{"id":21156,"date":"2013-05-11T06:27:55","date_gmt":"2013-05-11T13:27:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/?p=21156"},"modified":"2017-05-11T06:34:27","modified_gmt":"2017-05-11T13:34:27","slug":"the-single-most-valuable-document-in-the-history-of-the-world-wide-web","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/the-single-most-valuable-document-in-the-history-of-the-world-wide-web\/","title":{"rendered":"The Single Most Valuable Document In The History Of The World Wide Web"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"NPR.org<\/a> | Twenty years ago this week, researchers renounced the right to patent the World Wide Web. Officials at CERN, the European research center where the Web was invented, wrote: CERN relinquishes all intellectual property to this code, both source and binary form and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify and redistribute it.
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It’s a dull sentence from a dull document<\/a>. But that document marks the moment when the World Wide Web entered the public domain \u2014 a moment that was central to creating the Web as we know it today.<\/p>\n

I emailed Mark Lemley<\/a>, an intellectual property expert at Stanford, to ask him about the counterfactual. Could the Web have been patented? And how would the world have been different if it had?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here’s an excerpt from his reply:<\/p>\n

\nIt is entirely possible that the Web could have been patented. A strong patent right would have driven innovation along a different path.<\/p>\n

Even in 1993, as the Web was being introduced, scholars and the government interested in data communications were talking about the “information superhighway,” a proposed centralized, government-sponsored broadband network that would have delivered video from TV stations and other approved content. [It is this, and not the Internet, that Al Gore “invented”].<\/p>\n

The Web is what happened from the bottom up while government and the telecommunications companies were still figuring out how to build something from the top down. But a patent right could have changed the course of innovation from the decentralized Internet model to a centralized information superhighway model. And we would all have been the poorer for it.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This week, a CERN spokesman called the document<\/a> “the single most valuable document in the history of the World Wide Web.” There might be a bit of hyperbole in that statement. (It came from a guy sometimes<\/a> called the half-spin<\/a> doctor.)<\/p>\n

Still, at a moment when the technology world is swamped in patent lawsuits<\/a>, it does seem worth pausing to appreciate the moment when a group of researchers renounced their intellectual property rights to patent and gave the World Wide Web to the world.<\/p>\n

By Jacob Goldstein<\/p>\n


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Also See:<\/p>\n