And here we were thinking nobody "owned" the Web. Tell it to the spider. Lycos, which last week announced the impending approval of its patent on spider technology, is the latest pending litigant in the quest to claim ownership of the ubiquitous. Lycos officially aspires to dominate "smart spidering technology," crawlers that use preprogrammed wits rather than brute force to build their databases. But it may just be that the "smarts" of any spidering system are best measured by its inventors' filing dates with the US Patent and Trademark Office.
It's hard to imagine the HotBots, Excites, and Infoseeks paying pennies to Lycos every time somebody searches for "kitty," but imagination is still the most celebrated engine of profit. And lawsuits are still one of the most sophisticated forms of "strategic relationships" out there, perhaps even less labyrinthine than commerce deals. More chilling than the prospect of millions of Net users being forced to use Lycos, though, is the notion that other struggling innovators may have already followed Lycos' lead.
Imagine the potential campaign of terror should Netscape claim the patent on the Back button, Progressive Networks sign its name on tincan-and-string-sounding audio, and HotWired argue ownership of the ad banner. It brings back memories of Ticketmaster.com making bizarre noises about the illegal use of its URL on Sidewalk - the Berlin Wall theory of asset management. The settlement terms of that slapstick routine never came to light, and Lycos' charges against unlawful infringements are still hypothetical. Should the ABCs of Web technology turn into formal property deeds, the notion of collective Web ownership may be history, but the threadbare screen we end up with will be ours, all ours.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
