Who cares?

If you need a patent to secure funding, and funding requires a 4 for one bump on the exit strategy, a web browser hosted application is the last thing you want to build.   You want to build something that you can defend by any means necessary until you sell it to someone whose distribution is so large that defending it is just a call to a department in the next building, and otherwise, is so remarkably unique that stealing it is so obvious even a hip-hop DJ wouldn’t try it.

What the griefer vs the Anshe Chung/Graef DMCA complaint stunts show is that the future of the web as a profit engine is NOT in ubiquitous inclusive consensus-driven communications:  it is about closed firewalled paid-up-dues entertainment.   It is not about gathering; it is about enclosing.   It is not about reaching-out; it is about exclusion.

This thread is trying to make the case that a college library with math texts in 1964 was as popular as a drive in theatre showing Dr No.   It just ain’t so.  I leave it to your own tastes and research to determine which was more powerful or had a greater influence on the culture of 2007.  Better yet, ask your Mom and Dad which would have been a more likely place for you to have been conceived.

Power is money.  Otherwise, it is just influence.   People don’t want the Least.  They want The Most.  See Bill Haley and The Comets.

len