Pioneer Who Kept the Web Free Honored With a Technology Prize
June 14, 2004
By VICTORIA SHANNON
International Herald Tribune
HELSINKI, Finland, June 13 - If Tim Berners-Lee had decided
to patent his idea in 1989, the Internet would be a
different place.
Instead, the World Wide Web became free to anyone who could
make use of it. Many of the entrepreneurs and scientists
who did use it became rich, among them Jeffrey P. Bezos (
Amazon.com), Jerry Yang ( Yahoo), Pierre Omidyar ( eBay)
and Marc Andreessen (Netscape).
But not Mr. Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at a
Geneva research laboratory at the time. That is why some
people think it is fitting - or about time - that on
Tuesday, Mr. Berners-Lee will finally be recognized, with
the award of the world's largest technology prize, the
Millennium Technology Prize from the Finnish Technology
Award Foundation. The prize, valued at 1 million euros
($1.2 million) is supported by the Finnish government and
private contributors.
The Internet has many fathers: Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn,
who came up with a system to let different computer
networks interconnect and communicate; Ray Tomlinson, the
creator of e-mail and the "@" symbol; Ted Nelson, who
coined the term hypertext; and scores of others.
But only one person conceived of the World Wide Web
(originally, Mr. Berners-Lee called it a "mesh" before
changing it to a "web"). Before him, there were no
"browsers," nothing known as "hypertext markup language,"
no "www" in any Internet address, no "U.R.L.'s," or uniform
resource locators.
Because he and his colleague, Robert Cailliau, a Belgian,
insisted on a license-free technology, today a Gateway
computer with a Linux operating system and a browser made
by Netscape can see the same Web page as any other personal
computer, system software or Internet browser.
If his employer at the time, CERN, the European Particle
Physics Laboratory in Geneva, had sought royalties, Mr.
Berners-Lee said he thought the world would have 16
different "Webs" on the Internet today.
"Goodness knows, there were plenty of hypertext systems
before that didn't interoperate," he said in an interview
on Sunday as three days of award ceremonies began here.
"There would have been a CERN Web, a Microsoft one, there
would have been a Digital one, Apple's HyperCard would have
started reaching out Internet roots," he said. "And all of
these things would have been incompatible."
Software patenting today, Mr. Berners-Lee said, has run
amok. In April, Microsoft was awarded a United States
patent for the use of short, long or double-clicks on the
same button of a hand-held computer to start applications,
according to a report earlier this month on eWeek.com. At
the same time, Microsoft said last week that it was
appealing a $521 million judgment - the second-biggest
patent-infringement award - won by a Chicago company called
Eolas Technologies over plug-in applications in Internet
browsers.
In 2000, the BT Group tried to pursue royalties on
"hyperlinking," and in 2002 Amazon.com patented a way to
shop online with one click of a mouse button.
"The problem now is someone can write something out of
their own creativity, and a lawyer can look over their
shoulder later and say, 'Actually, I'm sorry, but lines 35
to 42 we own, even though you wrote it,' '' said Mr.
Berners-Lee, who is director of the World Wide Web
Consortium based at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
"What's at stake here is the whole spirit in which software
has been developed to date," he said. "If you can imagine a
computer doing it, then you can write a computer program to
do it. That spirit has been behind so many wonderful
developments. And when you connect that to the spirit of
the Internet, the spirit of openness and sharing, it's
terribly stifling to creativity. It's stifling to the
academic side of doing research and thinking up new ideas,
it's stifling to the new industry and the new enterprises
that come out of that."
In Europe, proposed changes in patent law are still out of
reach after more than a year of heated debate, and the
original advocate of the law is reportedly now ready to
withdraw it. In the United States, that the federal Patent
and Trademark Office issued a preliminary finding in March
that would invalidate the Eolas patent claim, Mr.
Berners-Lee said, "is a very important step."
"Now we have to look at the general system. In the States,
the situation will need a huge change."
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