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

Hindsight

[Anonymous Coward]

Always 20/20, especially if you're a greed-focused farging bastage.

Re:Hindsight

[mwvdlee]

...and ignore that the web might not have grown quite so popular if everybody had to pay for everything and stick to some individual's arbitrary rules.

Re:Hindsight

[Tsingi]

From Wikipedia: The Washington Post reported in 2003 that Lois Boland (USPTO Director of International Relations) said "that open-source software runs counter to the mission of WIPO, which is to promote intellectual-property rights." Also saying, "To hold a meeting which has as its purpose to disclaim or waive such rights seems to us to be contrary to the goals of WIPO

Re:Hindsight

[Joce640k]

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.

Yeah, all those RFCs are a complete waste of time.

All open standards should be written up in patent-speak (which nobody but patent lawyers can decipher) and never discussed in public beforehand (because that would make them unpatentable).

Impressive

[Spad]

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.

Re:Impressive

[Motor]

Head of Intellectual Property at UN thinks Intellectual Property makes things better.

Pope thinks Catholicism makes the world better.

News at 11!

Re:Impressive

[MysteriousPreacher]

Oh, maybe we would be posting on Slashdot, but Slashdot would be a news server where the summary was the first message posted to each new group. Links would of course be manual, i.e. a description of how to get at the article.

Good post. I would have posted before you if my ISP had licensed the AppleTalk to IPX bridge that would have allowed me to view Slashdot from my connection at home. Fortunately at work we have can afford to buy a browser that supports the mark-up used by Slashdot. I may be late responding to replies; the email clients here don't support the protocol my ISP uses.

Gurry simple doesn't understand "sharing"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

WIPO == Idiots

[zabzonk]

I worked at WIPO as a consultant for a year - a bigger collection of clueless f*ckwits would be hard to find.

Re:Who...

[Eunuchswear]

Your government voted for him.

The "UN" and it's myriad institutions is a figleaf for your rulers. It lets them do what they want and blame it on "The UN" or "WIPO" or "the WTO" or "the FMI" or "the World Bank".

No he didn't

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

That's what WIPO want

[petes_PoV]

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.