Becky sez, “My article on software patents and the knowledge economy has gone up on openDemocracy.net. It’s called ‘Patents for profit: dystopian visions of the new economy’. It’s a big’un – and ambitious in scope too, making links between the version of ‘democracy’ that has emerged from the closed doors of the European Commission and WIPO’s decision to exclude ad hoc observers from the upcoming A2K talks. openDemocracy runs a really good debate space alongside each article it publishes – anybody who’d like to come and thrash out the issues with me there over the coming week is more than welcome…”
The question has been a live one long before it entered the deep entrails of the European Union’s legislative process. Since the commercial software industry emerged around 1990, technologists have argued that code is different from other inventions: it does not need protection by patents. In software creation, open standards – code as common knowledge – are the key to fermenting progress. To patent code is to add disabling and unnecessary burdens on software enterprise that can kill its potential in this crucial, formative stage.
These fifteen years (a shorter timespan than the average patent) have seen the birth and maturing of the World Wide Web, all thanks to a protocol known as Hypertext Transfer (http). Tim Berners-Lee, the man who conceived the code that embodies this protocol, did not patent it. Thus it became an open standard: anybody could use it to contribute new programmes designed to run on the web. And use it they did. To the extent that the multiplying, democratising life-forms of the web now challenge the dominance of corporate media and orthodox models of economic activity.
(Thanks, Becky!)