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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."
Always 20/20, especially if you're a greed-focused farging bastage.
...voted for this guy?
(Yes, pedants, I'm aware we don't get to vote for them)
worldmobilenet.com -- World Prepaid Wireless Internet plans
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.
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.
I worked at WIPO as a consultant for a year - a bigger collection of clueless f*ckwits would be hard to find.
This certainly might have prolonged Gopher's viability.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The copy of copyright and patent supporters is to prevent systems like the internet from being founded. This is a great example: were the important protocols and general structure patented, what you know of as the internet would not have been delayed or more expensive, it would have never existed. It is quite obvious that the greater good is of no concern to IP supporters, only their own profits.
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.
Great Intellect...
Luckily Tim Berners-Lee did have a vision about his idea and probably even knew about the lack of vision of those greedy bastards.
...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
Nobody would have used the patented internet. Look at all the commercial protocols which failed to take off. DECNet for example.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
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 be HUGE overhead in collecting, and all the money would go right back to 'enforcement' and shit that has nothing to do with research or the betterment of human kind.
This is a joke. The whole idea is pure idiocy.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
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. 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.
I am officially gone from
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.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
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
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.
More than once - they called it CompuServe, GEnie, and AOL. Remember them?
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
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.
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.
(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.
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.
Case in point: Hyper-G/Hyperwave. 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, it found a niche for corporate intranets and now competes with SharePoint.
There are plenty of other early hypertext systems comparable to the WWW (going back to the 60ties). I seem to recall that Douglar Engelbart's 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).
check your history, young 'un. for example, the The IMF, also known as the âoeFund,â was conceived at a United Nations conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, United States, July 1944.
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.
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.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
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.
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.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
The biggest mistake in reasoning with a lot of systems like this is that the cost of administrative infrastructure is greatly under estimated.
Cost as in time. Asking for permission, reading a license contacting a lawyer about what the legal boundries are.
Cost as in money. Productive people are instead bogged down in checking and gatekeeping. This loss is doubled, this person could have contributed but is now a burden on the system.
Cost as in enjoyment. When working on something as soon as you have a negative balance in work completing the goal and red tape. People get demotivated. Work progress gets slowed or not compleded at all.
He glosses over in one sentence saying "a sufficiently nice license". This license and the administrative system it requires can never be good enough. This system would be huge, imagine the amount of paper work alone.
This guy needs FLAMEBAIT tattoo'd on his forehead. Surrounded with blink tags.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.