All this patent business has got me thinking. Surely you’ve read something in recent news reports about companies who claim they own the patents on much used Internet applications or formats. There was the whole fuss between Amazon and everyone else when they tried to get us to believe they owned the whole shopping cart concept. Doing the actual research and applying the knowledge it takes to create a real killer Internet application should be rewarded. Yet many times the people who own the patents to popular formats and content delivery methods aren’t the creators of this worthy stuff. Patent acquisition and ownership of intellectual property are modes of commercial enterprise.

"Patent acquisition and ownership of intellectual property are modes of commercial enterprise."

Bill Gates may have a stronghold on the operating system market but he doesn’t own the patents to the hardware (PC) that is required to run it. Big boys in the computer field play patent games all the time but recently the game is being turned outward to the end users and vendors of various "patented" Internet procedures and features.

The newest occurrence of the patent demon comes from this company that claims they own everything there is to own as far as seeing videos on the Internet is concerned. They’ve bought patents for certain video delivery formats and methods and now they want royalty money from adult sites that use these technologies. I’m not going to comment on the ethical qualities of this company’s claims because that’s not what this article is about. This article is about worst case scenarios and how far we can take this idea of "Who owns the Internet"?

A common argument among adult webmasters when they refute threats of legal action from US enforcement is that the United States doesn’t the own the Internet. The Internet belongs to the world. It’s called the World Wide Web, not the US Web. They say that no one can shut them down because no one entity owns the Internet.

In my heart, I believe the Internet belongs to the people of the world. After researching the origins and evolution of the Internet, I’m not so sure I can enforce the wishes of my heart in a court of law, especially patent law.

The Internet wasn’t cooked up by some college kids in their parent’s garage. The Internet was created by the United States Department of Defense. In response to the launching of Sputnick, the DoD started the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Researchers within ARPA like Leonard Kleinrock, Lawrence G. Roberts and Paul Baran developed a communications network that operated with packet-switching technology. That network was named ARPANET. Eventually some of the nodes that made up the ARPANET evolved into the World Wide Web. Private networks with commercial interests such as PSI, UUNET, and ANS CO+RE linked up with the backbones and the open architecture of the Internet began to take shape.

Somewhere in all that history are some patents for technology that’s more integral to the operation of the Information highway than video streaming. I can’t imagine the DoD completely letting go of their influence over the Internet. ICANN has charge over domain names. WC3 has authority over standards and protocols but who actually owns the ideas?

As far as I can glean from public documents when ARPANET split, the military kept their backbones and the researchers/educators yielded theirs to private interests. The stability of the public Internet depends on UUNET and AOL networks more than anything else. What if AOL and the DoD got into a patent lawsuit over packet-switching royalties? What if Ray Tomlinson or Lawrence Roberts had decided not to magnanimously gift the world with the email application? Wouldn’t it be funny if UNYSIS decided that one day they wanted arrears on royalties from every damned one of us because they own the patent to the .GIF image format?

I suppose the reason we didn’t have this kind of patent frenzy back in the heyday of television was because the culture wasn’t as litigious. Television pioneers had taken their business model from radio of paying for programming by running commercials and charging for airtime. Of course now, everybody sues everybody for everything. This new medium is advancing so rapidly the law can’t keep up and it seems to me "fast ones" are getting pulled from all sides of the board.

We’ll miss these days I suspect. These days when nobody knows who owns what and anybody can do pretty much anything for themselves. Someday soon the market won’t be as free. The walls will go up and there will be roadblocks up and down the information highway. A day will come when it won’t matter who owned the patent to what technology because they will be obsolete. New ideas and methods will take hold and hopefully never stop the progression.