Distributed Intellectual Product Rights Common Rights, Collective Rights and Intellectual Property
Distributed Intellectual Product Rights - Rights Office
  Nicholas Bentley Print version Blog
 

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Conclusions
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© 1999-2011
Nicholas Bentley

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Intellectual Contributions

and the

Rights Office System

A discussion of Copyright and related rights in a digital information world:

"If we as a society want to facilitate the development of artistic culture, copyright doctrine should recognize rights of access to the common in culture to a far greater extent than it currently does." (Locating the Public Domain, Professor Julie Cohen)

In these pages I propose that our Copyright regime is fundamentally based on an Intellectual Contributions model where all contributions to a new intellectual work are considered important. Contributions cover a range of activities and supporting materials from existing works that help form the author's original ideas, through the author's efforts in developing and presenting those ideas, to the purchase of copies of the new work, and even review and criticism of the work.

In the analogue world of paper books I argue that all these contributions were reasonably rewarded but that as we transition to digital environments and try to maintain the same copyright model by restricting copies with contracts and technical protection measurers we are at risk of loosing the social benefits of a commons of contributions.

I go on to lay out a Rights Office system for the digital world that would regulate the rights of all parties to intellectual works while maintaining privacy and the relative free distribution of copies for the benefit of the whole of society. I then argue that works distributed under the Rights Office system would successfully compete with 'free' copies and be able to produce adequate remuneration for producers while providing an framework for numerous new business models.

Published papers:-

Go here for a discussion on why Google should adopt the Rights Office system for Android.

If you have any please let me know.

This site updates and replaces my original DIPR site which has been in place since 1999.

 
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© 1999-2011 Nicholas Bentley Updated: January 2011