Re: Patents to be Auctioned

Thanks God that TBL did not try to patent the idea of combining
hypertext and networks.

Anybody too proud of his or her creative works should keep in mind that
almost everything that a single individual invents is based on reusing,
for free, the thoughts of millions of others, contemporary and previous;
as a stimulus or as previous knowledge, or both.

What is creativity but a few thousand neurons firing and establishing a
new link? And you want to charge mankind for this tiny, one-time
bio-chemical firework, which was running on a neural network (your
brain) that would not exist without the 30+ years of input provided from
the world that has been surrounding you, for free?

Maybe the W3C should implement a rule that anybody using W3C-based
technology (including the WWW as a whole), protocols, or mailing lists
must not patent any invention facilitated by that. So individuals and
enterprises can chose whether (1) they work and invent off-line, in the
dark, and charge others for their creative output, or (2) use the power
of the Web but share their fruits in turn with all fellow humans.

Martin
PS: I haven't read the patent, but to me it looks as if a lot of that
approach has been described already in TBL's early works. So the claim
of priority could be weaker than expected.

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martin hepp, http://www.heppnetz.de


Dudley Mills wrote: