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

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Conclusions
- References
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© 1999-2005
Nicholas Bentley

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References and Notes

[1a] By 'donate' I mean that they give away a copy of the product totally for free to an acquaintance. They do not charge for time or materials or accept any payment or trade in exchange.



[1] The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age (2000),Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), Executive summary.

[2] I define the process of creative work as the sum of an individuals intellectual efforts in a particular endeavour. For example, the creative work which resulted in an initial manuscript for a book would include the creative thoughts and ideas in the author’s mind and all his or her research, writing and editing.

[3] Creator/Author - Throughout this paper I often assume that the owner of the copyright of an intellectual product is the creator or author of the intellectual property – therefore when I talk of the creator I imply the legal copyright holder or content owner. The fact that the rights holder might have bought the right from the original creator makes no difference to my arguments here.

[4] Intangible - incapable of being touched, Webster’s

[5] Book - Throughout this paper I use the printed book as an example of a copyrighted product to illustrate how the traditional copyright process works or is implemented. The copyrighted book is easy to imagine but the same arguments apply to other forms of copyrightable material such as vinyl records, tapes, CDs, Etc.

[6] Story - As in the book example (see note above), I use the term story as a simple term to represent the creative intellectual idea  and expression behind the intellectual product.

[7] Consumers - Throughout this paper I refer to consumers and users of intellectual products. For the purpose of this discussion, each term refers equally to an individual or organization which is making use the intellectual product.

[8]   NRC/CSTB/Information Systems Trustworthiness Project, Panel 3, section 2.4 ( Panel created by Rohit Khare & Joseph Reagle, World Wide Web Consortium).

[9]   The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age (2000),Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), Executive summary.

[10] Multuple Copies - In active computer systems and networks the product is being continuously copied from one electronic storage device or memory to the next. This problem is well recognised:-

“In the digital world, even the most routine access to information invariably involves making a copy: Computer programs are run by copying them from disk to memory, for example (an act that some courts have ruled to be "copying" for the purposes of copyright law), and Web pages are viewed by copying them from a remote computer to the local machine…… , for digital information, access is copying.” The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age (2000),Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), Executive summary

[12] Efficiency is an economic term used to describe the economic cost of distributing information, it reflects the social benefit of widely spread ideas and it is usually balanced against the costs of implementing and enforcing a property rights regime to encourage creative effort.

[13] Increased social welfare costs reduce the number of ideas available to future authors.

[14]   “In a globally networked world there will always be people who can decrypt content- protection measures and share their bounty with others. The real risk is that if media companies make the customer experience too onerous, it will push more and more otherwise law-abiding people to break the law merely in order to get the conveniences they see to be their right. People who would be willing to pay for their music will have no simple way to do so.” - ‘Tuning Out the Customer’, Fortune.com, Tuesday, October 8, 2002, By David Kirkpatrick

-and -

“Distribution without the right to save and/or print would create a world in which information may be distributed but never easily shared. Some committee members believe that if copyright is truly to be a pact between society and authors to encourage the creation and dissemination of information for society's ultimate benefit, highly constrained models of distribution call this pact into question.” The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age (2000),Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), Executive summary

-and –

"…...and that encryption technologies make no distinctions between fair and unfair uses." – Para. 3.6  The Internet as a “threat” and a “challenge”, Study on Intellectual Property Rights, the Internet, and Copyright, By: Alan Story for the UK Commission on Intellectual Property Rights. Alan Story is Lecturer in Intellectual Property Kent Law School, University of Kent.

[15] “Individuals in their daily lives have the capability and the opportunity to access and copy vast amounts of digital information, yet lack a clear picture of what is acceptable or legal”. The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age (2000),Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), Executive summary, page 4.

[16] Jessica Litman, Professor of Law, Wayne State University,  'New Copyright Paradigms'.

[17] “To read is not a fair use; it’s an unregulated use” – Lawrence Lessig’s address to the Open Source Convention, 24 July, 2002. Lawrence Lessig is professor of law at Stanford University.

[18] The term ‘Collective Rights’ as use here refers to the rights of a group which have collective access to an intangible intellectual product and should not be confused with the term ‘collective work’ which is often used to define a work consisting of a number of contributions consisting of independent works.

[19] “Nor is it easy to supply a clear, "bright-line" answer [to what is acceptable or legal], because (among other things) current intellectual property law is complex.”  - and -  “Laws that are simple, clear, and comprehensible are needed, particularly those parts of the IP law that are most directly relevant to consumer behavior in daily life.” - The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age (2000),  CSTB, Executive summary, page 4.

[20] Easier - Quicker, cheaper, no forms, no shops, the thing to do, instant gratification…

[21] The Handle System technology, developed by the CNRI, provides a global name service for digital objects.

[22] For a discussion on micro payment systems see an article by Brad Templeton entitled 'Microrefunds and the "Don't Pay" button'  -

[23] See “Copy Protection Robs the Future” by Dan Bricklin.

[24]  The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age (2000), Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), Executive summary.

[25] John Barton - As reported in – Patently Problematic, By David Sarnoff, Economist.com.

[26] In a separate analysis of digital products as memes in an evolutionary system I show how the DIPR system imposes few penalties on identified products compared to unidentified products.

[27] Revising Copyright Law for the Information Age, section IV, Jessica Litman, Professor of Law, Wayne State University.

[28] Others have established the need for greater public understanding of the principles of current copyright law and the same arguments would apply to the DIPR system. – Copyright Education, The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age (2000),Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), Executive summary

[29] Many others have argued that creators and their media agents should see the digital revolution as an opportunity not a threat (DIPR would provide the structure and opportunity). For example:

Says Jerry Michalski: "Because media companies see intellectual property as their only asset, they're willing to risk totally alienating their entire customer base in order to protect that asset." He says that instead the companies should learn to view their [the] customers themselves as the asset and figure out ways to partner with them, or treat them as what he calls "co-participants, rather than an inert audience that merely consumes media."

Tuning Out the Customer’, Fortune.com, Tuesday, October 8, 2002, By David Kirkpatrick.

[30] The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age (2000),Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), Executive summary.

[31] The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age (2000),Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), Executive summary

.

[32] http://sims.berkeley.edu/~fredrik/research/papers/EvaluatingDRM.html

[33] 'Public Good -  Economists sometimes refer to certain goods as public. This does not imply that they are in the public domain as defined by intellectual property law. Rather, a public good is a product or service that has two properties. First, it is non-rival, which simply means that consumption by one person doesn’t limit consumption of the next. Second, it is non-excludable, implying that once the product exists, the benefit cannot be limited to those that have paid for it.' - A Framework for Evaluating Digital Rights Management Proposals, by Rachna Dhamija and Fredrik Wallenberg,

[34] The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age (2000),Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), Executive summary

[36] “Given the challenges to the copyright regime posed by digital information, the committee concluded that alternatives to a copy-based model for protection of digital information deserve consideration,….” - The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age (2000),Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), Executive summary

[37] Memes - In this discussion I relate Memes to a creative piece of work or intellectual property. Any one meme could have many different manifestations and there can be multiple copies of any particular manifestation especially when we are considering digital manifestations.  See: The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press 1976, ISBN 0-19-286092-5, Memes – Page 192 by Richard Dawkins for the original definition. Or, Meme Central

[38] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press 1976, ISBN 0-19-286092-5.

[40] Andy Clark, Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science

Natural Born Cyborgs?, By Andy Clark

[42] http://sims.berkeley.edu/~fredrik/research/papers/EvaluatingDRM.html

[43] ECMS - Electronic Copyright Management System - By ECMS I mean systems where rights holders manage the rights they hold and grant to other users of the product. This should not be confused with Digital Rights Management (DRM) that tries to enforce end-to-end control of the use of a digital product.

 
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© 1999-2007 Nicholas Bentley Updated: May 2007