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What If Tim Berners-Lee Had Patented the Web?

Posted by timothy on from the welcome-to-compuserve-again dept.

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."

114 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Probably Would Have Went the Way of Gopher by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Probably Would Have Went the Way of Gopher by Zerth · · Score: 1

      Hrm.. There's a question: if we had stuck with gopher-based internet, would monkey punching flash ads still have happened?

    2. Re:Probably Would Have Went the Way of Gopher by maverickjesterx · · Score: 1

      Anyone remember "Sneaker net"

    3. Re:Probably Would Have Went the Way of Gopher by Osgeld · · Score: 1

      yes just as the Internet grew from text to graphics to monkey punching

    4. Re:Probably Would Have Went the Way of Gopher by mickwd · · Score: 2

      Here in the UK, the big news recently has been the riots. The majority of the public is disgusted with the behaviour of many of those taking part - they were only interested in taking a load of stuff for free, lining their own pockets, and not giving a damn for any damage done to the overall public good.

      People are using software patents in the same manner, for the same reasons. It's a wholly-unjustifiable free-for-all money grab.

    5. Re:Probably Would Have Went the Way of Gopher by PopeRatzo · · Score: 1

      yes just as the Internet grew from text to graphics to monkey punching

      Oh, is "monkey punching" what the kids are calling it these days? We used to call it, "boxing with the bishop".

      "Monkey punching" - I like it, and it is without a doubt the true purpose of the Internet, followed closely by marketing stuff to people that they do not want.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    6. Re:Probably Would Have Went the Way of Gopher by dkf · · Score: 2

      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.

      I remember gopher. Once network bandwidth expanded enough, gopher died a death because it was ugly and hard to use. The killer feature of HTTP was HTML; being able to link arbitrarily from any document to any other was incredibly useful. Gopher had index pages - with nothing but links - and link-less leaf pages; real world data isn't that neat. Inlined pictures and forms and SSL, for all that they have caused so much grief since, just hammered home how little anyone really wanted Gopher's restrictions. HTTP itself though, that was a less-than-brilliant protocol to start out with; 1.0 was a giant step forward, as was 1.1 (though it's difficult to implement fully, hence it being done in libraries).

      Not that Gopher couldn't serve HTML (I remember hacking it to do so) and I started using Mosaic for real when I found it was a much nicer Gopher client than the others available at the time (xgopher was ugly!) But the package - HTTP, HTML, inline images, forms, a non-awful client - was very potent; gopher's only chance was to effectively become what the web was, but instead it just got replaced.

      --
      "Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
    7. Re:Probably Would Have Went the Way of Gopher by demonlapin · · Score: 2

      Unfortunately, I think he meant those ads that said "PUNCH THE MONKEY TO WIN". I like your version better, though.

    8. Re:Probably Would Have Went the Way of Gopher by Pseudonym+Authority · · Score: 1

      Actually, AC has a UID of 666, so it is much lower. Not that the GP isn't being a retarded dipshit, and having a low UID doesn't prevent that, just look at No. 137.

    9. Re:Probably Would Have Went the Way of Gopher by dbIII · · Score: 1

      Gopher was probably mentioned because Hyper-G (later morphing into VRweb) was a gopher inspired hyperlink system being worked on in Austria at the time.
      I think they merely wrote something you don't agree with because they were aware of some things you missed. I didn't know about it either until the web had reached the point where even Microsoft were reacting to it.

    10. Re:Probably Would Have Went the Way of Gopher by Z00L00K · · Score: 1

      Beat the meat based on what you find on the internet would also have happened. Before www got big it was on FTP and FSP sites.

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    11. Re:Probably Would Have Went the Way of Gopher by Z00L00K · · Score: 1

      I have worn out a few sneakers by now.

      And the deep-frozen yellow garden hose - that's something to have a love/hate-relationship to. Add a DELNI to it too. (I have one somewhere together with a dot matrix printer with serial interface)

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    12. Re:Probably Would Have Went the Way of Gopher by toriver · · Score: 2

      lining their own pockets, and not giving a damn for any damage done to the overall public good.

      Ah, you mean the Tories. :)

  2. It's IE all the way down! by sourcerror · · Score: 4, Funny

    We would just download Word docs that point to each other.

    1. Re:It's IE all the way down! by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      usenet could have been extended, to have indefinite retention, url-like constructs in messages

  3. If he had by suso · · Score: 2

    Then Doug Engelbart would have sued him.

  4. Couldn't patent it. by WebManWalking · · Score: 1

    Others had prior art, from Xanadu to HyperCard. But thanks again anyway, TBL.

    1. Re:Couldn't patent it. by sjames · · Score: 1

      Since when has prior art stopped a patent application? It had to be valid and novel, it's done with a computer .

    2. Re:Couldn't patent it. by WebManWalking · · Score: 1

      HyperCard's done with a computer.

    3. Re:Couldn't patent it. by 0123456 · · Score: 1

      Yes, but not on the Internet .

    4. Re:Couldn't patent it. by sjames · · Score: 1

      Yes, so it is also valid and novel! That is always the finding!

    5. Re:Couldn't patent it. by Teancum · · Score: 1

      Yes, but not on the Internet .

      Define internet please.

      HyperCard was done on AppleTalk..... close enough that I don't think you can make a legal, mathematical, or rational distinction between the two.

    6. Re:Couldn't patent it. by KiloByte · · Score: 2

      Your fallacy is trying to apply logic to the patent system.

      --
      The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
    7. Re:Couldn't patent it. by Bungie · · Score: 1

      Sorry fanboy. IBM had hyperlink before Apple existed. Haven't you ever used big iron?

      No I don't use big iron IBM systems...and I suspect many people here don't either. So please tell us which part of their big iron technology used hyperlinks among different documents long before others, and when it was released. Just bragging because you've worked on big iron doesn't prove shit...

      Hypercard was released in 1987 and was definately one of the earliest applications to use hyperlinks. It's not some kind of fanboy thing, even Wikipedia says this.

      --
      The clash of honour calls, to stand when others fall.
    8. Re:Couldn't patent it. by Teancum · · Score: 1

      If you really want to get into the nitty gritty of very early hyperlink applications, I'd give PLATO more kudos along that front than even Hypercard, although I will agree that Hypercard was one of the early "mainstream" applications and made the hyperlink integral to the application.

      There were also some early uses of hyperlinked applications done by the Xerox PARC team that were legitimate.... and done in the late 1970's/early 1980's. Of course the story of how Steve Jobs basically "stole" the concept of the GUI from the PARC team is well known in computer history.

      IBM also played with the idea, but it was well after the concept was well established and implemented by others, nor did the IBM software really get any sort of traction in the marketplace. I think I had actually heard about "hyperlink" by IBM, but I have never used. Hypercard was installed on nearly every Macintosh computer by Apple, and could be found on almost every college campus as well as many high school campuses and in many homes. There is no way IBM ever had that kind of market penetration for "hyperlink" or whatever it was called.

  5. Patented what specifically? by timeOday · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:Patented what specifically? by siddesu · · Score: 3, Informative

      He could have patented the thing he implemented and released over telnet in 1991 when I first tried it. Basically, the concept of a message from a resource that contained links to other resources, a server that delivered that message from the said resource over a simple protocol, and the format of the message and the mechanism of the said message's generation being transparent to the caller of the resource. With a computer, over the internet. In his articles at the time there was a lot written about different ways of displaying the said message. More than enough to cover all of the WWW as we know it.

  6. Re:What if? by geekoid · · Score: 1

    What is people on /. knew what prior art meant?

    what if?

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  7. What if the courts had guts? by MacTO · · Score: 2

    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.

  8. And queue up the... by The+Grim+Reefer2 · · Score: 1

    ...Al Gore jokes. ;-)

    (And yes I know what he said, but the truth still hasn't stopped the jokes)

    1. Re:And queue up the... by Obfuscant · · Score: 1

      but the truth still hasn't stopped the jokes)

      The truth is the reason for the jokes. We all know what he said, just some people want to deny it.

      "In a March 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer, Gore said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."" http://www.perkel.com/politics/gore/internet.htm. If you want to argue that he "promoted" the internet, fine, but to claim that "create" means simply "promote", you're wrong. Try telling the actual creators of JIF peanut butter that you created JIF peanut butter because you promote the brand and they'll laugh you into next week.

      You want to laugh at Quayle because he used a valid but older spelling for "potatoe", then accept the hoots and howls when Gore talks about creating things.

    2. Re:And queue up the... by riverat1 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Al Gore brought the High Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991 to Congress and got it passed. That was one of the fundamental pieces of legislation that took ARPANET from being a limited military/education network to the commercial Internet.

      In Wikipedia it says:

      Former Republican Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Newt Gingrich also stated: "In all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on a long time. Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet, and the truth is -- and I worked with him starting in 1978 when I got [to Congress], we were both part of a "futures group" -- the fact is, in the Clinton administration, the world we had talked about in the '80s began to actually happen."

      I don't think saying his he created it is any more than normal political spin.

    3. Re:And queue up the... by Boronx · · Score: 1

      From your link:

      But the real question is what, if anything, did Gore actually do to create the modern Internet? According to Vincent Cerf, a senior vice president with MCI Worldcom who's been called the Father of the Internet, "The Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the Vice President in his current role and in his earlier role as Senator."

      Jabbing at Quayle for misspelling potato is also not fair, though he attempted to correct a student who had spelled it correctly. I don't see why one unfair but true media frenzy should justify another unfair and false one. But forget the poatoe incident. The reason so many think of Quayle as a dolt is because he admonished a fictional character for getting pregnant. That, and his obviously shallow understanding of the issues. He was Sarah Palin before Sarah Palin was cool.

      Ripping on Gore for picking Lieberman for Veep is totally legitimate.

      --
      Play Command HQ online
    4. Re:And queue up the... by Teancum · · Score: 1

      I will give credit to Al Gore for helping to sponsor legislation that did help fund the early internet backbone. That at least deserves some sort of recognition. It was also his effort that put an e-mail server into the White House when he was elected Vice-President and even came up with the presidential e-mail address of president@whitehouse.gov. I don't know if it was him personally or one of his staffers, but he also was responsible for the "whitehouse.gov" domain to be registered. I think that counts for something, and in 1990 the internet was still very much a new thing that was just beginning to be used by politicians. Al Gore's predecessor, Dan Quayle, certainly didn't have an e-mail address until much later.

      Much of this official adoption by the White House also legitimized the internet in a great many ways.... and it should be noted that Al Gore was also instrumental in getting the first web server started in the White House as one of the first federal web servers. That comparatively speaking these are much less grand than saying he was "the father of the internet", I do think some kudos are certainly earned on his part.

    5. Re:And queue up the... by drooling-dog · · Score: 1

      Appropriate user name, have to say.

      But I think that those of us who aren't sitting in the back row shooting spitballs at the smart kids - i.e., non-Republicans - Gore's statement was pretty much accurate. The Internet was not a physical invention, like routers and modems; it was an institutional one. Facilities around the country had to agree on a common set of protocols and conventions for routing information between them. Bringing ARPANET to the public took planning and legislation, and Gore understood the importance and the potential of it enough to lead the way. It wasn't just promotion and cheerleading. For this he took nothing but ridicule from the GOP, who thereby exposed themselves as a backward-looking bunch of knuckle-dragging cretins. No offense, of course, if you're one of them.

    6. Re:And queue up the... by RoccamOccam · · Score: 2

      "... Ultimately, however, marriage is a moral issue that requires cultural consensus, and the use of social sanctions. Bearing babies irresponsibly is, simply, wrong. Failure to support children one has fathered is wrong. We must be unequivocal about this.

      It doesn’t help matters when prime time TV has Murphy Brown – a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman – mocking the importance of a father, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another “lifestyle choice.”

      I know it is not fashionable to talk about moral values, but we need to do it. Even though our cultural leaders in Hollywood, network TV, the national newspapers routinely jeer at them, I think that most of us in this room know that some things are good, and other things are wrong. Now it’s time to make the discussion public...." -- Dan Quayle, May 19, 1992

      Children born to unwed mothers in the US:
      1990 - 28 percent
      2008 - 41 percent

      "[children brought up in single-mother homes] are five times more likely to commit suicide, nine times more likely to drop out of high school, 10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances, 14 times more likely to commit rape (for the boys), 20 times more likely to end up in prison, and 32 times more likely to run away from home." -- Village Voice

    7. Re:And queue up the... by tragedy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      A few comments about those statistics.

      First, "children born to unwed mothers" does not necessarily mean children raised by a single mother and no father, it just means children born to mothers who aren't yet married. In some times and places in the past (and even to a degree today in some places, even in the US), having a child out of wedlock could get you shunned, maybe even arrested, banished or executed. Sometimes it would all fall on the mother, sometimes on the mother and father, sometimes mostly on the father (pretty rare, of course). At some times, it was vitally important for the couple to marry the moment pregnancy was suspected, to conceal the fact that the child had been conceived out of wedlock. At other times, it was enough to marry some time before the birth so that the child wouldn't be born a "bastard". In the social context we're working in for the purpose of this discussion, there isn't really such a thing as a "bastard" or "illegitimate" child anymore. Sure, the word bastard still means what it means, but the connotations aren't what they once were. It's no longer necessary for a couple to marry to "legitimize" their children. For one thing, with the family court system and DNA testing, women aren't dependent on the father to make a public declaration of responsibility in the form of a marriage. For another, the social stigma of being a bastard has been reduced. So, when a couple who are not married are expecting a baby, far fewer of them feel the need to run out and get married right away to protect themselves and their child from scorn.

      To make a long story short (too late), your "children born to unwed mothers" statistic doesn't tell us if that extra 13% isn't just couples who don't feel the need to rush into marriage anymore, but still stay together to raise the child. For that matter, it doesn't give us divorce statistics on the 72% who were married in 1990 vs the 59% in 2008. All it tells us is what percent of children were born to to mothers who weren't married in two different years, not what percentage of children were raised only by their mothers.

      Secondly, your statistic from the Village Voice about "children brought up in single mother homes" (assuming that's what it actually says, since that part is paraphrased) tells us about statistics for children brought up in single mother homes, but doesn't differentiate between homes where the mother is single by choice and those where the mother is not. For that matter, it doesn't make any effort to account for the fact that single mother families are far more likely to also be low-income or poverty-stricken and to adjust for the typical increase in all sorts of crime statistics among lower income brackets.

      In other words, the idea that fictional characters deciding to raise their children alone leads to social problems is not supported at all by the statistics you quote.

    8. Re:And queue up the... by RoccamOccam · · Score: 1

      I did not attempt to draw a correlation between the two. I merely showed his quote, which does not seem unreasonable, and showed statistics which appear to show that the issue is something about which society might justifiably be concerned. Apparently, you are not -- which is fine. However, I believe that people were looking for any excuse to mock Quayle, so they tried to trivialize the actual problem to which he was speaking.

    9. Re:And queue up the... by demonlapin · · Score: 1

      The reason that Quayle (and Palin, for that matter) is mocked as a dolt is that the media decided to portray him as one. Politicians all say things that sound really dumb out of context. Nearly all politicians say things that sound dumb in context, because they're human. I could make Barack Obama sound like a blithering idiot with some well-chosen sound bites, and the same skill would let me make GW Bush sound like the greatest orator in decades.

    10. Re:And queue up the... by metacell · · Score: 1

      I agree in principle, but in the case of Sarah Palin, I've seen whole interviews where she appears just as dumb. I've also seen the speech where she announced her resignation as governor (unedited), and there was barely a coherent thought in the whole speech. Palin's ignorance is far beyond what can be explained as everyday human fallability

      I think John Cleese has a point in this interview.

    11. Re:And queue up the... by ColdWetDog · · Score: 1

      ... and the same skill would let me make GW Bush sound like the greatest orator in decades.

      OK, you're on. The only rule I would add is that your quote has to be longer than one word.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    12. Re:And queue up the... by tragedy · · Score: 1

      The problem is, the "problem" Quayle was speaking to actually was trivial. Let me be more clear. The problem of children abandoned by one or more parents is _not_ trivial. Concern that the fictional activities of a fictional character "doesn't help matters" is trivial. It's one thing to speak about the problem of children who are essentially abandoned, it's another to attack women who choose to have children on their own in a responsible fashion, and then quite another entirely to attack fictional women who have fictional babies out of fictional wedlock.

    13. Re:And queue up the... by RoccamOccam · · Score: 1

      That's quite debatable. It's pretty clear that Hollywood has worked hard to remove the stigma associated with single-parenthood by choice.

    14. Re:And queue up the... by tragedy · · Score: 1

      Yes, I'm sure it's a vast conspiracy against good old traditional values. After all, the millenia of propaganda against such sinful women is nothing, but a few portrayals of single mothers as not being horrible is obviously a vast conspiracy against decency.

  9. An encumbered web would never have taken off by DragonWriter · · Score: 2

    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

  10. Re:What if? by s73v3r · · Score: 1

    "Prior Art" doesn't mean that someone thought of it before. Prior Art means that someone had implemented or made something very similar to the patent subject prior to the person applying beginning their work.

  11. I'm not sure it would be different by erroneus · · Score: 1

    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.

  12. Better yet by Vinegar+Joe · · Score: 1

    What if DARPA had patented the internet?

    --
    "The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
    1. Re:Better yet by DrVxD · · Score: 1

      IANAL, but AIUI, since DARPA is part a US Gov't, then that would place it in the public domain

      --
      Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
  13. Makes one wonder... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    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?

  14. The same can be said..... by maverickjesterx · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:The same can be said..... by jo_ham · · Score: 1

      Can't tell if trolling...

    2. Re:The same can be said..... by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 1

      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.

      They did. Same with patents. One hopes you are trolling and not genuinely this stupid.

  15. A contrarian opinion by Prune · · Score: 1

    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."
    1. Re:A contrarian opinion by maverickjesterx · · Score: 1

      umm technology made space travel possible!

    2. Re:A contrarian opinion by monoqlith · · Score: 1

      I disagree. The overwhelming trend in computer networking ever since the 60s has been towards higher and higher global connectivity. Slowly at first, and then an explosion. The infrastructure of the Internet was being developed with or without HTTP. If HTTP became proprietary another more open protocol, if not Gopher, would have taken its place eventually. Maybe we would have been sandboxed inside of online services for a little bit longer, but it would eventually have occurred to somebody to use Ted Nelson's idea of hypertext - which was already floating out there - on the Internet.

      People are information machines. Connecting them together electronically was only a matter of time.

      It's still not clear what the economic incentive to travel in space is, exactly, or how to realize those incentives in an economically profitable manner. However the economic benefits of direct and persistent inter-connectivity have been obvious for a long time.

    3. Re:A contrarian opinion by Prune · · Score: 1

      The space travel incentive is a long-term one, and working exactly to ameliorate the biggest danger of communications technology--the more highly integrated the world is, the more we stand and _fall_ together. Without colonizing other worlds, where the speed of light presents a fundamental barrier to high integration (and interdependency), there is no redundancy. It is the equivalent of a biosphere with huge lack of biodiversity, where a single disaster may wipe every life out because there is not sufficient variety that would allow some species to be fit in the new environmental conditions. In terms of humans, of course, one ought to be far more concerned about man-made than natural disasters, and technology is an enabler of ever bigger human-made disasters to be created by an ever smaller group of people.

      --
      "Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
  16. Can ask this about a lot by ThanatosMinor · · Score: 2

    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!

  17. Some random company would have patented it... by nurrud · · Score: 1

    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).

  18. Re:gopher by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 2

    Marc Andreesen would have been flipping burgers.

    Jim Clark would have joined Trip HAwkins, and gotten rich with 3DO.

    One of our astronauts would have come back from a solo mission, strangely... different.

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
  19. Patents don't last 20 years by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:Patents don't last 20 years by Theaetetus · · Score: 1

      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.

      Prior to the 1995 revisions, patents lasted 17 years from date of issue, and it was roughly 3 years from filing to issue back then (shorter backlog), so it was roughly 20 years overall...

  20. What If Tim Berners-Lee Had Patented the Web? by John+Hasler · · Score: 1

    Then we'd all be using Gopher.

    --
    Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
  21. Re:What if? by s73v3r · · Score: 1

    I think that'd be an even worse idea, then. You thought up something. So what? If you can't actually turn that idea into something, it's worthless.

  22. Re:What if Hitler had won in Britain? by JockTroll · · Score: 2

    The difference is that you cannon unshoot JFK or go back in time and do a plastic surgery number on Gorby's head. But the MAFIAA goons are about to turn back the clock and do exactly that - they'll lobotomize the Internet and turn it into a bunch of walled, pay-for gardens where you'll only be able to do what they want you to do. And the lawmakers side with them, because power always sides with Big Money. Unless violent action is taken, this is what's in store for all of us.

    --
    Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
  23. Re:gopher by Teancum · · Score: 4, Informative

    Then gopher would have been developed into something similar.

    There were so many other potential software packages that were doing essentially the same thing that the web was doing that I'd have to agree with this statement. It should be noted that SGML was already being used when Tim Berners-Lee introduced the sub-set that is known as HTML. It was already an interenational standard, as was HTTP, which was mostly a re-worked variant of FTP and other similar file transfer protocols.

  24. He answered this himself in 1997 by sootman · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:He answered this himself in 1997 by Quiet_Desperation · · Score: 1

      I recognize neither royalty nor its granted titles. :-)

    2. Re:He answered this himself in 1997 by KiloByte · · Score: 1, Informative

      Sorry, the thirteenth amendment was held off by courts as it would ban lawyers from titling themselves "esq" (and an unrelated amendment got its number). Thus, being an US citizen doesn't prevent Tim Berners-Lee from being granted nobility by the country of his birth.

      --
      The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
    3. Re:He answered this himself in 1997 by Lanteran · · Score: 2

      Hardly forces you to recognize a granted title though.

      --
      "People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
  25. Dumb question? by Quiet_Desperation · · Score: 1

    Someone else would have come up with some other tagging system? HTML was derived from existing markup system.

  26. A blast from the past by hamburgler007 · · Score: 1

    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=91026&cid=7841775

  27. Re:gopher by MightyMartian · · Score: 2

    Not to mention that SGML was developed from older markup languages dating all the way back to the 1960s. Like most "modern" technology, it too came out of that great wave of computational development and research from the early 1960s into the early 1970s.

    Mind you, we have companies patenting metadata extensions to SGML-derivatives and suing major software companies over it, so I don't suppose it would matter in the least.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  28. Re:gopher by tragedy · · Score: 1

    But "something similar" would have been patent infringing and, if it had taken off, implementers of gopher browsers would have been sued. Of course, 20 years ago, software patents were a bit dubious. There were some that had been granted, but it was a fuzzy gray area and whether they could be enforced or not was up in the air. As for business method patents, anyone sane could assure you that business method patents weren't ever going to be acceptable.

  29. troff by tsotha · · Score: 1

    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.

  30. With his first $100 Billion... by retroworks · · Score: 1

    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
    1. Re:With his first $100 Billion... by demonlapin · · Score: 1

      The technologies that implement the data transfer that makes the Internet a viable operation are the hardest part, because they deal with real physical limits. The protocols were secondary - look at the success of AOL and MSN in the immediate pre-massive-Internet era, ca. 1992-1995, working on the same 14.4k, 28.8k, and 33.6k modems that were the original end-user implementation of the Internet.

      In 1994, my small university (~2500 undergrads) leased a 56k line to a nearby public university, and provided eight 2400 bps modems as a dialup pool. They were almost never all in use. By 1997, 2/3 of the campus was using the freshly installed Ethernet.

      In short, I'd say that the Internet succeeded because the cost of data transport had finally fallen enough to make it possible to provide sufficiently fast connections to enough people.

    2. Re:With his first $100 Billion... by metacell · · Score: 1

      If Tim Berners-Lee had earned $100B on patenting his inventions, that money would've had to be taken from consumers in the form of higher prices. That, in turn, would've meant that consumers would've had $100B less to pay other producers for other goods and services. (See the Parable of the broken window.) I doubt Berners-Lee could've made significantly better use of those $100B than the original owners.

      It IS the freeness of the Internet which has made it a success. The freeness makes it very easy for anyone to get in on the game and try out new business ideas. If every Internet provider, everyone who manufactured network cards, everyone who opened an Internet store, and so on, had to pay licensing fees, it would raise the barrier to get into the market, and lower competition.

      Moreover, the people who held the patents would be able to block ideas they didn't like, or which their sponsors didn't like. For example, if Google was the biggest licensor, they could lean on the Internet patent holder to make it more difficult for Microsoft to get approval for their Internet services, or vice versa. Or the government could lean on the patent holder to block undesired information.

  31. cat skinning, 101. by mevets · · Score: 1

    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.

  32. Re:What if? by Imrik · · Score: 1

    They patents would probably still be issued, prior art isn't relevant until someone tries to enforce their patent.

  33. What if Ugh had patented fire? by Pf0tzenpfritz · · Score: 1

    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!
  34. Re:gopher by Z00L00K · · Score: 1

    Since Gopher existed before the web we know it as of today there was prior art. It would just have been a different implementation.

    The fact that Gopher died was because www took off and Gopher was commercial protocol.

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  35. Re:What if? by Z00L00K · · Score: 1

    Just watch Max Headroom and you can see what the web can/will be (The use of a trojan is actually in that series made in '85 as well as a lot of other stuff).

    Add some Gibson and you have the rest. There are a lot of other Cyberpunk authors that also provides interesting stuff that can be seen as prior art.

    And the concept of the water bed is in public domain since it was described by Heinlein before it was common, so Science Fiction can definitely be seen as prior art. Time to start reading if you suffer from a lawsuit then.

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  36. No by symbolset · · Score: 1

    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.
    1. Re:No by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 1

      That's called "raining on a parade".

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    2. Re:No by symbolset · · Score: 1

      Sorry.

      --
      Help stamp out iliturcy.
    3. Re:No by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 1

      It's OK! We jest together. :-)

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
  37. We'd be fucked by MrKaos · · Score: 1

    that is all

    --
    My ism, it's full of beliefs.
  38. The obvious by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 1

    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)

    1. Re:The obvious by metacell · · Score: 1

      I doubt it. Betamax was released before VHS, for example.

      Open formats are often technically inferior, but still better because they're open.

    2. Re:The obvious by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 1

      Betamax wasn't superior to VHS. On the second go, we got a better product. Thank you. :)

      --

      "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)

  39. If he patented the web by rottenSoul · · Score: 1

    we'd use a different protocol. is that concept so hard?

  40. There were dozends of competing systems by Casandro · · Score: 1

    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.

  41. Re:gopher by Frnknstn · · Score: 1

    It was already an interenational standard, as was HTTP

    Wait, what? It was already an interenational standard,Hypertext Transfer Protocol was invented before Hypertext Markup Language? That was an amazing piece of prescience! How did the original implimenters know that some time in the future, a document format called HTML would exist? Did they have to first invent TSP (Temporal Scrying Protocol)?

    I am willing to accept that unlikely occurrence based on your well written (and well-moderated!) post. However, in all seriousness, I must call complete bullshit on your 'HTTP was just like FTP' statement.

    HTTP represented a completely different model of how client / server communication should take place. FTP was closely related to it's popular contemporary protocols: SMTP, Telnet, etc. With it, you would first connect to a server, exchange credentials and other digital pleasantries, request a file operation, transfer data, and then bid a formal farewell to the server.

    In fact, FTP was a different to the other protocols in another manner: it opened a separate connection for the actual heavy lifting, using it to send or retrieve file data.

    HTTP is a completely different way of thinking: Simply connect to a server, tell it what you want and how you want it, read the headers and then read the file. Simple, agile, and low-latency.

    --
    If it's in you sig, it's in your post.
  42. Re:gopher by jcr · · Score: 1

    or maybe the Xanadudes would have shipped something better.

    -jcr

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
  43. CERN policy by toruonu · · Score: 2

    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...

  44. Re:gopher by toriver · · Score: 1

    That makes early (header-less) HTTP closer to the Gopher model ("give me a list or a resource"). When they started adding headers etc. more or less inspired by RFC-822 mail, it was still adapting older protocols. But it took ages before the extra protocol verbs like DELETE and PUT were properly utilized, people generally sticking to GET and POST with the occasional HEAD.

  45. Re:What if? by Mindcontrolled · · Score: 1

    As a patent professional - and this is ofc not legal advise yadda, yadda - prior art does not need implementation. A description would be sufficient, as long as it is detailed enough to be implemented in the manner you want to patent. Let's say someone invents a FTL drive. The general idea of FTL drives in SF would not be prior art, as no one has described a workable FTL there. However, if for some strange reason, a dilithium based warp core as described in the ST tech manual would actually work, I could not patent it, because in that case, the tech manual would be prior art.

    --
    Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
  46. Re:gopher by gojomo · · Score: 1

    HTTP did not pre-date Berners-Lee; his project made the first version in 1991/1992... which didn't become an IETF standard until 1996.

  47. Re:gopher by edumacator · · Score: 1

    Since Gopher existed before the web we know it as of today there was prior art.

    Isn't the point of this sort of mental gymnastics to illustrate how insane the patent system has become? How many times do we see the most inane idea get a patent, even if there is a tremendous history of prior art?

    I haven't RTFA, but my guess is the intent is to say, if TBL had done the same thing, it would have tremendously altered the world we live in, especially if he vigorously defended his patent against the other protocols that threatened his patent. Then it's just a small leap of the imagination to wonder how many new "Internets" have been stifled because of software patents.

    --
    An important change for education.
  48. Plenty of Prior Art by cshotton · · Score: 1

    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!!!
    1. Re:Plenty of Prior Art by metacell · · Score: 1

      The contributor is making a point about how patents hinder innovation, I presume.

  49. Re:but he couldn't by DrVxD · · Score: 1

    ...and the rather obvious corollary that the WWW would be without Americans.

    Damn you TBL - why didn't you patent it!

    --
    Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
  50. Why less interesting? by nurb432 · · Score: 1

    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 ----
  51. Re:but he couldn't by nurb432 · · Score: 1

    And if America didn't have "WWW", the rest of the world would have never heard of it. Where do you think it really took off, then spread outwards?

    Yep, the US.

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  52. Royalties by Murdoch5 · · Score: 1

    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.

  53. Well, actually... by hirschma · · Score: 1

    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.

  54. Hyper-G or VRML by sgt+scrub · · Score: 1

    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.
  55. Is the news that slow? by The+Dawn+Of+Time · · Score: 1

    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.

  56. Fewer viruses by readin · · Score: 1

    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.
  57. It Depends by brit74 · · Score: 1

    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).

  58. VRML Would have Ruled the World! by Cito · · Score: 1
    VRML would have ruled the internet! No need for the countless plugins, flash, shockwave, realaudio, shoutcast, activex, etc.

    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.

  59. Patent what, exactly? by ahabswhale · · Score: 1

    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?
  60. Re:gopher by Teancum · · Score: 1

    I wasn't commenting on the official RFC paper defining HTTP, I was referring to the basic protocol which was used by HTTP. It wasn't anything new and in fact adopted many standard practices being used by a great many other file transfer protocols and software. This is one of the reasons why FTP servers could be directly accessed by most web browsers, because the transfer protocols were almost identical.

    What has gone on is that HTTP has diverged from this base design and certainly has adapted and developed over the years to become something substantially different. My point is that it wasn't a revolutionary design but rather an evolutionary design with one small tweak after another over the years to add one new feature, then another and another until you have what we now know as HTTP. As such, this isn't really patentable either other than the concept of a hyperlinked GUI.... which also wasn't anything particularly new.