Scenario 1 : Every fact becomes "Privately" Own

2007- The rise of WebBlogs and loss in movies and CD producers

WebBlogs are becoming more and more popular, however, people are taking advantage of WebBlogs by using/copying the contents from others WebBlogs without notifying the publisher. The users published anonymously about their experiences or feeling in regards of shameful or dangerous. People share everything from sex and intimacy experiences to thoughts of terrorism on the website. Some of these contents and infromation indeed annoyed others and may result in disaster. People dislike others to steal and copy their ideas/experiences that they have published without stating where they steal and copy it from. There exist lawsuits on WebBlogs in US and China, which are the two countries that have the highest number of WebBlogs users. There isn't any law established about the usage/reusage of the information about WebBlogs, and thus this has brought up some attention as far as the legislation is concerned.

Another problem is that there are too many illegal videos and mp3 on the Internet, and all of these have caused significant loss to movie producers such as Paramount, Pixar, Tristar, as well as CD producers such as Rolling Stone, Sony, EMI, MGM,etc. eMule also catch the attention of these big market producers as there are too many people downloading all kinds of illegal videos, mp3 and books using this fascination software. At the end of 2007, the downloads of eMule have reached nearly 300million times. The spirit of "sharing everything except our family" scares and annoys big companies due to their significant losses these years.

2008- China and US Government cooperate

Big movie and CD produce companies sue eMule about their "illegal" sharing of the movies and mp3 etc since Dec 8th, 2003, when it started up. They claim that although eMule is peer-to-peer file transferring, and most of people who are using it is not for commercial purpose. The truth is many people are using eMule and thus resulting in significantly reduce in the profit of those companies by providing "free" download to their potential customers.

Microsoft signed agreement with the China government about the protection of software. Due to the pressure from Microsoft and other foreign countries, enterprises in China also calls on the protection of software, brandname,etc. Since these dramatically affect the performance of the enterprises to a large extent, the economic situation of a country's economy develop only up to a certain period of time and freeze. This is also the same situation in other Asian countries such as Malaysia, India,etc.

2009- Rise of Intellectual Property

A new law about the using of webBlogs and other experiences information sharing on the website is established. This law states that for the people who would like to share their experiences and information with others should use "Creative Commons" as their announcement of their copyright on it.

The lawsuit about eMule is still in hot discussion in this year. However, there is rumors saying that most likely, eMule will lose the lawsuit.

Most of the WebBlog are protected by the Intellectual Property. Application for Intellectual Property becomes fast,simple and easy. It is like when you go to the supermarket and you choose whatever you want. Thus, when you want to publish something you have read/copy on the Internet in another place, you must state where you got them. Creative Commons became very popular. A lot of people are using CC as one kind of fashionable symbol for their website or some resources. Some of the people are also trying to earn money from the information they have and everyone needs to pay a certain amount of money to publish their information elsewhere.

2010- All human knowledge are universally accessible

eMule lost the lawsuit against big companies. Apart from eMule, other peer-to-peer file transfer community such as Bit Torrent is also forbidden.

Numerous software sharing websites in universities in China are shut down. Before shutting down, these websites can only access by intranet which is inside the campus. There are thousands and thousands of free softwares on these websites. It is even possible to download Window XP and Office XP from those websites.

At the same time, China government also try to persuade the software companies to reduct the price of software as the main problem in China as well as the other Asian countries for the copyright of softwares is the price issue. This is another way to look at the problem of piracy, and to solve it in another way. Most of the software companies offer relatively lower price to individual customers and this indeed helped to boost the market in some sense. Actually, due to the large amount of buying and the economy of scale, the software companies get higher ROI.

Imagine that all human knowledge is universally accessible on the World Wide Web and every fact becomes private property. When everything becomes private property, information, videos, musics, source codes, softwares and etc. will be leased or sold. The price are sold at different level depends on the importance and quality of the information but are relatively low price. For instance, one guy is sharing his job-hunting experices and back pack travelling in the Europe and China. These two experiences are only selling at 3.99euro. However, thousands of people pay for this information. People are willing and used to pay for the information with a relative cheap price.

Piracy still exist, but however, in a relatively small scale, since the price of patented stuffs are not as expensive as before, and it doesn't make so much sense with piracy. You can pay a small amount of money, and you can get the "true" product, isn't that nice?

2011- Everything on the Web becomes Intellectual Property

The open standard (open source software/open content) are diminished as everything on the Web becomes Intellectual Property or patented. However, cooperation still exist. Unix as an example, programmers who contribute to the development of Unix are considered as "shareholder" of Unix, all of them can use Unix for free.

MIT's open courses are still online. However, the courses are joinly cooperated program in the world: the program gathered Top 100 universities as well as Top 10 universities in each country. Staffs and students in these universities have free access to the databases of open courses. As for other universities, they need to pay a small amount of money to get an account to access to it.

Besides that, when all the facts are patented, there will be less redundancy of information or conflicting information as there cannot be two patents on the same information.

References:
1. Intellectual plan established by China government
http://cn.news.yahoo.com/060430/346/2hf38.html

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emule