Scenarios

Do you know your online rights? Are you worried of getting sued of using others information? Have you received a letter asking you to remove information from a Web site or stop engaging in an activity? Or are you concerned about liability for information that someone else posted to your online forum? We believed that those are the few questions that many of us have come across while accessing the Web. Our scenarios are stories of Intellectual Property on Web 2.0 in 5 years from now which is the year 2011.

Scenario 1 : Every fact becomes private property

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.

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.

to be continue... and edited

Scenario 2

Scenario 3