- From: Harry Zink <heywoodfloyd@mac.com>
- Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2001 11:46:15 -0700
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
- Message-Id: <6D77ED0E-B5D3-11D5-9770-0003934B6ADA@mac.com>
I think Alan Cox said it best when he stated: "A patent-encumbered web threatens the very freedom of intellectual debate, allowing only large companies and big media houses to present information in certain ways. Imagine where the web would be now if only large companies were able to use image files." [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentpolicy- comment/2001Sep/0131.html] The W3C is a standards body which has already often been ignored by the major players during the past 'standards' wars between Netscape and Microsoft - while a motion to support for-fee patents technology in the WWW will certainly be greeted well by the major players (who are, after all, behind it), it will also render the W3C body almost as irrelevant as ICANN is quickly becoming - and into nothing else but merely yet another lapdog of the major industry players, and certainly of Microsoft. Personally, I strongly recommend against this - lest W3C wants to be part of yet another longwided effort by 'the industry' to wasted millions of dollars with failing efforts to control an open and free resource of information. Like all prior efforts, any such efforts will fail, it's just a question how much money will be wasted this time by a great many industry participants. The true question, economically speaking, is "couldn't these millions be used more productively?", as in polishing existing software, making existing products actually work (not just work better), better interactivity between products and support for standards, and, above all else, better *content* instead of better control over content. So far, I hate to say it, but all content that these big players try to control isn't, for the most part, worth controlling, as it's crap - just like most movies produced nowadays, most music, and most 'content' websites (albeit the death of dot.coms has reduced those numbers significantly). If these control-freaking idiots would spend efforts to provide better content, and treat their customers with more respect (instead of assuming their are all thieves), maybe they would do better in general, instead of hemorrhaging money, and trying to distract from their own incompetences by pursuing pointless projects bound to fail (SDMI, anyone?) Will the public outrage have any efect? Of course not. Harry
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Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 14:49:20 UTC