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Posts Tagged ‘Intellectual Property’

Intellectual Property

23 Nov

When it comes to intellectual property, I have two conflicted biases. On the one hand, I am an author and a content producer. From that perspective, I think that artists should be paid for their work. On the other hand, I am a content producer who probably never will be, but enjoys reading books and listening to music, and from that perspective I think that requiring consumers of media to pay for it restricts access to the relatively wealthy and stifles the societal conversation. While many modern copyright organizations place these two sets of interests in direct competition, and perhaps they must be in a capitalist society, they do not need to be in all cases. In the following essay, I will attempt to outline a technosocialist approach to ensuring that content producers are rewarded for their work without restricting free access to such work by all people.

The first point that I want to make is that I am not talking about any type of physical goods here. If a citizen wants a physical paper book or music disc, it is only fitting that there be a Consumption charge appropriate to the resources used to make it. But as we become an increasingly digital culture, the need for such physical goods becomes smaller and smaller. Software, books, journalism, music, and even visual art can all now be created and distributed without any physical objects changing hands. If the Contribution for the production of physical goods is based on supply and demand, how can you determine a Contribution value for something with, essentially, an infinate supply?

By refocusing on something that does come in a limited supply: the attention of citizens. Every citizen in a society can have no more than 24 hours in a day, and only a portion of that can be spent consuming media. If citizens are free to focus their attention wherever they choose, they will automatically “vote” for their favorite media by giving it the most of their free time.

To my mind, there are two primary types of media: those which aspire to be informative and those which aspire to be entertaining. There are of course those which accomplish neither, but it is still a useful boundary to draw. Under my model, content producers would have to choose one label or the other, and they would then “compete” only against the other media in that same category. The informative media such as journalism and non-fiction writing would therefore be put in a smaller pool, but they would also be subject to an expectation of factuality. Content producers found to have included untrue or misleading information in a piece claiming to be informative are subject to a three strikes policy, after which they would only be able to post content as entertainment. Not only would this mean that journalists and non-fiction authors would be compensated for their efforts without having to compete against the flashier entertainment programming for the attention of the crowds, it would create a bright line between entertainment and information that would help citizens judge the reliability of the information they were recieving, without limiting the rights of opinion-based media, which are entirely free to publish however they see fit but which must be labeled as and compete with entertainment programming if they do not wish to be held to journalistic standards of integrity and truthfulness.

So, how does this competition actually work? It’s fairly simple. When a citizen reads a book or watches a television show electronically, it is easy for the system to track the length of time spent engaged in that activity. Let’s say that in a given month, George listens to 8 hours of music, spends 5 hours reading the news, watches 12 hours of entertainment television, and reads one one book, which takes him 10 hours. That’s a total of 30 Entertainment hours and 5 Information hours. In each category, each citizen is worth a set amount of Contribution credit. For the sake of this example, we’ll set that at 20Ctv, but it would probably take a certain amount of trial and error for society to find a good value for it. Now, in the 8 hours of music that George listened to, he played one of Steve’s songs twice, for a total of 7 minutes. That translates to .3888% of George’s total entertainment attention for the month, and Steve would therefore recieve .0777Ctv added to his Contribution score. Not much in this case, but it adds up quickly as a musician gains fans. Meanwhile, George also read a news article that Sam wrote about the theft of Steve’s guitar several essays back. He spent 7 minutes doing that as well. But Sam’s piece was an Informational one rather than an Entertainment one, so he is only competing against the other news articles that George read. His 7 minutes translates into 2.3333% of George’s Informational attention, and he therefore recieces .4666Ctv added to his contribution score. Again, not that much, but if only a thousand citizens of Imaginary City with similar news consumption habits read it, he would get more than 450Ctv.

Our modern economic system attempts to judge a product’s value by how much money a consumer is willing to spend on it. I prefer to look at a person’s spending habits as they relate to time rather than money for a simple reason: everyone has time, and everyone has a limited amount of time. The same is not true of money. As someone who has extreme difficulty finding a conventional job, I need to be extremely careful in how I spend money. Terry Pratchett is one of my favorite authors of all time. I’ve read all of his books dozens of times, but always through the public library. My friend Dave is a cardiologist and has family money as well. He liked the one Terry Pratchett book he read, and so he bought the rest of them so that he’ll have them available if he ever gets some free time and feels like reading them. In monetary terms, he likes Terry Pratchett better than I do. After all, he was willing to spend more than $100 on books, and while I did once knit Terry Pratchett a scarf, I’ve never actually purchased a single book. But in terms of how we spend our time, I spend at least eight or ten hours a week reading them, and Dave has only spent about ten hours reading Terry Pratchett in his life. If we want our culture to be shaped by the democratic interest of the population, it should be at least as rewarding to enrich the lives of the poor as it is to incur mild interest from the rich.

Let me put forward another example. One of my favorite comic strips is “Unshelved”, a comic about a public library. There are few libarians I know who do not love Unshelved, and because librarians are particularly good about passing book recommendations to each other, this means that Unshelved has quite a large fanbase, and book sales ought to be fairly high. There’s just one problem: that fanbase is made up primarily of librarians. Which means that while there are few public library systems that do not have at least one copy, the thirty librarians in a given library system all borrow the one copy the library bought rather than buying their own. Librarians tend to have strong views on the rights of authors, and so the creaters of the comic make enough off of sales of tshirts, coffee mugs, and other items less easily shared to earn a fairly comfortable living, but does it make sense on a cultural level for books written for librarians to be less profitable than books written for CEOs? By making all digitally-reproducable media free to consume and rewarding content creators by the time that their consumers are willing to spend on their product rather than their money, we can more accurately create an information marketplace based on the true value of the media to consumers.

I think I’ve labored this point enough, so let me declare the subject of copyright over and done with, and move on to a related field: patents. That is, the right for someone who develops a technology to require those who utilize it to pay a liscence fee. This is another field in which I have somewhat conflicting biases. On the one hand, I think that the greater the financial rewards for technological sucess, the faster it will happen. On the other hand, I’m sick and tired of not being able to sync my iPhone with any of my Linux computers just because Apple holds a patent the iPhone syncing software and they won’t release a Linux version. It’s annoying as hell.

To stay in the realm of software development, let’s look at the two competing software universes current existing side by side in our modern culture. First, we have commercial software. In the commericial universe, software is written by salaried programmers working in more or less traditional corporate organizations, and the resulting code is patented and controlled solely by that corporation. Second, we have Free Open Source Software (FOSS). In the FOSS universe, software is written by everyone who feels like it. Both the programs and the code are available for free over the internet, and patenting any of it would probably get you into some serious legal trouble.

Saying for sure which of these systems produced “better” software would be difficult. Linux is far and away a better operating system than Windows, but lack of Linux compatibility aside, iTunes is similarly much better than anything the FOSS community has produced in the realm of music organization. As with so many cases, technosocialism’s post-currency nature gives it an advantage over capitalism in dealing with these sorts of situations. Rather than having to choose between financial incentive for the programmers and openness of the results, technosocialism can combine the two. In much the same way as we dealt with academic texts, journalism, and music, we can also find a way of incentivising technological progress without simultaneously stifling it.

Let’s start with how Contribution credit is earned when someone uses a program. Programs, like other forms of media, are going to come in two basic categories: entertainment, and productivity. A computer game, like World of Warcraft, would be considered entertainment and would be grouped with television and novels as an entertainment pasttime. The Contribution earned would be dependent on how long people played it versus reading a book or listening to music. But for productivity-oriented software, such as OpenOffice.org or GIMP, Contribution would be determined by the use to which the program was put. Let’s say that thanks to the universe ignoring a certain amount of paradox, I was writing this essay in a technosocialist society. (This example needs to have rather a lot of references to computer programs and I’m too lazy to make up imaginary ones.) I’m writing on a netbook running the Linux operating system, and specifically I’m using a text editor designed for writers called TextRoom. And to keep it simple, let’s say that I wrote the entire book in TextEdit. (I’ve also used gEdit, OpenOffice, and a paper notebook, but I don’t feel like doing the extra math right now.)

Now let’s say that my book was wildly sucessful, what with Bill, George, Steve, and Fred getting to read all about their own lives and everyone else in Imaginary City finally finding out why their society was structured the way it was. Thanks to the process described earlier in this essay, this earns me quite a lot of Contribution credit. In one month, my Contribution from the book is 1800Ctv. The creaters of TextRoom would therefore get a 10% ‘royalty’ for being the tool that I used to create the book, or 180Ctv. I don’t happen to know how many people are involved in the development of TextRoom, but I think that it’s a solo project and so for the sake of this example, let’s assume that it is. The author of TextRoom get’s 180Ctv. Now, I could only write my book with TextRoom because I had Linux to run the program with. So in addition to the 10% royalty that goes to TextRoom, there’s a 1% royalty to the creators of Ubuntu Linux, the operating system of my computer. Distributing this 18Ctv is far more difficult, because Ubuntu is most definitely not written by a single person. It is made up of hundreds of components written by hundreds of different people.

To distribute the Contribution properly so that everyone gets their due, we have to somehow quantify the work that each individual has put into building Linux. After putting a lot of thought into it, I’m not sure that I see a better way than to count lines of code. On the one hand, this risks incentivizing sloppy code over more efficient code that uses fewer lines. On the other hand, if one person in the coding community comes up with a ten line function that replaces a fifty line function, it is in the interest of everyone working on that programming to replace the inefficient code, because it will increase the value of their own contributions. In self-defense, coders will need to submit the most efficient code they can write to avoid having their code replaced entirely. But to get back to our example, let’s say that a particular programmer wrote 1% of the code that makes up Ubuntu Linux. That would then entitle him to 1% of that 18Ctv, or .18Ctv. Quite small in this particular case, but when you think of everything that people use Linux to accomplish every day, even 1% of 1% adds up to a significant amount.

This same model can apply to other forms of technology as well, and that is really what I’m getting to about a replacement for the current patent model. If you design a particular circuit, you will get 10% of the Contribution value recieved by any designer who incorporates your circuit into a product. What you cannot do, and this is the primary difference from our current patent system, is stop any other designer from incorporating your circuit into their product. That ability to block further innovations based on patented technology is what turns our modern patent system from a system that incentivizes progress into one that stifles it. To go back to my initial complaint, Apple developed iTunes and they should be entitled to financial rewards for that. But if they are not going to develop a Linux version themselves, they should not be able to stop someone else from doing so. If someone else wanted to port iTunes over to a Linux platform, it is Apple’s right to be rewarded for it, but it is not their right to deny Linux users their program.

I could go on for pages about current abuses in Intellectual Property law. The recording industry once sued a college student for seven trillion dollars. A few years ago someone recieved a patent for a stick. But I think I’ve gone on long enough about why we need reform. And while reform under our current system would be extremely difficult (and rather unlikely, given the political power of the big content producers), Intellectual Property is one of the few fields which are actually easier to work out in a technosocialist context than in a capitalist one. Because of the breakup of the individual-to-individual exchange, content producers can be “paid” without there needing to be a specific charge for that content. This allows not only equality of access for all citizens, it brings equality of value to all audiences. Books aimed at a poor niche market can be just as sucessful as books aimed at a rich niche market of the same size. And this, in turn, greatly strengthens and deepens the social conversation and encourages greater participation.

 
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Alternative Models for Academia

22 Nov

In the modern academic world, there is basically one way to earn one’s living: teaching at a University. If one is in the medical or scientific field, it may be possible to gain a purely research-oriented position, and if one is also a skilled writer one may be able to suppliment one’s income by writing books on the topic one studies, but on the whole it is difficult to earn a living without teaching college students.

One of the main aims of technosocialism is to break down links between duties, so that someone who is good at task A doesn’t also need to be good at task B in order to be rewarded for doing task A. This is very relevant here. Teaching is a challenging task, and not everyone is tempermentally suited to it. Certainly not all of those who are suited to scholarship would do as well in a classroom. With that in mind, we need to develop a new model of rewarding pure scholarship, but first we need to take a closer look at just what scholarship is.

Let me start by drawing a line between scholarship and research. They are closely related, but they are distinguishable from each other. In a sentance, research is the discovery of wholy new knowledge, and scholarship is the the digestion of knowledge already gained. Without research, scholarship quickly grows stagnant, but without scholarship, society can never gain the full benefits of research. But while the benefits of research are often fairly easy to determine, the contributions of scholars are often more difficult to quantify. Once we take away the assumption that scholars will earn their living through teaching, how can we quantify their work and assign Contribution appropriately?

Once teaching and research have been defined as separate activities, there is one quintissentially scholastic activity left: the publishing of books and papers. We’ve already touched briefly on the Contribution credit assigned to the authors of books in non-academic contexts, but there is a fundimental difference between books written for entertainment and books written to convey information, and that must be dealt with when we’re talking specifically about non-fiction work.

The example I’d like to call your attention to in this context is Google. Specifically, Google’s PageRank system. To determine the order of search results, Google looks both at how frequently the search keywords turn up on a particular page, and at how many other pages link to the page in question. The more pages link to that page, the higher its PageRank becomes.

This is relevent to our discussion because in many ways academic writing works the same way. The significance of a given book or paper lies partly in how many people read it, and partly in how many other scholars cite it in their own work. The more citacions are made to a given work, the more likely it is to have been significant in its field.

There are two primary ways that the author of a book recieves Contribution credit: when someone reads their book simply for enjoyment, they are given COntribution credit in proportion to the amount of that person’s reading time that was devoted to reading that book, the same way a musician would be, and when someone uses their book as a learning aid to pass a test in the SNA system. We’ve already gone over both of those in some detail and I don’t want to rehash them here. But I do want to add one more feature, one which can trace its lineage back both to Google and to pyramid-marketing schemes. Every time a book earns Contribution  credit for its author, a secondary pool is created, equal to half of the primary amount, which is divided up among the authors of the works cited in that book according to the number of times they are cited. Each of those credit assignments then generate their own secondary pools, which are similarly distributed, and so on until the amount of the credit generated falls under a predefined threshold. I realize that that last sentence may have been a bit difficult to follow, so let’s try an example.

Ed writes a book. He cites Jed and three other authors. Ned writes a book, and cites Ed’s book, and three other authors. Ted writes a book, and cites Ned’s book, and three other authors. Because they are obidient little imaginary academics who like making the math easy, they each cite all of their authors an equal number of times. Now, several people read Ted’s book and use it to pass an exam on English Literature. Ted earns 512Ctv. He thinks no more about it. The system, meanwhile, begins calculating the secondary Contribution pool. Half of Ted’s reward would be 256Ctv, which is then divided among four authors. Ned recieves credit for 64Ctv. This then creates a secondary pool for Ned’s book of 32Ctv, and Ed gets a credit of 8Ctv. You know the drill by now, Jed gets a credit of 1Ctv. At this point it stops because the system does not calculate secondary pools on rewards of 1Ctv or less. Which is handy, because I was running out of ‘ed’ names.

In real life, the world of scholarly writing is less like a linear progression and more like an interconnected net. What this means from the standpoint of academia in a technosocialist society is that these these secondary reward pools would enable even fairly obscure scholars to gain Contribution credit if their work led, even several steps down the road, to an important book or breakthrough. The more influencial a work is, the more it will be cited by others, and the more avenues for gaining Contribution the author will have.

 
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Technosocialism and the Arts

27 Jun

Let’s look back at our friend Steve, who was doing shift work while trying to make it as a guitarist. What does that mean? How do artists support themselves in a society with no currency? How is Contribution measured when it is nearly impossible to calculate supply and demand for something like music? To put it simply, their reward is determined by the number of people who enjoy their work. When an artist makes a recording, it is it is made freely available to the public. Citizens can then indicate whether or not they like the song as they listen to it, and Contribution credit is awarded appropriately.

Let’s say that Steve eventually records a song that gains a moderate amount of popularity. Bill, George, and Fred all listen to it. Bill doesn’t like it. Apparently he isn’t a fan of fingerpicking guitar. So he indicates that he doesn’t like it, and there is no impact on Steve’s Contribution score from Bill’s having listened to it. George and Fred, on the other hand, both like it. George adds it to a playlist he has put together specifically for fingerpicking guitar. He doesn’t often listen to music, but he does like to listen to guitar while he’s cooking, so out of two hundred song-plays that George hears in a given month, Steve’s song comes up four times. Fred, on the other hand, listens to music constantly while he’s working. He adds Steve’s song to his main “random mix” playlist, and over the same month he hears it forty times out of the 3600 song-plays he hears. So which of them causes Steve to receive more Contribution credit? George. While Fred listened to the song more in absolute terms, George gave it a greater percentage of his “musical attention” for lack of a better term. Since quantifying someone’s enjoyment of any art is more or less impossible, we have to use their behavior as a more easily quantified metric.

So to restate all of this in a drier way with no imaginary people, each citizen’s attention and enjoyment is worth a certain amount of Contribution credit. The ways they choose to spend their time determines how that credit is distributed. There is one other key point: citizens are never charged Consumption credit for non-physical consumption of art. After all, when a book, movie, or piece of music is enjoyed electronically, no societal resources are being consumed except for bandwidth. Infinitely reproducable works of art like these can only improve the societal conversation and people should never be discouraged from participating.

Now how about physical pieces of art? They are actually much easier to calculate Contribution for. Any citizen can add a section to their Profile displaying their artwork. Other people who admire it can subscribe as fans of their artwork. When the artist puts a new piece of work into the Depot system, subscribers will automatically be notified and will have the opportunity to view the work and submit requests. From there, the standard Depot distribution system applies. When it comes to physical art, citizens are charged a Consumption value because they are recieving a physical object which then becomes unavailable to the rest of society.

One place where it gets a bit tricky is reproductions of physical art, eg. posters printed with the image of a painting. While Contribution credit for the artist can be determined the same way that it would be for music or books, Consumption credit for the purchaser becomes more complicated. Generally the best way to handle this will be basing the Consumption charge on the total supply and demand for poster printing regardless of the poster being printed.

There’s a reason that Adam Smith made the division of labor the first major topic he covered in The Wealth of Nations. Given a fixed labor force, division of labor and the production line dramatically increases the material wealth that can be created. Later on in his book, Smith also warns strenuously against the social impact of dividing labor too specificly, because workers acting as nothing but automatic machines rapidly lose pride in and satisfaction from their work, and over time may lose the finer intellectual senses that make us human. So it’s important not to see it as an unmitigated good. But it certainly does have a place in society and it’s important that it be possible under technosocialism. But how to allocate Contribution credit, and how to distribute the goods that are produced? It’s time for another adventure with imaginary people.

Meet Bill, George, and Steve. Bill is an entrepreneur with a great new idea for making cotton ear swabs out of scrap cotton and paper. George is a mechanical engineer. Steve is an amateur guitarist who wants to find a way to improve his Contribution score part time without having it interfere with his music. Bill registers his idea and gets in touch with George through the Skills Needed/Available (SNA) system. Together, they design a largely mechanized facility that takes either raw cotton or scrap cotton fabric, as well as paper that has been sorted for recycling, and with the aid of a small number of workers, turns them into cotton ear swabs. Once the system has determined there is sufficient demand for ear swabs and a randomly selected panel of engineers has confirmed that the design for the facility is sound, the various tasks required to build it are entered into the SNA system. At this point George goes on to other projects, his work as a designer finished, but Bill stays on to supervise the construction and the opening of the facility. While he’s waiting, he creates a profile for the facility in the Manufacturing section of the SNA system. This profile includes primarily the number of people required for the plant to operate, the materials required to occupy a full compliment of workers for a shift, and the quantity of ear swabs that will be produced in that time. He also designs the training program and qualification test for workers to pass before they’re able to work independently in the facility. These training programs and tests can be edited later by workers, but it’s important to have a solid base to start from.

Eventually the facility is finished and ready to begin production. This is where Steve comes in. Because Steve prefers to avoid long-term commitments that might interfere with club gigs he might get or prevent him from working on a song when he has a good idea, he gets most of his work through the Shift Work section of the SNA system. He maintains a full profile on the SNA, which tracks his qualifications, his experience, and his preferences. He can sort through available jobs manually or allow the SNA system to play matchmaker, and point him towards nearby jobs he is qualified to do that require labor. In this case, he is searching in the evening for shift work the next afternoon, and using the system’s matchmaking feature. The system looks through the facilities requiring labor for that shift, and selects several nearby facilities: a match factory where Steve has worked before and on whose equipment he has already been certified, a bakery that needs a one day temp to help move some heavy boxes, and our new cotton ear swab factory. In this case, because it is closer to his apartment and only needs one person to meet its minimum staffing level for that shift, it recommends the ear swab factory. And Steve, who doesn’t feel like lifting boxes all day and prefers something new to yet another shift at match factory, agrees to give it a try. Before his shift the next day, he takes and passes the online certification course on the ear swab factory’s equipment, which takes him about an hour and for which he gets a small amount of Contribution credit.

So the next day, Steve goes in, and he and five other people use the facility to produce 600 boxes of cotton ear swabs. What happens next? If mass-produced consumable commodities like these were placed in the same system as Fred and his handmade hats, they would swamp it and make it far more difficult to find the more individual items. Ear swabs have two important charactaristics that make them work well for this example: they are consumable and thus needed on a regular basis, and they are all largely the same. While there may be occasional specialist types of ear swab, and there may be occasional differences in materials, for the most part they do not come in different flavors, styles, or sizes. So when Bill is entering the facility’s information into the manufacturing system, he can simply categorize the product as (for example) Consumables> Bath & Body> Hygiene> Ear Swabs> Standard. Meanwhile Fred, our craftsman who turns out to have unusually waxy ears, goes through 60 ear swabs per month. He can go through the Recurring Request system and enter his need for 60 swabs per month. If he has previously liked the ear swabs made through Bill’s process better than others, he can specificly request swabs from that facility, but the specificity of his request may mean that he is charged a higher Consumption value than he might be otherwise if there is a great deal of demand for Bill’s ear swabs specifically and a larger supply of swabs from other manufacturers. The system tracks who in society is in need of ear swabs and ships them out appropriately, using the same priorities for people with high Contribution and low Consumption that we saw in the case of Fred’s handmade goods.

But how is the Contribution value attributed when so many people’s work went into producing those 600 boxes of swabs? Bill had the initial idea and supervising the setting up of the facility, George drew up the plans, Steve and his fellows did the actual manufacturing, and the materials were supplied by even more people who don’t get names because they’re only tangentially in the story and I can’t be bothered. Who gets how much Contribution credit?

Let’s start with the suppliers of the materials because they’re relatively simple. The Contribution value of materials supplied to the facility depends on the demand for that facility’s product at the time the materials are contributed. A supplier with two hundred pounds of recyclable paper can choose to bring that to a toilet paper factory or to our ear swab factory. Which he chooses will depend on whether there is more unmet demand for ear swabs or for toilet paper at that time, since that will dictate how much Contribution value he is given for his paper. But the system also needs to track the supplies in stock at each facility. Once a facility has enough materials to produce continuously for a month, it should stop accepting new contributions of that material.

On to Bill and George. The best model to keep in mind here is the current system of royalties in modern art-based industries such as book publishing and filmmaking. Most authors aren’t paid a salary while they write a book, or (usually) given a lump sum for the rights to a book. Instead, they are paid a royalty, or a certain percentage of the book’s cover price, when the book sells. In the case of the film industry, there may be dozens of actors and writers who recieve residual payments when a movie is shown on television, even if the movie was made twenty years ago. Similarly, both Bill and George are given a small amount of Contribution credit for every box of swabs produced, even though they may not necessarily be actively involved in making swabs a year down the line. This way there is still a strong incentive for innovators to bring new processes and products to society without creating the severe inequities that exist in our modern corporate culture.

Now Steve and his comrades. Their Contribution differs from Bill and George’s in that it is partially related to current demand for ear swabs, but it is also related to the current demand for shift-work manual labor. The portion of it determined by demand for the product they are producing helps them choose between different shift-work opportunities, but if too high a percentage of the population is looking for work as manual laborers, the portion of their Contribution that depends on demand for manual labor may encourage them to train in a specialty such as plumbing that will allow them to earn more.

 
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