nternational 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."
