UN Bigwig: The Web Should Have Been Patented and Licensed

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."

Comments

Re:Hindsight

[buchner.johannes]

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. He brings the example of Violin vs. Saxophone.
I think his intention is correct, but should be solved by open standards as documentation, not patents.

He mentions there are many options in IP (I guess beyond patents [/. groupthink: bad] and copyright [/. groupthink: good]), but he doesn't explore what they are, or how they would have beneficial (to whom?) in case of the WWW.

I think he made the mistake of taking an example from the software/standards world. If he had taken an example of hardware, it would have been a good argument: It is beneficial if what happens behind the doors of e.g. car factories is patented -- i.e. brought to the open for improvements -- that way it is documented, can be improved upon, yet protected from IP theft.

The tone of the video (jump to 0:49:50) is also different from what it is portrayed as. His "talk" was a tiny side-note on a discussion/presentation. Does his comment mean the whole "The Global Innovation Index 2011" is useless? I think there are better arguments to be made, for instance: Does history show that "innovation programmes" from top-level effectively stimulate innovation, or is it just random successes by individuals? What are really the important factors (not for economic success, but for beneficial contributions)?