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.