On intellectual property with a cool head. Part 2
This is a continuation of the article “On intellectual property with a cool head.” Here is a link to the first part . In the second part, I want to present what the intellectual property regulation system could look like if it was created from scratch, taking into account new opportunities and new threats that emerged thanks to the widespread computerization and the Internet.
The optimal solution would combine the best features of the intellectual property protection regimes listed in the first part, while minimizing their disadvantages. In addition, it would be desirable, as far as possible, to reduce the number of entities and build a common foundation for all types of intellectual property. Therefore, it is worth starting with things that are equally important for works of art, as well as for inventions and scientific discoveries. First of all, it is the need to reliably and reliably register authorship and priority. Plagiarism and “bikes” are not needed by anyone. Then you need to provide a mechanism that allows authors to make a living, but at the same time does not impair the freedom of speech and creativity and does not create formidable obstacles to consumption. Let's start with the registration of intellectual property.
The system, which is able to automatically, cheaply and reliably register the fact of publication of any information, has been operating on the Internet for several years. Moreover, the information in it has great financial value, which means that serious attempts have been made to crack it. This system is called Bitcoin . In a nutshell: Bitcoin is a completely decentralized payment system. Technically, it is a distributed database containing information about financial transactions. With the help of cryptography, the uniqueness and authenticity of each transaction is verified. With the same success, such a system can store any information at all.
And, by the way, already stored. The Bitcoin-based Network Namecoin was created, which serves to register domain names, which, along with logos and trademarks, are a kind of intellectual property. Exactly what we need. Imagine for a moment that all or almost all people and organizations engaged in intellectual work - from a simple blogger to the Academy of Sciences, will install nodes of a similar network on their servers. Any draft, any publication, any idea, any finished work can be included in this database within a few minutes. To keep the base compact, you can package the work itself or the description into a separate file, and in the database you can store a link to it and a cryptographic hash.
')
Cryptography provides almost unlimited possibilities - do you want to declare your priority, but at the same time keep the development secret for the time being? No problems! Publish the encrypted and signed file, and when it is necessary - show the key. Or even keep the file at home - the hash will confirm its authenticity in the future.
Such a distributed database is much better than all existing solutions. Copyright arises, de jure, automatically. De facto, official, state registration or dubious tricks, such as sending a registered letter to yourself with a copy of the work, can be very useful for protecting rights. A bunch of extra gestures. Registering a trademark, filing an application for an invention is usually quite an expensive and bureaucratic process. Publication in a scientific journal is also a complicated matter.
Add here the already existing and long-existing tools for plagiarism search and identification of video and audio fragments, such as those on YouTube, and link the accounts of network members with real details and personal data - the foundation for the global automatic system for registration of intellectual property rights is ready.
Of course, automatic protection against plagiarism is not perfect. It may mistakenly block the publication of completely original things, and this is absolutely unacceptable. A lot of absurd examples were on the same YouTube. It means that it should be of an auxiliary nature and should be used only for searching and recommendations. And this leads to the opposite problem. If an honest inventor finds an earlier solution of the same problem in the database in the same way - he will simply be upset, and then he will be engaged in something else. If an honest author finds that the ingenious poem that came to his head was actually written a hundred years ago and just sat in the subconscious (Such a blow from a classic!) - he would do the same. But a crook and a conscious plagiarist are not.
In addition to protection against plagiarism, a mechanism is needed to separate valuable information from nonsense. We can afford to register everything, but we cannot protect everything. All the submitted manuscripts are not published in a prestigious scientific journal, not all patents are examined, and not every author succeeds in signing a lucrative contract with the publisher. Fortunately, a solution to the dropout problem already exists.
The peer review system developed in science is nothing more than crowdsourcing. Ratings of the popularity of movies or music - he is. Finally, the entire open source community is built on crowdsourcing entirely. Perhaps it is the open source development culture that can serve as a role model in all areas of intellectual activity. The technological basis for the development of free products are open repositories, functionally equivalent to the distributed database described above for registering the fruits of intellectual labor. One glance at the activity schedule of commits, the number of forks and subscribers, and profiles of key developers is enough to form a fairly reliable opinion about the quality of the project.
In the world of Open Source, a spontaneous and naturally formed system that effectively performs the functions of peer review, patent examination, and popularity ratings at the same time. Imagine a kind of “global githab” that stores not only source codes and technical documentation, but also drafts of books and scientific articles, film scripts and music tracks where you can fork a movie or send a pull request with new experimental data confirming or disproving the theory.
Naturally, such a global intellectual repository should not and cannot be a single site or portal. It must be a network of independent nodes joined by open protocols and data formats. Creating such a network is quite realistic from a technical point of view. But, unfortunately, it is still impossible legally. Without mechanisms to protect the interests of authors, such a network will always be a lot of enthusiasts and volunteers. A very large part of authors and inventors simply will not dare to “open the source code” without weighty legal guarantees of receiving remuneration.
To give them, two things are needed: a method of receiving remuneration from the end user and a method of redistributing this reward among all who contributed to the creation of the product. The modern practice of receiving remuneration is coercion and intimidation. Take for free is simply impossible. For this they can even go to jail. Redistribution also occurs in more diverse ways: this is direct coercion through legal actions, voluntary-compulsory licensing, and fairly free contracts and contracts between participants in the process, defining, for example, film movie fees.
In all cases, legal mechanisms are involved, possibly not bad for large businesses, when each company has a whole legal department, but practically unacceptable for small and independent participants. A business built on intellectual property plays the role of a "roof", which protects authors from the encroachments of unscrupulous competitors and takes a huge percentage of it, because it is impossible to survive without the services of the same "roof".
To be a full member of the “global Github” and claim to receive remuneration, a certain weight and influence in the community, you must register there under the real name. Non-anonymity is an obvious and natural feature of any professional community where reputation plays an important role. Exceptions are possible only if de-anonymization threatens the life and health of the author, as is the case with political or religious dissidents. And even in this case, more often we are talking not about anonymous, but about pseudonymous participation. A user profile that exists quite a long time and is quite active is one of the highest values in such a network. Just to take and register under a different name means losing the connections and reputation that have developed over many years.
This leads us to a universal solution to the problem of redistribution. Any new artifact registered in the repository must contain an exhaustive list of the sources on which the new work or invention is based, indicating the degree of influence of each of them. This list should be open and allowable additions and changes by the community (of course, there must be a mechanism for protection against abuse and vandalism). If the author does not provide such a list and actively resists its creation by community forces, this very quickly puts an end to his reputation and ability to use the repository in the future.
Specific criteria for the influence of works and ideas on each other - the topic of a separate large conversation. Each industry has its own traditions and ways of assessment. This is where the common base for all ends and the serious differences between the types of intellectual property begin. In the cinema, there are generally accepted standards for fees of all film crew members, in science, the order in which it is customary to give the names of the authors of scientific works, in industry, legislation regulating the procedure for licensing patents, and so on.
Automated mass application of the "wisdom of the crowd" on the basis of these established practices will make the system much more flexible and accurate. If today we have to choose between just a few protection modes, which are far from always ideally suited, then in such a system both the terms of protection and the procedure for confirming and registering rights and any other variables can change separately and independently, adjusting to each specific niche.
One of the most difficult questions is the proof of the fact of the influence of one work or invention on another. Perhaps the main drawback of the modern patent system is the underlying assumption that one and the same idea cannot simultaneously and independently come to mind to different people. This drawback takes the scale of a natural disaster, when trivial things are being patented, and the solution of a problem that any competent engineer or designer can find in a few hours or days is suddenly blocked for twenty years due to the fact that someone was not too lazy to patent it.
Partially this problem can be solved by open development, when everything is published, starting from the earliest draft, or publishing encrypted drafts, through which you can prove that an idea came to mind before someone else published it. In other cases, it remains to rely only on the time of publication. So, if two very similar programs or scientific papers are published at intervals of a month, despite the fact that their creation would hardly take less than a year, then it is likely that their independence can be assumed. If the difference was several years, then the priority should be in earlier work.
In addition, you can introduce a mechanism for checking non-obviousness and a high level of originality of the solution, something like a crowdsourcing patent examination. If the author believes that his solution is nontrivial, he can publish the condition of the problem in open form, and the solution itself - in encrypted form, and make a pledge. If someone else can repeat the decision of the author or offer the best option within the stipulated time, the pledge goes to him. If not, the author receives an additional advantage, the value of which is proportional to the size of the pledge.
A separate issue is the regulation of relations between the repository participants and the outside world. What if someone from outside takes advantage of the labor of others? After all, for example, anyone can download the source code of any program from GitHub and is completely anonymous. What will prevent in the same way to download the text of the book and sell, without paying a penny to the author? Or sell a device invented and published online?
It will prevent that such a person or company condemns itself to marginalization. This number will be held for petty fraudsters in third world countries, but any corporation with a name runs the risk of incurring significant reputational losses when the fact of theft is discovered.
An organization that maintains and regulates the work of the global repository and represents the interests of a significant number of authors, inventors and scientists, let's call it, say, the “Open Intellectual Property Fund”, will have great authority. Most likely, much more than environmental and human rights organizations now have, which quite effectively force transnational corporations and entire governments to improve working conditions and to take care of the environment.
An organized global boycott of goods and services of companies that do not respect intellectual property may be more terrible than any fines and legal prohibitions. Conversely, companies that honestly share profits with those to whom they owe their prosperity can receive a well-deserved positive PR, for example, in the form of the right to place a special sign on their products. And in the future we can talk about legislative coercion.
Finally, we got to the mechanism for receiving rewards from the end user. Probably, it is necessary to recognize that any attempts to stifle the free copying of anything are doomed to failure. They are either ineffective or come into fundamental contradiction with the fundamental rights and freedoms of the person. Lack of piracy is possible only in a totalitarian society.
If in the fight against fraudsters appropriating the results of someone else's intellectual labor for profit, a whip in the form of a boycott or penalties is quite applicable and justified, then the end user, who pumps and reads exclusively for himself, can be forced to pay only with gingerbread. If you prohibit free access, then the whole system of open collective creativity will not be able to function.
What can make people pay? Crowdfunding and positive discrimination. Crowdfunding has already proven its effectiveness. Just a couple of years ago, this word didn’t tell almost anyone about anything, and today you won’t surprise anyone with a project collecting a million dollars in a few days. Perhaps even the opposite, crowdfunding is perceived too positively. As with any fashionable innovation, it is associated with high expectations. Creating new products or works is always risky and unpredictable, and yet the information that, it turns out, not all financed projects end successfully, and much of the successful ones do not fit into the deadlines, almost causes offense and frustration.
After a few years, the euphoria will pass, most of the rake and boundary cases will be known and it will turn from an exotic novelty into a workhorse, generating billions for creative and enterprising people. And our “global Githab” will be an excellent help to crowdfunding, because there it will be easy to see who is who, and whether you can trust the promises.
Co-financing often works much better than donations because it is not just a reward for a job already done, it is complicity, co-creation, and this is an opportunity to be the first to touch something new.
Now about positive discrimination. What is negative discrimination is well known to all. Examples of positive discrimination are priority support for paid customers in the Freemium model, “gold” and “platinum” discount cards for large customers, membership in closed clubs. Nobody forces to buy expensive smartphones and cars. But they are buying. Demonstrative consumption may seem ridiculous and stupid, but such is the nature of man. We like to feel rich and prestigious, to be a member of communities and clubs that are not so easy to get into.
Perhaps one of the main reasons for the ineffectiveness of propaganda by copyright advocates is that they equate free downloads to crime, creating and maintaining a romantic aura around “piracy” and pushing people away from them by excessive cruelty of punishment. Why call theft something that can be called a meanie? If there is at least some kind of romance in the theft, then in greed and greed it can not be in principle. The law does not prohibit rummaging in the garbage or attacking a free meal at a party. But the vast majority of people do not behave this way. In this case, usually no one will reproach or, moreover, imprison a person who is aground if he has to do so.
The widespread use of positive discrimination without coercion and fines will create an atmosphere in which the payment for the consumed product will be perceived as an honorable duty, and not as a rent or tribute. At the same time, the rights of those who cannot pay for objective reasons will not be affected. A poor student or resident of a third world country will have access to the exact same set of intellectual values as a millionaire.
A fan club or professional user community will be formed around any object of intellectual property, the position in which will be determined, including the amount of money spent. Here it is important not to overreact, so that authority and reputation cannot be bought. Money should not come first. Positive discrimination should give tangible benefits to all who pay at least a little, but should not allow those who do not make any contribution to the community other than money, greater privileges than active, but poor participants. The dependence of the number of "buns" on the amount of money spent should be logarithmic.
At the junction of crowdfunding and positive discrimination, the practice of returning part of the money spent to early consumers and fans, or even possible participation in the further distribution of profits, can work. The response of the first few thousand consumers can play a crucial role in the success of the product, so why not share with them? One of the arguments in favor of the existing system of publishing houses and labels - they are looking for talents and help young authors to unwind.
Encouraging early consumers will create the conditions for the existence of an alternative search system and the discovery of capable authors. It is possible that the most active and insightful lovers of music or literature will be able to support themselves by searching for unknown but promising authors and helping them unwind. Such a scheme of promotion looks much more natural and fair than modern “industrial” methods, when money solves everything.
At one time, the invention of writing allowed the creation of large states instead of primitive communities and tribes and became the foundation of modern law and science. Despite the fact that the invention of computers and the Internet has already made a revolution in many areas, in law in general and in intellectual law in particular, so far, unfortunately, technologies that are several thousand years old have been used. Legal texts are full of cross references, laws should be written in the most formal way, not allowing contradictory interpretations, which means computerization is more than appropriate here. Computers could be used to find and resolve legal conflicts, to search for precedents, to eliminate duplication and to collect statistics. Laws should be written as programs in very high-level languages, not as paper documents, and exist in the form of databases and algorithms, not books and folders.
Instead of using the opportunities provided by computers and the Internet, lawmakers are trying to limit them, to fit the usual limitations of paper documents and physical objects. It seems that from the point of view of most lawyers, free copying and distribution is a bug, not a feature. And the confusion, inconsistency and nebula laws written on paper - on the contrary. A good lawyer is one who is able to quickly find and interpret the necessary fragments in a huge text base. Search is definitely the work of a computer, not a person. And if you move from writing laws in a relatively free form in natural language to a more formal form, using computer-friendly markup, then 90% of the tasks of interpreting the law can be assigned to a computer. A person will only have to make decisions of an ethical nature, monitor the correctness of the input data and deal with particularly complex and non-standard cases.
The IBM Watson supercomputer is ready to help doctors diagnose. The work of the diagnostician and the lawyer is in many ways similar. Both require extensive erudition, scrupulous attentiveness and quick interpretation of huge amounts of information; life and death can envy both of them. But in the field of law there is not even a hint of automation. Perhaps because it will deprive the estate lawyers a large part of the power, which, incidentally, would be very good. A comparison of prosperous and backward states suggests that the monopolization of power in the hands of individuals or cohesive groups is evil. And in modern democratic countries, the concentration of power in the hands of one professional group - lawyers is growing stronger. The judicial branch consists entirely of them. There are more lawyers in parliaments than people of all other professions combined. A very large proportion of corporate and government bureaucrats have a law degree.
The algorithms and data structures on which self-regulating communities on the Internet are based, such as Wikipedia, GitHab, Habrahabr, Stack Overflow, constitute their “constitution” no less, and maybe more, than the rules and user agreements. Standards, protocols and the source code of the official Bitcoin client provide acceptable stability and transparency without any laws, codes or instructions that form the basis of any traditional financial system.
A global intellectual property repository based on open standards and protocols could solve most copyright and patent problems without any formal laws at all. He would need only a little help in the form of stimulation of its use by all interested persons, and in the form of some sanctions against malicious violators. By the way, in Estonia, a country that today is one of the world leaders in creating a true electronic state, a similar distributed system for automation of almost all spheres of public life is already in operation - X-Road . An excellent example of what will happen if you do not mechanically transfer standard paper documents and procedures to the network, but build the system initially, taking into account the capabilities of computers.
The optimal solution would combine the best features of the intellectual property protection regimes listed in the first part, while minimizing their disadvantages. In addition, it would be desirable, as far as possible, to reduce the number of entities and build a common foundation for all types of intellectual property. Therefore, it is worth starting with things that are equally important for works of art, as well as for inventions and scientific discoveries. First of all, it is the need to reliably and reliably register authorship and priority. Plagiarism and “bikes” are not needed by anyone. Then you need to provide a mechanism that allows authors to make a living, but at the same time does not impair the freedom of speech and creativity and does not create formidable obstacles to consumption. Let's start with the registration of intellectual property.
Distributed databases and cryptography.
The system, which is able to automatically, cheaply and reliably register the fact of publication of any information, has been operating on the Internet for several years. Moreover, the information in it has great financial value, which means that serious attempts have been made to crack it. This system is called Bitcoin . In a nutshell: Bitcoin is a completely decentralized payment system. Technically, it is a distributed database containing information about financial transactions. With the help of cryptography, the uniqueness and authenticity of each transaction is verified. With the same success, such a system can store any information at all.
And, by the way, already stored. The Bitcoin-based Network Namecoin was created, which serves to register domain names, which, along with logos and trademarks, are a kind of intellectual property. Exactly what we need. Imagine for a moment that all or almost all people and organizations engaged in intellectual work - from a simple blogger to the Academy of Sciences, will install nodes of a similar network on their servers. Any draft, any publication, any idea, any finished work can be included in this database within a few minutes. To keep the base compact, you can package the work itself or the description into a separate file, and in the database you can store a link to it and a cryptographic hash.
')
Cryptography provides almost unlimited possibilities - do you want to declare your priority, but at the same time keep the development secret for the time being? No problems! Publish the encrypted and signed file, and when it is necessary - show the key. Or even keep the file at home - the hash will confirm its authenticity in the future.
Such a distributed database is much better than all existing solutions. Copyright arises, de jure, automatically. De facto, official, state registration or dubious tricks, such as sending a registered letter to yourself with a copy of the work, can be very useful for protecting rights. A bunch of extra gestures. Registering a trademark, filing an application for an invention is usually quite an expensive and bureaucratic process. Publication in a scientific journal is also a complicated matter.
Add here the already existing and long-existing tools for plagiarism search and identification of video and audio fragments, such as those on YouTube, and link the accounts of network members with real details and personal data - the foundation for the global automatic system for registration of intellectual property rights is ready.
Of course, automatic protection against plagiarism is not perfect. It may mistakenly block the publication of completely original things, and this is absolutely unacceptable. A lot of absurd examples were on the same YouTube. It means that it should be of an auxiliary nature and should be used only for searching and recommendations. And this leads to the opposite problem. If an honest inventor finds an earlier solution of the same problem in the database in the same way - he will simply be upset, and then he will be engaged in something else. If an honest author finds that the ingenious poem that came to his head was actually written a hundred years ago and just sat in the subconscious (Such a blow from a classic!) - he would do the same. But a crook and a conscious plagiarist are not.
In addition to protection against plagiarism, a mechanism is needed to separate valuable information from nonsense. We can afford to register everything, but we cannot protect everything. All the submitted manuscripts are not published in a prestigious scientific journal, not all patents are examined, and not every author succeeds in signing a lucrative contract with the publisher. Fortunately, a solution to the dropout problem already exists.
Crowdsourcing
The peer review system developed in science is nothing more than crowdsourcing. Ratings of the popularity of movies or music - he is. Finally, the entire open source community is built on crowdsourcing entirely. Perhaps it is the open source development culture that can serve as a role model in all areas of intellectual activity. The technological basis for the development of free products are open repositories, functionally equivalent to the distributed database described above for registering the fruits of intellectual labor. One glance at the activity schedule of commits, the number of forks and subscribers, and profiles of key developers is enough to form a fairly reliable opinion about the quality of the project.
In the world of Open Source, a spontaneous and naturally formed system that effectively performs the functions of peer review, patent examination, and popularity ratings at the same time. Imagine a kind of “global githab” that stores not only source codes and technical documentation, but also drafts of books and scientific articles, film scripts and music tracks where you can fork a movie or send a pull request with new experimental data confirming or disproving the theory.
Naturally, such a global intellectual repository should not and cannot be a single site or portal. It must be a network of independent nodes joined by open protocols and data formats. Creating such a network is quite realistic from a technical point of view. But, unfortunately, it is still impossible legally. Without mechanisms to protect the interests of authors, such a network will always be a lot of enthusiasts and volunteers. A very large part of authors and inventors simply will not dare to “open the source code” without weighty legal guarantees of receiving remuneration.
To give them, two things are needed: a method of receiving remuneration from the end user and a method of redistributing this reward among all who contributed to the creation of the product. The modern practice of receiving remuneration is coercion and intimidation. Take for free is simply impossible. For this they can even go to jail. Redistribution also occurs in more diverse ways: this is direct coercion through legal actions, voluntary-compulsory licensing, and fairly free contracts and contracts between participants in the process, defining, for example, film movie fees.
In all cases, legal mechanisms are involved, possibly not bad for large businesses, when each company has a whole legal department, but practically unacceptable for small and independent participants. A business built on intellectual property plays the role of a "roof", which protects authors from the encroachments of unscrupulous competitors and takes a huge percentage of it, because it is impossible to survive without the services of the same "roof".
Transparency and reputation
To be a full member of the “global Github” and claim to receive remuneration, a certain weight and influence in the community, you must register there under the real name. Non-anonymity is an obvious and natural feature of any professional community where reputation plays an important role. Exceptions are possible only if de-anonymization threatens the life and health of the author, as is the case with political or religious dissidents. And even in this case, more often we are talking not about anonymous, but about pseudonymous participation. A user profile that exists quite a long time and is quite active is one of the highest values in such a network. Just to take and register under a different name means losing the connections and reputation that have developed over many years.
This leads us to a universal solution to the problem of redistribution. Any new artifact registered in the repository must contain an exhaustive list of the sources on which the new work or invention is based, indicating the degree of influence of each of them. This list should be open and allowable additions and changes by the community (of course, there must be a mechanism for protection against abuse and vandalism). If the author does not provide such a list and actively resists its creation by community forces, this very quickly puts an end to his reputation and ability to use the repository in the future.
Specific criteria for the influence of works and ideas on each other - the topic of a separate large conversation. Each industry has its own traditions and ways of assessment. This is where the common base for all ends and the serious differences between the types of intellectual property begin. In the cinema, there are generally accepted standards for fees of all film crew members, in science, the order in which it is customary to give the names of the authors of scientific works, in industry, legislation regulating the procedure for licensing patents, and so on.
Automated mass application of the "wisdom of the crowd" on the basis of these established practices will make the system much more flexible and accurate. If today we have to choose between just a few protection modes, which are far from always ideally suited, then in such a system both the terms of protection and the procedure for confirming and registering rights and any other variables can change separately and independently, adjusting to each specific niche.
One of the most difficult questions is the proof of the fact of the influence of one work or invention on another. Perhaps the main drawback of the modern patent system is the underlying assumption that one and the same idea cannot simultaneously and independently come to mind to different people. This drawback takes the scale of a natural disaster, when trivial things are being patented, and the solution of a problem that any competent engineer or designer can find in a few hours or days is suddenly blocked for twenty years due to the fact that someone was not too lazy to patent it.
Partially this problem can be solved by open development, when everything is published, starting from the earliest draft, or publishing encrypted drafts, through which you can prove that an idea came to mind before someone else published it. In other cases, it remains to rely only on the time of publication. So, if two very similar programs or scientific papers are published at intervals of a month, despite the fact that their creation would hardly take less than a year, then it is likely that their independence can be assumed. If the difference was several years, then the priority should be in earlier work.
In addition, you can introduce a mechanism for checking non-obviousness and a high level of originality of the solution, something like a crowdsourcing patent examination. If the author believes that his solution is nontrivial, he can publish the condition of the problem in open form, and the solution itself - in encrypted form, and make a pledge. If someone else can repeat the decision of the author or offer the best option within the stipulated time, the pledge goes to him. If not, the author receives an additional advantage, the value of which is proportional to the size of the pledge.
A separate issue is the regulation of relations between the repository participants and the outside world. What if someone from outside takes advantage of the labor of others? After all, for example, anyone can download the source code of any program from GitHub and is completely anonymous. What will prevent in the same way to download the text of the book and sell, without paying a penny to the author? Or sell a device invented and published online?
It will prevent that such a person or company condemns itself to marginalization. This number will be held for petty fraudsters in third world countries, but any corporation with a name runs the risk of incurring significant reputational losses when the fact of theft is discovered.
An organization that maintains and regulates the work of the global repository and represents the interests of a significant number of authors, inventors and scientists, let's call it, say, the “Open Intellectual Property Fund”, will have great authority. Most likely, much more than environmental and human rights organizations now have, which quite effectively force transnational corporations and entire governments to improve working conditions and to take care of the environment.
An organized global boycott of goods and services of companies that do not respect intellectual property may be more terrible than any fines and legal prohibitions. Conversely, companies that honestly share profits with those to whom they owe their prosperity can receive a well-deserved positive PR, for example, in the form of the right to place a special sign on their products. And in the future we can talk about legislative coercion.
Crowdfunding and positive discrimination
Finally, we got to the mechanism for receiving rewards from the end user. Probably, it is necessary to recognize that any attempts to stifle the free copying of anything are doomed to failure. They are either ineffective or come into fundamental contradiction with the fundamental rights and freedoms of the person. Lack of piracy is possible only in a totalitarian society.
If in the fight against fraudsters appropriating the results of someone else's intellectual labor for profit, a whip in the form of a boycott or penalties is quite applicable and justified, then the end user, who pumps and reads exclusively for himself, can be forced to pay only with gingerbread. If you prohibit free access, then the whole system of open collective creativity will not be able to function.
What can make people pay? Crowdfunding and positive discrimination. Crowdfunding has already proven its effectiveness. Just a couple of years ago, this word didn’t tell almost anyone about anything, and today you won’t surprise anyone with a project collecting a million dollars in a few days. Perhaps even the opposite, crowdfunding is perceived too positively. As with any fashionable innovation, it is associated with high expectations. Creating new products or works is always risky and unpredictable, and yet the information that, it turns out, not all financed projects end successfully, and much of the successful ones do not fit into the deadlines, almost causes offense and frustration.
After a few years, the euphoria will pass, most of the rake and boundary cases will be known and it will turn from an exotic novelty into a workhorse, generating billions for creative and enterprising people. And our “global Githab” will be an excellent help to crowdfunding, because there it will be easy to see who is who, and whether you can trust the promises.
Co-financing often works much better than donations because it is not just a reward for a job already done, it is complicity, co-creation, and this is an opportunity to be the first to touch something new.
Now about positive discrimination. What is negative discrimination is well known to all. Examples of positive discrimination are priority support for paid customers in the Freemium model, “gold” and “platinum” discount cards for large customers, membership in closed clubs. Nobody forces to buy expensive smartphones and cars. But they are buying. Demonstrative consumption may seem ridiculous and stupid, but such is the nature of man. We like to feel rich and prestigious, to be a member of communities and clubs that are not so easy to get into.
Perhaps one of the main reasons for the ineffectiveness of propaganda by copyright advocates is that they equate free downloads to crime, creating and maintaining a romantic aura around “piracy” and pushing people away from them by excessive cruelty of punishment. Why call theft something that can be called a meanie? If there is at least some kind of romance in the theft, then in greed and greed it can not be in principle. The law does not prohibit rummaging in the garbage or attacking a free meal at a party. But the vast majority of people do not behave this way. In this case, usually no one will reproach or, moreover, imprison a person who is aground if he has to do so.
The widespread use of positive discrimination without coercion and fines will create an atmosphere in which the payment for the consumed product will be perceived as an honorable duty, and not as a rent or tribute. At the same time, the rights of those who cannot pay for objective reasons will not be affected. A poor student or resident of a third world country will have access to the exact same set of intellectual values as a millionaire.
A fan club or professional user community will be formed around any object of intellectual property, the position in which will be determined, including the amount of money spent. Here it is important not to overreact, so that authority and reputation cannot be bought. Money should not come first. Positive discrimination should give tangible benefits to all who pay at least a little, but should not allow those who do not make any contribution to the community other than money, greater privileges than active, but poor participants. The dependence of the number of "buns" on the amount of money spent should be logarithmic.
At the junction of crowdfunding and positive discrimination, the practice of returning part of the money spent to early consumers and fans, or even possible participation in the further distribution of profits, can work. The response of the first few thousand consumers can play a crucial role in the success of the product, so why not share with them? One of the arguments in favor of the existing system of publishing houses and labels - they are looking for talents and help young authors to unwind.
Encouraging early consumers will create the conditions for the existence of an alternative search system and the discovery of capable authors. It is possible that the most active and insightful lovers of music or literature will be able to support themselves by searching for unknown but promising authors and helping them unwind. Such a scheme of promotion looks much more natural and fair than modern “industrial” methods, when money solves everything.
findings
At one time, the invention of writing allowed the creation of large states instead of primitive communities and tribes and became the foundation of modern law and science. Despite the fact that the invention of computers and the Internet has already made a revolution in many areas, in law in general and in intellectual law in particular, so far, unfortunately, technologies that are several thousand years old have been used. Legal texts are full of cross references, laws should be written in the most formal way, not allowing contradictory interpretations, which means computerization is more than appropriate here. Computers could be used to find and resolve legal conflicts, to search for precedents, to eliminate duplication and to collect statistics. Laws should be written as programs in very high-level languages, not as paper documents, and exist in the form of databases and algorithms, not books and folders.
Instead of using the opportunities provided by computers and the Internet, lawmakers are trying to limit them, to fit the usual limitations of paper documents and physical objects. It seems that from the point of view of most lawyers, free copying and distribution is a bug, not a feature. And the confusion, inconsistency and nebula laws written on paper - on the contrary. A good lawyer is one who is able to quickly find and interpret the necessary fragments in a huge text base. Search is definitely the work of a computer, not a person. And if you move from writing laws in a relatively free form in natural language to a more formal form, using computer-friendly markup, then 90% of the tasks of interpreting the law can be assigned to a computer. A person will only have to make decisions of an ethical nature, monitor the correctness of the input data and deal with particularly complex and non-standard cases.
The IBM Watson supercomputer is ready to help doctors diagnose. The work of the diagnostician and the lawyer is in many ways similar. Both require extensive erudition, scrupulous attentiveness and quick interpretation of huge amounts of information; life and death can envy both of them. But in the field of law there is not even a hint of automation. Perhaps because it will deprive the estate lawyers a large part of the power, which, incidentally, would be very good. A comparison of prosperous and backward states suggests that the monopolization of power in the hands of individuals or cohesive groups is evil. And in modern democratic countries, the concentration of power in the hands of one professional group - lawyers is growing stronger. The judicial branch consists entirely of them. There are more lawyers in parliaments than people of all other professions combined. A very large proportion of corporate and government bureaucrats have a law degree.
The algorithms and data structures on which self-regulating communities on the Internet are based, such as Wikipedia, GitHab, Habrahabr, Stack Overflow, constitute their “constitution” no less, and maybe more, than the rules and user agreements. Standards, protocols and the source code of the official Bitcoin client provide acceptable stability and transparency without any laws, codes or instructions that form the basis of any traditional financial system.
A global intellectual property repository based on open standards and protocols could solve most copyright and patent problems without any formal laws at all. He would need only a little help in the form of stimulation of its use by all interested persons, and in the form of some sanctions against malicious violators. By the way, in Estonia, a country that today is one of the world leaders in creating a true electronic state, a similar distributed system for automation of almost all spheres of public life is already in operation - X-Road . An excellent example of what will happen if you do not mechanically transfer standard paper documents and procedures to the network, but build the system initially, taking into account the capabilities of computers.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/157367/
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