[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Re: W3C ridiculous new policy on patents
That proof is there empirically and hard to question in the profit and loss sheets of the overwhelming majority of dot.coms that tried it. As I said, look at the new Yahoo business model which includes more revenue from advertising and selling services to the users. What is donated to common usage and a natural commons are very different things. The Internet is not free pasture land. You can "prefer" any entity, university or otherwise, to do what you prefer but they don't have to and it is more than likely that as costs climb for use of their resources, they will as Yahoo is doing, put tolls on that usage or return to the governments of their local areas for increased support. Then you can vote for higher property taxes or whatever means is used. That is a way to express the preference. Again, the issue is the relationship of the W3C to patented technologies with regards to creating specifications. More to the point, it is becoming the charter of the W3C itself and the privilege of a commercial consortium to govern the public interest. len -----Original Message----- From: Francis Norton [mailto:francis@r...] Your argument proves that the internet was not free of development cost, it doesn't prove it wasn't a commons. We're arguing about what business model best supports the development costs of the internet. So-called economic "realists" were horrified (I know, I saw their faces) when I explained that this new-fangled internet thingie made it as cheap to retrieve a document from the other side of the globe as from up the road. They assumed that bandwidth was a scarce resource of diminishing returns - in fact it is a scarce resource of increasing returns, so that the more "inefficiently" we price it (so that pricing encourages users to "squander" it) the cheaper and more plentiful it becomes. In a free market no-one has a right to profit, but everyone has a right to try to make a profit. If I, as a tax payer, and consumer, prefer to support my internet habit by having tax-funded universities donate IP to the common wealth and supporting companies that support unencumbered technologies, rather than by paying tolls to monopolistic corporations, then that's my right. Unless you can prove that this business model won't work - and you haven't yet, which isn't surprising, since it is the business model underlying internet technology so far - I'll keep fighting that corner. Companies and states alike are here to serve humans, not vice-versa.
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