RE: [xml-dev] Re: W3C ridiculous new policy on patents

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

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@redrice.com]

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.