily an idiot. But it's who we need to fight.
Apply for the job (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
They already tried this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Small minds (Score:3)
An invention that has never been protected by patent, copyright or trademark has changed the present and future of humanity in a vast and previously unimaginable way forever. It has reformed societies and toppled tyrants, revolutionized old cultures and inspired new ones. This was twenty years ago: If it were protected by patent, it would only just now have entered the public domain - at the earliest.
Meanwhile, the small minds that preach the value of imaginary property invent nothing but combinations of buzzwords that bamboozle the patent office, and cannot conceive of the value of an idea that is not locked away, or of the profit humanity gains from it.
wow! (Score:3)
This guy needs FLAMEBAIT tattoo'd on his forehead. Surrounded with blink tags.
Re: (Score:3)
Nobody would have used the patented internet. Look at all the commercial protocols which failed to take off. DECNet for example.
Re: (Score:2)
The Internet (and its subset, the web) are the common spaces which commercial enterprises rely on. They are the streets and roads which connect the shops where consumers choose to buy Coke, Pepsi and Big Macs. Without those common spaces there would not be Coke and Pepsi. Only one would remain in business because Coke could have bought up the roads and made sure they would not stop at shops which sell Pepsi.
Re: (Score:2)
There were multiple incompatible network services, AOL, Compuserve and many smaller ones...
That simply doesn't work because they are all limited in scope and incompatible, you end up having to have 50 different accounts in order to communicate with everyone.
The Internet worked because it was a single network, open to all and used by everyone.
NOT a Good point though (Score:3)
No, it's not a good point, because if the basic Internet was such encumbered, it would never have grown as fast, and that delay would would be a real cost on the REVOLUTION that instant global communication brought not only to "basic research and development", but the world.
We might have been ten years behind, with people still using dial-up while companies paid through the nose for the ability to email. The idea that a global system of levies would get pumped back into basic research is LAUGHABLE. There'd
Re: (Score:2)
This. The adoption of the internet was, in part, because it was practically free advertising. Businesses are acutely aware of return on investment, and the early internet was not an obvious play to many conservative types. Still, when getting a presence on was a few hundred dollars and the IT guy was so jazzed about it he would do the coding as part of his regular job, the response often was "why not?" The acceleration of relevance of the internet was staggering.