What If Tim Berners-Lee Had Patented the Web?

An anonymous reader writes "Last week Slashdot had the story that the web had turned 20 years old. Of course, patents also last 20 years, which has resulted in some asking what would have happened if Tim Berners-Lee had patented the web? Thankfully, he didn't (and wouldn't). But we'd be living in a very different (and probably less interesting) world if he had."

Re:Patented what specifically?

[siddesu]

He could have patented the thing he implemented and released over telnet in 1991 when I first tried it. Basically, the concept of a message from a resource that contained links to other resources, a server that delivered that message from the said resource over a simple protocol, and the format of the message and the mechanism of the said message's generation being transparent to the caller of the resource. With a computer, over the internet. In his articles at the time there was a lot written about different ways of displaying the said message. More than enough to cover all of the WWW as we know it.

Re:And queue up the...

[riverat1]

Al Gore brought the High Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991 to Congress and got it passed. That was one of the fundamental pieces of legislation that took ARPANET from being a limited military/education network to the commercial Internet.

In Wikipedia it says:

Former Republican Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Newt Gingrich also stated: "In all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on a long time. Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet, and the truth is -- and I worked with him starting in 1978 when I got [to Congress], we were both part of a "futures group" -- the fact is, in the Clinton administration, the world we had talked about in the '80s began to actually happen."

I don't think saying his he created it is any more than normal political spin.

Re:gopher

[Teancum]

Then gopher would have been developed into something similar.

There were so many other potential software packages that were doing essentially the same thing that the web was doing that I'd have to agree with this statement. It should be noted that SGML was already being used when Tim Berners-Lee introduced the sub-set that is known as HTML. It was already an interenational standard, as was HTTP, which was mostly a re-worked variant of FTP and other similar file transfer protocols.

He answered this himself in 1997

[sootman]

Tim Berners-Lee in Wired, March 1997 [wired.com]

Do you wish you'd started the Web as a business?
 
If I'd started "Web Inc." it would have been just another proprietary system. You wouldn't have had this universality. For something like the Web to exist, it has to be based on public, nonproprietary standards.

PS: That's Sir [slashdot.org] Tim Berners-Lee to you, bub. :-)

Re:He answered this himself in 1997

[KiloByte]

Sorry, the thirteenth amendment was held off by courts as it would ban lawyers from titling themselves "esq" (and an unrelated amendment got its number). Thus, being an US citizen doesn't prevent Tim Berners-Lee from being granted nobility by the country of his birth.