I couldn’t believe my luck.

Standing in front of me and speaking about ”Web 2.0 – The Next Leap Forward” was Jimmy Wales, the man who founded Wikipedia, the ultimate model of a world “in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge”.

(Pic) Jimmy Wales: "The overall trend is in the right direction.”

The perfect man to pose my question to – sharing my Olympic video experience, I asked him what he thought about the attempts by big business to claim copyright over content that’s posted by users on social networking sites like YouTube, and whether that would pose a stumbling block to the “next leap forward” in Web 2.0?

“Reprehensible” was his first word.

The world has changed, he added. “We now have peer-to-peer communication, we live in a broader world, no longer a broadcast world.

“For companies to think that someone posting their own personal videos of a huge spectacle is somehow going to damage their brand is goofy.”

He noted that it would have been different “if you had taken a High Definition broadcast and recorded it, and then put it in a nice package and sold it; that could be considered piracy”.

Saying that “companies have become very heavy handed on enforcing their rights” but acknowledging that “it’s a complicated issue”, Wales, who sits on the board of Creative Commons, however said he was optimistic that “the overall trend is in the right direction”.

“A lot of companies are beginning to understand that it will damage their brands to be seen as too controlling. They should be supporting fans. I think it’s a business mistake to stop fans from showing their personal snapshots of an event because if it helps spread the message, then more people will watch the full broadcast.”

Like Wikipedia, Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation. It “provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artiests and educators easily mark their creative with the freedoms they want it to carry”.

Wales was honoured with the Global Brand Icon award by the Global Brand Forum with chairman Karthik Siva saying that Wales had made a “profound and pervasive difference” to our world and had created a brand that was “honourable” in its essence. Last year’s Global Brand Icon was US Vice President Al Gore.

Next week: Jimmy Wales and how he’s planning to revolutionise the world of search.