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UN Wades Into Patent War Mess
Rambo Tribble writes "The BBC is reporting that the worldwide, tangled mess of IP litigation has come to the attention of the UN's International Telecommunication Union. The agency has announced it will be holding talks aimed at reducing this massive drag on the digital economy. Good luck."
If there's one organization I think of when it comes to taking effective, decisive, timely action - it is the United Nations.
#DeleteChrome
HA!
I for one am not going to forget about that proposal.
Guess how that is going to turn out then ?
Seriously, there are far too many lawyers involved in this mess for them to agree to the self destruction of their livelyhoods (and political ambitions..:) )
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
"aimed at reducing this massive drag on the digital economy" and transferring it directly from the taxpayers of the member nations pockets, into the UN's.
Microsoft and Apple are among firms that have called on others not to enforce sales bans on the basis of such standards-essential patents.
Wow.
We've been warned of the upcoming so-called singularity, where technology advances faster than we can comprehend. It seems like the patent wars (if they continue) might be delaying its arrival; is that a desirable outcome?
Indeed. The only way to actually solve the issues with monopoly rights like patents is to turn them into non-confrontational compensation rights where a third party (such as the patent office) provides compensation due based on usage. Such a system would reasonably have a limited budget, ensuring that the system players have an interest in keeping the quality of compensation rights high as if more rights get granted everyone would get less per use.
But a non-confrontational system would require and support far fewer lawyers, so like you say it's unlikely to happen.
Someone in the UN must feel they are becoming out of touch, only getting involved in the physical world. First "Internet Rights", now IP law reform... what next? UN mandated hackerspaces?
No article of the constitution grants law making or regulatory authority to any foreign power. How did you get that idea from the clause authorizing the president the to make treaties with the consent of congress? Are you insane?
I think this may actually not be a waste of time. A lot of the mess we see now is due to the inclusion of patented technology in international standards (be they ITU, ETSI, ISO-IEC, ANSI whatever). And the fact that there was so little oversight on this, the validity of patent claims and subsequent licensing, was due to the direct wishes of the telecom/technology companies themselves. The standard bodies were all to happy to accommodate their constituents in this point for years.
Now the companies, and the government who are in the awkward position of depriving their citizens of the latest cell phone because of some obscure patent law issue, are realizing that they are in the process of hanging themselves with the rope they had requested.
This is a very broad issue and the ITU has had a decent track record of elevating previously obscure tech issues into the international policy realm. If anyone expects overnight binding measures to come from this, they are deluded. But raising awareness of the issue and getting the various actors to take a position is the unavoidable first step in resolving any complex issue.
Good luck to them.
It involves a foreign power dictating terms you agree to bind American behavior to. Like a law, or a regulation.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'd love to see the UN troops with their blue hats march into the courtroom and tell the lawyers of both sides to back off.
And a nice little red cross tent outside taking care of the wounded lawyers who burned themselves choking on their coffee.
For some people, the UN could announce a cure for cancer, free unlimited food for everyone, a low-cost solution to global warming and a Mars colony project on the same date, and they would comment with NWO paranoia, evil overlord nonsense and "don't mess with my rights" bullshit.
A huge majority of those comments come from americans. Are you so unconfident that you can't accept someone else besides the "land of the free and the home of the brave" (which has long since turned into a joke to everyone outside the US) as someone setting international agendas?
We have a similar phenomenon over here in Europe, btw. - it is directed against the European Union, which is always blamed for everything that goes wrong, even though at least lately they have made a ton of excellent decisions (rejecting ACTA being the most prominent one). That is in part caused by our coward, corrupt, evil politicians, who abuse the EU to push through laws they want but know would never get popular support for. It goes roughly like that: Come up with law, test it with a few controlled "leaks", notice popular outrage. Publicly call the scapegoat you prepared for a crazy idea and ascertain public that the party line is different. Quietly move law to the EU level and get it passed as an EU directive. A year or two later, dig up old law again and complain how you really don't want to do it, but the EU forces you to...
So I wonder where the anti-UN sentiment in the US comes from?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
1) All patents expire after 2 years. If you can't make money from having a 2-year monopoly on an invention, it obviously wasn't very good anyway. 2) Getting a patent costs a €LARGE_AMOUNT of money, which goes into a fund that the government uses to invest into research. 3) No sales bans. The only penatly for "violating" a patent is compensation for actual damages, the burden of proof for which lie on the patent holder. 4) If out of a random sample of five university students in the appropriate field, at least three find your idea obvious and/or trivial to come up with, your patent is rejected. 5) (Very) generous exemptions from the all of the above for non-profits, educational users and independent (non-corporate) inventors.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
There are a lot of problems with patents. The the existence of trivial patents that should never have been granted is a biggie. The use of these patents by trolls to extract money from a market they didn't help build is another. Next on the list are companies using trivial patents to stop competitors. The role of standard essential patents in these problems is limited. Just look at the patents used by offensive parties in patent cases. If not hidden from view. Rounded corners, specifics of a search function, the way to display information, tapping vs sliding a screen lock widget.
At the same time both Europe and the US are investigating the use of standard essential - and not trivial - patents in these cases. And now the UN kicks in. The same organisation involved in the latest attack on net neutrality. Remarkable. So remarkable you should wonder who is/are behind it. I'm afraid that just might be the parties using trivial patents offensively, that now see Motorola and Samsung bringing in patents that are less trivial as defense. If that is true, forget about the UN doing something about the real problem of standard essential patents: submarining a standard. The current EU, VS and UN involvment is about setting the stage for the trolling game.
This whole patent mess reminds me of the animation movie "Finding Nemo". Somewhere a flock of seagulls attacks, mindlessly screaming "Mine! Mine! Mine!"
This is what the industry is like today. Lawyer driven madness, where everyone is trying to put a claim on any thought that might be remotely original. It is a huge drag on innovation and leads to destruction. I can only hope the ITU will be able to put up a sail between these gullible seagulls and real innovation. Just like in the movie.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
UN along with the prior failed League of Nations was a Rothschild invention.
Since its creation there has been 67 wars by proxy.
Other acronyms are going to quickly get dragged into this, mainly the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) which is much more about this sort of stuff, and possibly the World Trade Organization (WTO) if, for example, Korea were to complain that the US ITC is being overly kind to Apple and should be letting Korean products in.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
The only way to actually solve the issues with monopoly rights like patents is to turn them into non-confrontational compensation rights where a third party (such as the patent office) provides compensation due based on usage.
No, there is a third way: drop patents completely. Like copyright, they began as ways for a king to get additional funds: by legalizing bribes, so someone could pay to have his competition declared illegal. And like copyright, they never has any purpose that's beneficial to the society at large (despite what their proponents say).
I don't think anyone can say with a straight face that patents promote innovation.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Solved.
For some people, the UN could announce a cure for cancer, free unlimited food for everyone, a low-cost solution to global warming and a Mars colony project on the same date, and they would comment with NWO paranoia, evil overlord nonsense and "don't mess with my rights" bullshit.
A lot of people would comment on that because where do you think most of the money for those programs, or the free food would come from? That's right, the US. We already have enough problems ourselves that we have to fix first.
A huge majority of those comments come from americans. Are you so unconfident that you can't accept someone else besides the "land of the free and the home of the brave" (which has long since turned into a joke to everyone outside the US) as someone setting international agendas?
You know, we here in the US do kind of have cause to be uncomfortable with being controlled by a higher body. I mean, the country itself exists only because Americans got tired of being ruled over by a government that they saw as foreign and insensitive to their needs and only wanted to exploit them to fund it's wasteful wars and other expensive programs.
We have a similar phenomenon over here in Europe, btw. - it is directed against the European Union, which is always blamed for everything that goes wrong, even though at least lately they have made a ton of excellent decisions (rejecting ACTA being the most prominent one).
That is because people don't like to give up sovereignty. By giving up power to a higher regional entity, the "local" (state) governments lose their independence and quite a bit of their power. Look at what is happening in Greece and you can see how people like getting told what to do by an outside power overriding their own sovereignty. The same situation happened in America 150 years ago. Hopefully Europe can avoid the war we were unable to.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
What a pitty they choose to focus on FRAND type of patents, instead of ALL the (mostly) obvious ('software like') patents.
Now, imagine someone suggesting to abolish ALL patents that can be 'worked around' by doing a software change.
Kind regards,
Roel
Seems the BBCs spin on this is that Apple and Microsoft are the 'good guys' where Samsung and Motorola are the 'not so good guys' due to their defensive measures with their FRAND patents.
It mentions nothing of the abuse that Apple is giving regarding to block android phone sales due to patent disputes.
Shame the BBC didn't do more in-depth research and give a fuller-laid-out article covering all sides. Not what I expected as a taxpayer to be honest.
One time Americans brag how lack of federal government contributed to the euro mess and another time they argue that state power is what makes America.
That's called a freedom of the speech. Freedom of thought had been relegated to their favorite news organisation.
I wouldn't mind dropping patents completely. However, there is a problem that I think needs addressed before anyone takes the idea seriously. Say, I'm a poor man, living on ramen noodles and tap water, and no hope in sight. I invent widget X, which is really useful and would, in a flourishing scenario, make me rich. But if there are no protections, there is nothing keeping MegaCorp Y from just looking at my widget X, and mass producing a version that sells for cheaper than I can even buy my widget parts for. Obviously, mankind still benefits from my idea, but I won't. This isn't a problem, per se, because perhaps we need to get out of the mentality that we will get paid for adding to everyones good, but that totally kills any ambition to ever even try to market my product.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Freedom of thought had been relegated to their favorite news organisation.
You mean Reuters, BBC, and Al-Jazeera English? Because that's where I get most of my news.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Ah yes. The UN will save us!
A lot of people would comment on that because where do you think most of the money for those programs, or the free food would come from? That's right, the US. We already have enough problems ourselves that we have to fix first.
I can relate to that argument better than you think, because I'm german and we germans are the ones largely paying for the whole EU thing.
However, we are also profiting from the EU a lot more than the mainstream media or the politicians care to admit.
I wouldn't be surprised if the same would be true for the US. Of course, the facts won't be easily available, because politically, the UN is the perfect scapegoat.
You know, we here in the US do kind of have cause to be uncomfortable with being controlled by a higher body. I mean, the country itself exists only because Americans got tired of being ruled over by a government that they saw as foreign and insensitive to their needs and only wanted to exploit them to fund it's wasteful wars and other expensive programs.
That's pretty ironic because the end result of it all has been that you've created your own government that is insensitive to your needs and only wants to explout you to fun its wasteful wars and other expensive programs.
And give you an illusion of control. When's the last time elections in the US really changed anything?
That is because people don't like to give up sovereignty.
Strawman. They already have. The question is not giving it up or not, the question is solely to whom.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
UN along with the prior failed League of Nations was a Rothschild invention.
Sources and evidence or it's a lie.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Strawman. They already have. The question is not giving it up or not, the question is solely to whom.
It is not a strawman, because at least nominally a state government is still beholden to the people of the state, and are supposed to act in the best interests of the people. If they do not, then the people should be able to install a new government that does. In the case of the EU, the state government can no longer operate in the best interest of its people, as it is under the control of the EC and EP. The problem we are seeing is that the strong states in the EC are forcing decisions that best help themselves, or at least gives them greater protection. Politics at every level is a zero sum game, but especially at this level. When these stronger states look out for their own or the regional interests, these weaker states lose by default. Pretty much every commentary says that Greece would be better off on the lira, but for the sake of the EU and the euro they have to stay on the euro.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
You know, we here in the US do kind of have cause to be uncomfortable with being controlled by a higher body.
Doesn't everyone?
Look at what is happening in Greece and you can see how people like getting told what to do by an outside power overriding their own sovereignty.
Don't be so sure about it. They HATE their complacent and stupid government, but most of them see the Europe as the only way out of the third world. So all in all, quite the opposite of what you're stating.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Hey! On the bright side, at least now the ITU is not a little known entity, as someone qualified it less than a month ago.
:-) It took only one previous post to come out from the "unknown" territory.
You have to give them that
I know of 2 viable alternatives to intellectual property. First is nothing. No patent law, and no other explicit form of encouragement. You would have to make good use of your first mover advantage to benefit from your widget. You may still be able to negotiate a deal with MegaCorp, but they tend to cheat and renege on deals if they think they can get away with it.
If the public feels there ought to be something more, then there is the other alternative, some form of patronage. Rather than trying to restrict access by force of law, so that tollbooths can be placed before all who would use an idea, try a permissive system. Use first, and sort out the compensation later. The small time inventor would help show how popular his invention is, and, after some verification, would receive monies from these organizations that we created specifically to handle this issue. At no point would any user of an idea have to fear being slapped with a penalty, or being dragged into court, which is a penalty all by itself.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
apparently, your experience in the soviet bloc has led to some wackjob views on capitalism
however, as per your last comment, you still retain the tribalism of the old soviet bloc: korea, red!
how come the soviet economic policies have left you so scarred, but the soviet imperialism is something you still are aligned with, according to your last comment?
isn't soviet imperialism as equally destructive as it's communist ideology?
you don't see that. so you're some sort of eternal propaganda victim
strangely enough, you remind of ayn rand, whose own derangement on questions of capitalism, because of her formative years in the soviet bloc like you, led her to embrace an equally febrile and shrill fundamentalist extremism on what capitalism means
anyway, keep spamming slashdot. i guess as a captain of industry you can afford the time (!?)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The European Union isn't the problem - its the European Parliament or the European Commission. One makes useless shit up and pays vast amounts to their politicos, the other sensibly rejects the crap like ACTA.
Then there's the European Court of Human Rights and European Court of Justice, one lets convicted murders remain in a country because they had a girlfriend and imprisoned drug addicts continue to receive drugs, the other upholds bans on xboxes because Microsoft refused to pay for patents they used.
Its not so simple in the EU you see. That's why there's a lot of calls for reform, and calls to scrap the whole thing are generally misreported.
Well, with the first, what I see happening inventors will be "employed" by MegaCorp, because no small Joe wants to try and out-commercialize MegaCorp. The big ones get bigger, at a rate even faster than they do without current protections.
The second assumes that people are less than assholes when it comes to money. That will never be the case.
I actually put a little more thought into it. Something I think everyone can get behind. Lets have what we call a pre-patent. Before getting a patent, you get the pre-patent, which gives your widget current-style patent protection... for 6 months. During this 6 months, you can go around, try to license your widget design to whoever, or try and bring the product to market on their own. After those 6 months, if there is a working product being produced and consumed, you get a real patent, that lasts as long as you are producing the product, or you have licensees producing a product. As soon as their is no more production, the patent becomes public domain.
Pre-patents would be easier to invalidate as well, since they aren't fully granted patents yet. It could make it much easier to deal with
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
your constant spamming of this site with your bullshit extremist economic and social views makes you the issue, not your mental vomit in this particular thread
what you say isn't really interesting anymore. your existence is the issue. you're the most prolific troll on slashdot
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you do not have the capability to bring something to market, you do not have the capability to capitalize on it. You'd need to partner up, sell it/yourself as much as you can, etc, but there really is no fundamental claim that you should be compensated if you yourself do not (including "can not") execute.
Many people who have advanced humanity through their ideas and innovations did not receive any sort of windfall funding after the fact; it's simply not to be expected as normal. We are most likely in a slow IP bubble right now, so consider that our perspectives are from inside that.
You believe patents should be able to last indefinitely? I don't think that's something "everyone can get behind".
My (somwhat conspirational) take is that this is intentional. At the beginning of this chain are investors, bankers etc. who are pulling all strings (by investing, lending etc.) - finance sector in general. At the end of it are consumers who suffer all negative consequences of this mess (indirectly) and pay lawyers' bills. From the point of view of financiers the best company is the one they've most invested in and in our case this is Apple by far. So, financeers will use all their influence to make Apple bigger, which - given their current huge market share and profits - means monopoly. The same wall street estabullshitment that was able to steal trillions of dollars in (more or less direct) bailouts will use its influence to make sure Apple remains so profitable, regardless of mayhem caused in the process. Will this mean killing all the innovation, let's be it. In this particular case ITU will ensure that all competitors currently bullied by Apple will remain toothless. It this won't help, expect some crazy legislation aimed at preventing competition in mobile space. This is crony capitalism at its best - wall street crooks protecting their shiny, "fruity" investment.
If the idea is brilliant, isn't obvious, and everybody wants one forever and ever, sure. I see the problem with patents ultimately is to keep things/ideas from being used by others. I tried my best to illustrate that in my proposition, the target of getting a patent would be making this thing available. Meh, that was my 20 minutes of toilet time pondering.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I don't think you understood what I said.
the problem with patents ultimately is to keep things/ideas from being used by others.
Exactly! I think the solution is not to tweak how we get permission to use an idea. The solution is to make it so we don't have to get permission.
An inventor ought to be compensated. But that does not mean an inventor should be handed any kind of control, veto power, or even much of a say on the amount of the compensation. The amount is for the public and impartial measures to decide, not the inventor. Giving all those powers to an inventor just gums up the works.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
The funny thing is that unless you are exceptionally wealthy, i.e. a megacorp, there is little hat you can do to stop another megacorp expropriating your ideas. The best you can do is to sell it to someone else who has the money to defend it.
See my journal, I write things there
Where does anti-UN sentiment in the US come from?
It comes from experience. It comes from watching the UN for decades. It comes from seeing the worst human rights violators chairing the commission on human rights. The UN is just club for the elites as they decide how to mess with the world for their own benefit. And as elites, they do it ineffectually and at great cost, but that's OK because its only effects the lives of non-elites and its done with other people's money.
I agree, in parts.
But the EU does have a parliament, and it has been made more powerful with the latest reforms.
The UN doesn't have a parliament. Would that help your fears? Considering that more than half of the representatives (if selected by population sizes) would be from Asia? And only about 5% from the USA?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
That's so cute, you think watching the propaganda you have been fed for years and years means you have come to some kind of conclusion on your own!
I mean, the country itself exists only because Americans got tired of being ruled over by a government that they saw as foreign and insensitive to their needs and only wanted to exploit them to fund it's wasteful wars and other expensive programs.
At least you solved the 'foreign' part.
Nope. I'd rather not have the UN at all. To me it's about as effective as the League of Nations was, except their only purpose is to try and gain as much power and control over things as they can. But despite that it is essentially toothless when it comes to enforcement, which is why they keep trying to encroach on everything.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The UN is funded by member nations in proportion to their GDP. In the past, this has meant that the U.S. has been paying for more than 25% of the UN's activities. Many Americans felt we weren't "getting our money's worth" from that investment, paying a lot of money to support an organization which frequently worked counter to U.S. interests. On the flip side, many people who are anti-U.S. tried to use the UN to thwart U.S. interests while expecting the U.S. to pay 1/4th to 1/3rd of it.
Yes you can argue the EU as a whole pays a bigger share, but the EU has much more representation in the UN's voting bodies. They have 2 permanent security council seats and frequently have non-permanent seats. The U.S. has just 1 permanent security council seat. (Incidentally, when the UN was first formed, the USSR wanted each of its republics to have a separate seat and thus a separate vote. The U.S. countered that if they were going to do that, each of the U.S. states should have their own seat and vote. The EU, by starting off as separate countries at the time the UN was formed, has kinda unintentionally finagled the same thing wrt represenation.)
With globalization and improving economic development around the world, the U.S. share of UN funding has been falling, approaching 20%. When I projected it (before the housing bubble), we were on course to drop below 20% around 2015-2020. The lower the U.S. share drops, the better it will be for both those in the U.S. and those anti-U.S.
Germany is getting nothing from the European Union, the problem with the Germans is that about half of them are now socialists, and they are not learning from their mistakes. They already paid to subsidise the Eastern part, they can't stop being masochistic.
When I first visited Germany maybe 5 years ago, I asked some of the gov't workers on a train from Belgium to Baden Baden: when are you going to get out of Euro, it's destroying your purchasing power and your standard of life?
They said: it's better to pay than to fight wars. I am on and off in Germany for 3 years now, I come and go, stay for a couple of months at a time, in Baden Baden right now. I see that the attitudes are shifting, now maybe half of the people are against the Euro (the currency itself, never mind the union) and Germans need to get livid about the common bonds that will end up costing Germany untold amounts of wealth and productivity.
I remember I was actually surprised to see just how poor Germans really were compared to their counterparts in USA or Canada and I figured it out - it's the credit. Germans do not live on credit, they spend cash, they don't extract equity from their mortgages (if they have mortgages, and getting a mortgage in Germany is something else altogether in terms of difficulty compared to USA and Canada).
Germany is a WEALTHY country because it produces so much, but it is feeding the European Union with its wealth instead of consuming it itself, and that is done with all the inflation, and from the very beginning my prediction was that Euro, as a currency, has a very limited lifespan, that there cannot be an equitable union among countries with such different economies - mostly producers and savers in Germany and mostly consumers and debtors in southern Europe (and Eastern Europe of-course).
Germany is not better off in this crisis because of unions or laws, as so many liberals are convinced of, they are totally wrong.
Germany is better off because the people are net savers, the country has so much production capacity that it feeds countries around it, it doesn't actually need them to exist.
As far as I understand by now Germany can supply about half of its energy needs from renewable sources - solar and wind power, of-course the Germans got the completely wrong idea from Fukishima, so they don't want any nuclear, which is a huge mistake of-course, but even without nuclear maybe they can manage to produce enough power to be totally independent in a couple of decades.
Germany would be much better off of-course without all these laws, without regulations and these insane taxes (the German tax police is something else, it's fierce and insane) and as far as I understand it is common occurrence among the Germans to snitch upon each other to the authorities, so Germany is not even close to being a free country from individual POV, but it has enough common sense here to keep production by lowering the regulations, to allow cheap immigrant labour into the country to prevent jobs from being outsourced to places with lower labour costs and the most important thing: people are savers.
Savers will save the day of-course, with their own savings, they will be gutted by the spenders, but that's how the economies of the world will restart, because everything will be stolen from the savers.
You can't handle the truth.
So I wonder where the anti-UN sentiment in the US comes from?
LOL. I am not Anit-U.N. but I can easily see where the comments come from. Look at the headlines in the news recently. Does Syria ring a bell? Are civilians dying? Are kids being murdered for political ends? What is the U.N. proposing? Is it stopping any of the people from dying? Is there ANY FUCKING CHANCE whatsoever that the U.N. will make the slightest bit of difference there?
It seems clear the U.N. is utterly pointless in effecting any sort of change. Something is going on in Syria and NOBODY is revealing what exactly it is other than people are dying. Why are they dying? Why does the government feel the need to shell civilians? Why do Russian and China approve of what the Syrian government is doing? Why aren't we being told the truth about why the Syrian government is doing what they are doing? Why are we just being told about the civilians and children dying but not about... what? The "rebels" are actually an armed faction for another power that wants to take over the country and is backed by Western powers?
Seriously, the U.N. is about the stupidest idea ever as it is utterly powerless when it comes to sincere power struggles. Innocent people are dying and suffering! Make it stop NOW... or at least arm the civilians to give them a fighting chance.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Patents promote innovation. I don't think anyone can say with a straight face that patents don't promote innovation.
Its simple, why would I invest money in R&D when I could instead just invest money in stealing the idea? Why would I invest my own time and money in inventing something, when someone can just steal it from me when I'm done? Without patents innovation would pretty much be stopped dead.
Have you a link?
I don't have one myself, but I do know specifically that CERN did consider patenting the Web, but decided to Set The Series Of Tubes Free specifically so it could benefit humanity.
To the best of my knowledge, Tim-Berners Lee never made a dime off of it. I haven't followed his career lately, but for at least quite a long time after the Web became hugely popular, he was still a rather modestly-paid CERN staff member.
Let me create a couple placeholders:
Those are just empty Apache directory listings for now. I'll publish proper markup after I do some literature research. Posting placeholder directories like I do all over Creation primes the SEO Pumps.
Jonathan Swift, who can't be bothered to recover his password
unless you can afford to enforce your patent rights against a giant corporation with millions or billions of dollars and dozens of lawyers on staff, then your patents aren't worth anything.
patents are no use against mega-corps. they are only a tool FOR them, not a weapon against them.
bullshit. the US hasn't paid their UN dues for decades. they use the UN to inflict their policies on the world, and then expect the rest of the world to pay for that "privilege".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_the_United_Nations#The_U.S._arrears_issue
You wouldn't have the money to patent it or to defend the patent. Once you try and defend your patent MegaCorp Y is going to counter sue for all you have and you will not be able to afford the mounting legal costs and now you lost your home.
"Don't Panic!"
"That's right, the US. We already have enough problems ourselves that we have to fix first."
Right, but few of your problems are purely internal. They're pretty much all intertwined with the outside world in one way or another.
It's worth noting that the argument that the US gives a lot is a bit weak too. Per head of population, the US gives far less than many other countries in terms of aid etc.
The whole reason foreign aid budgets exist, is not because of altruism as they're billed as, but because they produce favourable conditions for trade for the donating country. This is why Britain donates to India, despite the fact India has it's own space programme which is more than the UK has going for it.
When WIPO was first created, throughout it's early years, many poorer nations voted for weaker IP laws, because they wanted cheaper medicine and technology for their countries, but the US did not like this and did not like the fact that it had been outvoted, so it created the WTO and used it's clout to try and push countries under the WTO. Effectively it didn't want to play the IP game by the world's laws, so it took it's toys and made it's own game, hoping to make everyone else play by it's rules. The US could not have done this if it wasn't such a major contributor to the UN, but it could and did, and the result is that it has been able to build global IP laws that massively benefit it's pharamaceutical, media, and tech industries. The money spent has massively paid off.
"You know, we here in the US do kind of have cause to be uncomfortable with being controlled by a higher body. I mean, the country itself exists only because Americans got tired of being ruled over by a government that they saw as foreign and insensitive to their needs and only wanted to exploit them to fund it's wasteful wars and other expensive programs."
So what's changed? Sure you're got rid of British rule, but you're still controlled by a government that sure, it's not foreign, but is still insensitive to the needs of the majority of the populace, catering primarily for big business and the rich, and it's still carrying out wars that are just as wasteful.
"That is because people don't like to give up sovereignty. By giving up power to a higher regional entity, the "local" (state) governments lose their independence and quite a bit of their power."
This isn't true. It's because people are, for the most part, ignorant. They're easily swayed and seduced by populism and nationalism, there's an inherent natural tendency towards these tribalist traits. The EU is a prime example of this, successive British governments have used it as a scapegoat, they've blamed the EU for things that aren't really it's fault, and importantly, they've used it to stir up nationalist sentiment towards it. Stirring up that sentiment in this way is nothing new - Americans do it with "terrorists", Argentinians do it with the Falklands, Iran does it with the Jews, and Britain does it with the Europeans. It's the way politicians milk easy votes from the more simple minded elements of society, but that doesn't make it right.
As a Briton, living in a safe-seat area in the UK, I'm actually better represented by the EU than I am by my own government. This is because in the UK my vote is completely meaningless due to first past the post, it can never hold any value, because it will always go to a candidate that either doesn't closely represent my interests, but who will always win, but for a party that at least partially represents my interests, but can never win. In contrast, my vote to the EU is based on PR, so no matter how small a percentage my vote contributes, it still counts for something, which is much more than for my national government. Clearly, the suggestion that being governed by a higher power means reduced personal freedom is false. My EU vote has bought me a the destruction of ACTA, it's bought be laws that better protect my rights as a worker, it's bought me laws that better protect my right to privacy, it's brou
...their so good at straightening things out.
While in general I think it's fine for companies to go the route that works and pursue patent enforcement actions, the issue changes when it comes to standards-essential patents. Excessive import bans and patent litigation in this area have the potential to substantially -- and unnecessarily -- increase the costs to consumers. It will be interesting to see what (if anything) happens as a result of the UN talks.