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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."
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.
We would just download Word docs that point to each other.
Then Doug Engelbart would have sued him.
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.
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
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!
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..."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"... 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
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.
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.
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...