Scenario 1 : Every fact becomes "Privately" Own

2007- The rise of WebBlogs and annoying 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 the 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. Since there are too many people download all kinds of illegal videos, mp3 and books by this fascination software. Up until the end of 2007, the download of eMule has reached nearly 300million times. The spirit of "sharing everything except our family" really scares and annoy those big companies due to their significant losses these years.

2008- China and US Government cooperate

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

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. Since these dramatically affect the performance of the enterprise and to a large extent, the economic situation when a country's economy develop to an certain period of time. 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 webBlog and other experiences information sharing on the website is established. In this law, it is stated 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. And apply for Intellectual Property become very simple and easy just like you go to the supermarket, and choose whatever you want. Thus, when you want to publish something you have read on the Internet to other places, you must state where you got them. Creative Commons became very popular. A lot of people using CC as 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, you need to pay a certain amount of money to publish their information elsewhere.

2010- All human knowledge are universally accessible

eMule lost the lawsuit against those big companies. Not only eMule, but also other peer-to-peer file transfer community such as Bit Torrent is also forbidden.

A lot of software sharing website in Universities of China is closed down. Before closing, this website can only access by the IP address inside the campus. There are thousands of free software on the website. You can even download Window XP and Office XP on the website.

At the same time, China government also try to persuade the software companies to reduct the price of software to sell more. Since the main problem in China as well as the other Asian countries for the copyright 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 the individual customers. This indeed 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. You must be very careful when you are going to use this information or you want to paste the information at another place. Moreover, some information on the website, such as information, video, music, source code, software and etc. will be leased or sold. Depend on the importance and quality of the information, they have different price. More of the price are not high. 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, tens of thousands of people pay for this information. It seems that people are already get used to pay for the information with a relative cheap price.

Piracy is still existed, however, to a relatively small scale, since the price of patented stuff is not as expensive as before, 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) will be diminished as everything will becomes Intellectual Property or patented. However, there is still cooperation. Take Unix as an example, programmers who contribute to the development of Unix are cosidered as "shareholder" of Unix, all of them can use Unix for free.

MIT's open courses is still on line. However, it join in a cooperated program in the world: the program gather Top 100 universities as well as Top 10 universities in each country. They provide staff and students in these universities free access to the database of open courses. For other universities, they need to pay a small amount of money to get an account to access to it.

The other side 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