Scenario 1 : Every fact becomes private property

2007
WebBlogs are becoming more and more popular, however, some people are using the stuff from other people's webBlog without notify them. They just think they publish their experiences or feeling on the website and they would like to share it with others. This indeed annoy some people. Another problem is that there are too many illegal videos and mp3 on the Internet, and all of these have caused significant loss to the movie producers such as () and (). Emule also catch the attention of these big market producers.

2008
Microsoft sign agreement with the China government about the protection of software. Both because of the pressure come from Microsoft and other foreign countries and enterprises in China also calls on the protection of software, brandname,etc.

Imagine that all human knowledge is universally accessible on the World Wide Web and every fact becomes private property. As consequences everything that you will be able to get/use/download from the Web such as information, video, music, source code, software and etc. will be leased or sold.

People are commercializing everything and selling it and the most extreme case is even facts are patented!! The market becomes niche market as people who have the information can make a lot of money and monopolize the market. As information is getting more expensive, so does piracy increases. People can’t afford or does not want to pay for the information and thus pirated the stuffs. Piracy is stealing from those that have the information. Laws were established in order to change piracy into a crime and the world becomes chaotic as issues as minor as plagiarism will be bring to the court as every fact become patented. It is difficult to eliminate piracy.

The main players of piracy issues are the United States, ASEAN countries in general and China specifically. Piracy results in high loss of billions of dollars for the US Government and pressure the world to tighten or enforce Intellectual Property laws in each country. The problems of Intellectual Property of Web have become a big argument worldwide and new legislation will be needed. When the law can no longer handle the issues related to Intellectual Property, the main players that lost the most money is US government due to pirated software. When the US government can no longer tolerate the increasing piracy, misuse and abuses of Intellectual Property and the worst of all is that the world may be at war.

The open standard (open source software/open content) will be diminished as everything will be patented and thus no people are willing to share their source code. As a result, there will be no cooperation and coordination in the advances and improvement of software or technology.

Intellectual Property are motivated by the economic realities of the information revolution where information is a value-added activity, which means everyone can profit by making every fact patented. It is definitely a money making business.

On the other good sides when all the facts are patented, there will be less redundancy of information or conflicting information as there can be no 2 patents on the same information.

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