[Foundation-l] Fwd: An idea of free innovation

[Milos Rancic]

On Sat, Nov 8, 2008 at 5:44 PM, Ting Chen <wing.philopp at gmx.de> wrote:
> I think we have a place for original research, and this is Wikiversity.
> The idea is good, but there are much problems. For example how can we
> prevent people from just take such an idea and patent it himself. The
> WMF is at the moment (shamefully) not even able to protect copyvio from
> our content. We would have less resource to open another front here.

The main schism of Wikiversity is not about OR, but about NPOV. Unlike
an encyclopedia, it is not so possible to build a university based on
one ideology (or "point of view" even authors of that particular POV
claim that it is "neutral").

While it is true that Wikiversity has to incorporate some OR, it is at
the much lower scale than Wiktionary incorporates OR. (Every word
definition is OR if it is not copied from some dictionary.) At
Wikiversity participants may teach each other how to do original
research, but it still doesn't need to be original research per se.

But, I think that the main initiative for the project which would deal
exclusively with OR will come from Wikiversity. OR project should
gather ideas and (non-encyclopedic) scientific production, and
Wikiversity's primary goal is not that, but to be a platform for
self-education (as far as I understand it).

As far as I know (but, let's say Mike Godwin may correct me), if
something is published prior to submitting a patent, it is, at least,
an easy case on the court; which wouldn't be our matter until someone
tries to sue us because of patent infringement (which would be, btw,
very stupid).

However, it is true that before we make such project we have to have
well developed Wikiversity because such places, where original
research is possible, tend to become a place for pseudoscience and bad
science. We have to have at least a clear picture about that segment
of "intellectual property" laws (like we have in the case of copyright
law), too.