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What If Tim Berners-Lee Had Patented the Web?
An anonymous reader writes "Last week Slashdot had the story that the web had turned 20 years old. Of course, patents also last 20 years, which has resulted in some asking what would have happened if Tim Berners-Lee had patented the web? Thankfully, he didn't (and wouldn't). But we'd be living in a very different (and probably less interesting) world if he had."
Then gopher would have been developed into something similar.
Open internet limited by lawsuit. There would still be an open internet, and things like gopher and Usenet would have grown and been able to do a little innovation. However, if gopher tried to expand to be more web like, we would have seen a legal fight that not only delayed innovation, but limited the arenas in which we innovated.
Well, he could have patented it and if he had tried to exercise those patents, my guess is that people would have been put off until a better more liberating solution came along that circumvented those very patents. It's odd that Techdirt mentions Gopher protocol. That was licensed software and, as I've speculated before, died because it cost money to use.
Techdirt's usually a good read but I don't agree with his assessment on this one. I believe we would have a completely different protocol and paradigm that might have taken longer to achieve and might have been better or worse. Who's to know? I think Gopher's example makes it plenty obvious that any patented solution limping along would be ravenously devoured by an open alternative.
Had it been patented, I simply don't believe it would have been the final solution.
My work here is dung.
it was too primitive back then, and nothing would have come out of it. HTTP won because it was open/free. Look at worldnet services or what the BBS companies tried to do on the internet back then, and that would have been the death of the 'web' ...
We would just download Word docs that point to each other.
Then Doug Engelbart would have sued him.
What if evey sci-fi concept was used as prior art? I bet most of the patents would never get issued.
What if?
I'm just "this guy", you know?
Others had prior art, from Xanadu to HyperCard. But thanks again anyway, TBL.
It seems like there's a rash of articles lately assuming Berners-Lee patented the web as we know it. He didn't. What he invented is implemented by a tiny fraction of the code for a modern web browser. So you have to get much more specific about which of his innovations were patentable at the time, and what alternative technologies were available for those.
A bit of computer history: Honeywell and Sperry Rand battled over fundamental patents for computers. The courts essentially said, 'Atanansoff created those ideas years ago. Oh, and Dr. Atanasoff, it's too late for you to patent those ideas. Ta-ta.' From what I've been told, that 'ta-ta' was just a polite way of giving all of the parties the finger because the courts realized that allowing Sperry Rand to enforce their patents would hold back the computer industry by decades.
...Al Gore jokes. ;-)
(And yes I know what he said, but the truth still hasn't stopped the jokes)
A significant factor in the WWW explosion is that it was coming into its own as a an alternative right about the time that the most popular gopher server implementation stopped being free and there were fears that alternative implementations might be subject to attempts to collect money from the same source.
An encumbered web would have reversed the incentive with regard to gopher v. WWW on that score
Software/Business Method patents are not valid in 95% of the world
So the only thing that would of happened is Americans would be without the WWW
What we know of today is that business after business start staking claim after claim over internet technology and space. Patenting "the internet" has been ongoing since the beginning. We have seen it in things like GIF related patents for example. We have seen a continuing flood of "on the internet" patents and all manner of nonsense. Admittedly, the worst of this has only taken place recently but it has been around for a long while. How many things "internet" did Microsoft try to highjack over all this time? So far, only Java (for web applets) and internet browsers come to mind at the moment. (But they sure made life fun in the early days where people left their file and printer sharing exposed to the internet the way they did. I found ALL KINDS of things with my war-scanner scripts.)
Having to pay the originators/inventors for the right to do things on the internet would have likely made it even more exclusive from the start where many startups happened because of the low cost of entry in the market. For bigger business, such costs are just the cost of doing business and would have been considered negligible even in those days.
All in all, I don't think we would have seen much difference. All we have witnessed is a lower cost of entry into the market.
What if DARPA had patented the internet?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
What if JFK hadn't been shot? What if Gorbachev hadn't had that big mark on his forehead? What if I'd just stayed silent instead of asking stupid hypothetical questions?
How many awesome changes for the next 20 years are prevented by today's patents?
How cool could the world be in 2031 if we had no (software) patents?
I think about this a lot! Think about where we would be if the lawyers of today existed when say the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, radio, television, vcr (betamax anyone?) microwave, etc.... were invented. In general its not that people are narrow minded today, just extremely greedy! I mean really, especially Apple. BTW, I think new features in Lion really ripped off the look and feel of Gnome3 especially scrolling. I think the open source community should speak to some lawyers and sue Apple and force them to open source their GUI. I am sure Steve would not like that.
Things would have been better because we would have pushed other avenues of science and technology more, such as space exploration and so on, rather than concentrate on the geeky and _inwards-looking_ pursuit of computers (and ultimately merging our brains with machines and living in virtual realities at the expense of real reality and outwards exploration). And I'm saying this as a computer scientists.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
I often wonder what the state of things would be if software and business method patents had been allowed 50 years earlier.
Quicksort (and others) would be patented, as would the very idea of software encryption. Codebook + on a computer = patent!
later and would get it's patent approved. If it's a big company with big bucks for lawyers, even prior art wouldn't get it revoked. Most companies would not want and/or be able to afford to litigate (assuming the big companies would not immediately see it's value as happened with Tim's invention).
What's stopping him? Certainly now the Patent Office.
They begin when they are granted and last for 20 years from the initial application date. Due to the stunningly inefficient PTO (Patent and Trademark Office), my last four patents took seven years from application to grant date, so each patent will last a little less than 13 years.
Then we'd all be using Gopher.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
We'd all be paying a small licensing fee and everything else would be the same. The software and hardware we use to access the WWW is full of patents, why would a patent on the WWW cause the world to end? I think we would get by. Nothing to see here folks.
If someone had patented the web, I imagine it would have gone down the toilet and become irrelevant like other technologies such as airbags, or WIFI.
Tim Berners-Lee in Wired, March 1997
Do you wish you'd started the Web as a business?
If I'd started "Web Inc." it would have been just another proprietary system. You wouldn't have had this universality. For something like the Web to exist, it has to be based on public, nonproprietary standards.
PS: That's Sir Tim Berners-Lee to you, bub. :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Gopher would still be around. Still like Gopher better.
Someone else would have come up with some other tagging system? HTML was derived from existing markup system.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=91026&cid=7841775
My first response would be "how could you patent a syntactical gloss over troff?", but I guess you can patent pretty much anything these days.
He might have brought us 4G wireless by 1998. With his second $100B, he may have cured cancer. While I share the /. community's disgust with patent trolls, SLAPP lawsuits, and (especially) patent exhaustion doctrine extentions, I think you also have to ask what would have happened if Thomas Edison hadn't patented the light bulb. Would he still have raised the money to bring it to scale, and would we still have created demand for utilities? Or would more people be in the dark? Is it the "freeness" of the web which made internet widespread, or is it the money that was to be made by people selling computers?
Gently reply
Not to deprecate TBLs work, but there are many ways to implement pointers and tags. The web is a success because of those that got behind it ( even forcing a leviathon to stop destroying it ), certainly not for its elegance. Much worse would have been OK too.
It's more likely we'd be using the CORBA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Object_Request_Broker_Architecture than gopher, there was also Fresco http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresco_%28windowing_system%29, which was based on CORBA and provided a user interface API and was intended to replace X11. All this UI code (and probably CORBA) went down the tubes when the web appeared.
HTML, by the way, was not the first implementation of hypertext. The whole concept is some decades older, but the fact that there was not much practical use for it made it somewhat hard to patent it.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
I would and still could patent the games and UI developments I made in high school on the Commodore Pet.
Down to the fact that I COPYRIGHTED THEM in my code!
Is this code, pre-existing patents?
I have it, printed in fine detail on dot matrix.
Every UI thing I thought of is enough to get a patent these days.
EVERYTHING predates Apple and Google.
I should post the code!
Marc Andreesen would have exploited the environment provided, as he did.
Jim Clark would have disappeared from view after an unfortunate Las Vegas incident with a transgender prostitute.
All of our astronauts came back from their missions strangely... different. Having been there makes you different. As we are defined by our experiences, exceptional experiences make us different. They change us.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Tim who?
that is all
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Something different would have come along. And since another round of thought would have been put into its design, there's a fair chance it would have been better.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
we'd use a different protocol. is that concept so hard?
Systems that were not open enough, so they failed. All major "online services" had their own formats, incompatible with each other. For example German company T-Online had 2 system. One was based on Prestel, a character based protocol allowing for user definable characters and 32 out of 4096 colours as well as 3 phase blinking. The other one was called "KITT" which allowed for GIF images and CD-Rom integration.
I guess if it hadn't been for http and html, we'd probably be using public logins with telnet or something similar. Or perhaps someone would have made the same system with FTP and some other document format. Perhaps plain text.
Or in a nutshell, the Web didn't win because it was better, the web won because everybody could easily participate.
Am on an iPad on crappy network so won't bother to go looking for the docs, but working at CERN I can shed some light to the CERN mentality.
It's been asked a hundred times and the answer by CERN management is always the same, ALL CERN dIscoveries are given to the public domain (from a new particle to a cheap insulation material to what not other technical invention). Even when patents are taken it's to protect the public domain from a hostile abuse by some corporation. No licensing fees are asked. So I guess T.B.L. working at CERN should have meant that the same policy applies...
Assuming that he'd filed for his patents before the USPTO went insane, odds are low that they would have survived the prior art test. As others have mentioned, Gopher, FTP, and even several BBS systems would have been able to cover the prior art for the HTTP component. HTML was really just a bastardized version of SGML. And the entire concept of a hypertext page was predated by HyperCard and a bunch of work at Xerox PARC.
Why are we even having this discussion?
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
It would have been quite a different universe if Gerald R Ford had patented the automobile. The "motor city" would have been Grand Rapids instead of Detroit.
They might have patented it and still let people use it for free, but retain control to keep the 'bad guys' from abusing things.
Patents themselves are not evil. its how they are used that can be, or not.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If he collected a 1/10000th of a cent for each hour of web time, he would be so rich he would single handedly be able to buy every country in the world and become the one true world leader, of course that might not be a bad thing, I'm sure he would still do a much better job then W did at running for lack of a better term anything.
I was once out to dinner with Tim (and some others). It was at a Benihana's in Napiersville, IL. It was for a W3C thing.
After several sake-bombs, he wistfully expressed regret that he hadn't gotten a patent on the URL. He his idea was that he would have freed the patent, except for anyone putting a URL in print for purposes of advertising. Those folks would have had to pay him a fraction of a cent per impression.
I'm not so sure how serious he was, be he really looked pretty sad.
If your really bored here is the pdf Harmony Xwindows Hyper-G browser
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Do we really need to play a game of alternate history to get the Slashdot crowd into a masturbatory frenzy over why patents are evil? I'm pretty sure the populists are already frothy enough around here.
Easy answer. Since the US believes the strongest in patents, then the US would have either:
a. Developed a new web that would be been similar but different just like all OTHER companys that try to evade patents.
b. US would have been years behind while China whose gives a shit about intellectual property would have just done it regardless.
From TFA: "Rather than an open World Wide Web, most people would have remained on proprietary, walled gardens, like AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy and Delphi. While those might have eventually run afoul of the patents, since they were large companies or backed by large companies, those would have been the few willing to pay the licensing fee."
Proprietary systems would have competed to keep their networks clean. Fewer viruses. No virus protection systems slowing down my computer
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
It depends on what he did with the patents. Having a patent doesn't mean that no one else could use it. For example, He could've changed $0.10 per year to every website. This would be negligible compared to annual domain name registration, so it would have a negligible effect on adoption. He might've used that money for himself, or perhaps, used it more philanthropically - for example, to improve security on the web, research a cure for cancer, or help people around the world to get access to the web (which would be both self-interested since he gets paid per website, and socially useful).
The entire internet would have been like Second Life :)
I remember downloading VRML browsers back in late 90's and thinking it was the future of the "web".
Virtual Reality Markup Language
In 1997, a new version of the format was finalized, as VRML97 (also known as VRML2 or VRML 2.0), and became an ISO standard. VRML97 was used on the Internet on some personal homepages and sites such as "CyberTown", which offered 3D chat using Blaxxun Software. The format was championed by SGI's Cosmo Software; when SGI restructured in 1998 the division was sold to Platinum Technologies
Anyone interested in reading up on some of the old stuff can check out the Web3D Consortium: http://www.web3d.org/x3d/vrml/index.html
Of course I was in my 20's, and late 90's everything kept promising "virtual reality" and I had dreams of surfing the web would be like walking down a sidewalk, other people "surfing" you would see on the sidewalks as well, and if you wanted to visit a computer store then it would have a 3d representation 'building' to walk in, browse the shelves "virtually", chat with other customers in the store.
hehe talk about delusions of grandeur back then, but yea for about a year or two I actually thought that VRML would take over and make HTML and the web as we know it obsolete.
There's not much he could actually patent since the vast majority of what he did was on technology built by others. He could have patented HTTP, I guess. However, it would just have been replaced by something else. He didn't invent hyperlinks or any of that stuff that HTML uses so there's really not much for him to patent that couldn't be trivially circumvented.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
a newsgroup :-)