##################################################### Treatise on copyright and preservation of information ##################################################### In this essay I will try to argue in favor of three major points related to copyright on the creative works in the digital age. #. Creative works must be seen as information bundles in the most general sense and described in terms of digital communication theory. #. Domains of copyright protection can be seen as analogous to plots of physical land, so that concepts and customs well established in the realm of real estate can be applied to them. #. "Imaginary property" is not an ironic term, but a precise one, and as such it better be used seriously. One implication of this term is, that just like imaginatively built constructions, creative works must be considered to be a common cultural heritage of the society with an associated duty imposed on the owners. Most ideas presented here are not original and were expressed before by various people under different circumstances. This essay, therefore, presents my personal view on the issue, taken as a whole at this time and date. Just like any other personal opinion, it is merely a residue left by considerable number of other people words, which I've read and heard over the years passed. It is quite common, in recent times, to discuss problems arising from application of copyright in the modern digital environment. However, the real problem, which is commonly missed, is the obvious lack of duty, which, necessarily, must be associated with any social right. The aspect of duty is missed not only in context of copyright discussions. Indeed, in our overabundant society duties are sometimes forgotten outright. Yet, they exist and every right has an associated duty, and without such a balance truly just society simply cannot exist. The concept above is obvious to the level of triviality when we talk about "natural" human rights. Since the long forgotten days of king Hammurabi it is accepted, that person, who denies his fellow human of the right to own his property or even of his life must be punished, possible by the same measure. So, the right to live is mandated by the duty to let live everybody else. I won't go into the philosophical abyss it is the discussion of basic human rights and limit myself to accepted practises of property laws. After all, eager proponents of copyright law tightening prefer to treat copyrighted items like property, albeit imaginary. The basic duty associated with the right to own private property is taxation. It is important to point out that taxation is not some sort of punishment, inflicted by the society on its members. On a contrary, taxes, at least in theory, serve as important regulator, aiming to maximise the common good at the small expense of private discomfort. Simplest example of the kind is dependency of public road construction funding on fuel tax. If people are willing to spend more on fuel, social institution in charge of roads gets more money to build and maintain them. Alternatively, when demand for fuel is low, same institution can reduce its road maintenance efforts, as they are not really required, and, consequentially, earns less of the fuel tax money. This is more or less how social justice is intended to work - in a form of negative feedback dynamic regulator, allocating resources to where they are really needed. Of particular interest in the context of imaginary property are issues of real estate ownership and taxation. For generations, since times immemorial (in fact, since first tetrapod set foot on the land, as many animals also have concept of owned territory hardwired into their brains) land was the most valuable resource people could own. And, in fact, we see that ownership of land is subject to a considerable number of regulations, most of them existing to minimise the number of conflicts in the community of neighbours. Landlord can not perform arbitrary activities with his land without asking permission from the community, and, more important, the property must be kept in order up to an acceptable standard, also mandated by the same community. Moreover yet, landlord is obligated to upheld the right to own his property regularly, by paying an appropriate tax. Failure to do any of this inevitably results in legal action and forceful transfer of ownership to other, better suited people. I suppose, at this point of the essay, anybody will understand where I'm going to. Yes, I say, if copyrighted work is to be considered a property, let it be real estate, because the field of human mental enterprise and its fruit are much closer to a real, dirt covered field and juicy fruits it bears than to a discardable pair of socks. I will return to this aspect further down the text, but in the meantime, I shall address the issue of duty, associated with the (copy)right. But first, a short introduction to a basic nature of information is necessary. People, whose occupation is not directly bordering the field of modern communication theory, often assume information to be a sort of ephemeral, yet readily available thing, not subject to the forces of nature, nor exposed to the mercy of elements. The actual state of affairs is, of course, very far from this. A direct consequence of one of the most basic laws of creation, so called `Noisy channel coding theorem `_ precludes transmission of arbitrary amounts of information through space or time. The more information we want to transmit over the vastness of spatial or temporal spaces, the more effort we need to put in to keep it error free. Ancient clay tablets or parchment scrolls took enormous amount of manual labour (energy) to create, yet contained only a few thousand bits of information at best. This is the primary reason, why we can still read many of them after the numerous millennia had passed: energy, expended to encode each byte of useful information was so high, that this information managed to survive the long journey through time. Since then, we invented overwhelmingly more advanced ways to encode information, but basic principle stays the same. Moreover, whatever efficiency gain was obtained by improved encoding techniques, it is negated by the explosive? exponential growth in the amount of information worth to preserve. Lets consider some modern examples. Printed books, for instance, can survive for decades, even for centuries, but only with appropriate care. They must be handled carefully, stored in dry environment and far from any insects or rodents who may want to contribute to ultimate success of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Effective retrieval of information from printed books requires even more work, as any educated librarian would testify. Yet, since the invention of printing, the situation got even worse. Next important invention in the field of information storage, photographic film, requires even more skill, equipment and effort to remain in good health, while being capable of surviving for even less time. Considerable amounts of cinematic film stock was already irreversibly lost, and this is only over a historically minuscule time frame of a single century. There's nothing mysterious about this unfortunate fact: colour film stock contains incredible amount of information and, therefore, mandates expedition of great effort to be able to survive the journey through the waves of time. There's no need to emphasise the enormous cultural importance, old films and books bear, as society without memory has no better chance of survival then unfortunate Alzheimer's disease patient. "Digital revolution" in information storage brought in an additional factor to consider. Median lifespan of most digital storage media probably does not exceeds 10 years. In addition to this short physical lifespan (determined by very high storage densities) digital media is subject to cultural degradation. Equipment, necessary to recover information from high density storage quickly becomes obsolete and data formats used -- obscure. Even the best wishing and properly motivated individual may be unable to retrieve useful data from old digital media, simply due to absence of appropriate equipment or instructions on how to make some. Some will argue, that wisdom of the masses may take care of the problem. This is, unfortunately, not true. Masses, which we take to represent common, not specifically motivated members of the community, are not prepared, quite justly, to expend a considerable effort needed to preserve even small amount of creative work items in a proper order. Even if we look at specifically organised, non-profit organisations they, more often than not, lack funds, equipment and payed-for specialist time to restore and maintain even small amount of old creative works, especially, if non-digital mediums are involved. The argument above leads us to a very specific conclusion: commercial exploitation of copyrighted creative work must be allowed and regulated, for the sake of mere continuous preservation of the works in question. However, this exploitation must be regulated, in a way analogous to a system, set up for owners of heritage listed real estate properties. This is to be done for the greater good of society in general. ************************************************ Properties possessed by imaginary property items ************************************************ Value, contained by the imaginary property item resides purely within information domain. Vast majority of newly created works comes into existence as purely digital compositions, represented as a stream of bits. For the smaller percentage of existing and future non-digital works we have the capability to create an unambiguous digital representation which will sufficient to identify and, in many cases, even recreate the work in question. Thus, we can postulate the following basic property of the creative work: it can always be represented as a stream of bits, either equivalent or one-to-one mappable to the work itself. `Cryptographic hash `_ of this bit stream, accompanied by some additional description can serve as a compact identifying token for purposes of creative work registration and tracking. Given this construct, we can understand, that various forms of the mentally "same" creative work, are, in fact, different, though derived, copyright items. This is a desirable property, which is being actively neglected at present. Books, musical compositions or films are seen as singular copyrighted items no matter how they are actually encoded, which, in many cases causes troubles and confusion on behalf of copyright owner. Unfortunately, it's very hard, if not outright impossible, to quantify the notion of "derived" work in general case. The issue of derivation must be judged by committee of humans on a case by case basis, but, fortunately, only if some form of conflict arises. However, derivation by means of encoding method is clearly defined and should be registered explicitly by the owner. Such specifically derived works will have varying quality and, consequentially, varying commercial and taxable value (as explained below). Owners will also be able to allow easier or free access to lower quality variants of their owned works without the risk of compromising their rights over higher quality, more valuable variants. In case, creative work exploitation conflict occurs, the value of the infringing item must be evaluated in respect to the set of items, registered by the owner as originating from the same mental source. This is absolutely necessary in order to establish fairness, as only fair societies can aim for real prosperity. ********************************************** Rights, worthy of granting to copyright owners ********************************************** #. Newly created imaginary property items should be subject to the same self-claimed copyright rules we have at present. The duration of this initial period must be specifically limited to some reasonable, short period of time, lets say 10 years. If we compare the vast area of human creativity to a sort of newly discovered Terra Incognita, we can allow for a sort of creativity "land rush", as actually happened during European colonisation of the New World. Everybody shall be allowed to come and grab their own plot of imaginary property, claiming it for themselves without too much hassle. #. During the initial self-assigned copyright term, all creative works of persisting value must be registered by the appropriate authority. Expected commercial value of such items must be declared as well, for the sake of duty imposition, as outlined in the following section. All historic "land rushes" ended precisely like this. Owners of claimed land were required to register their possessions with the governing authority. The establishment of this practise should not add too much worries to prospective owners. After all, large copyright owning organisations already perform complicated manipulations with creative works in their possession, for regulatory rating and profit reasons. Small, private owners are not expected to own too many commercially exploitable works, so the effort spent on maintaining registration should not be excessive. Such Copyright Authority should not aim to receive the copies of the works, just like Land Authority does not pretend to control privately owned land. Rather, it should rely on compact cryptographic constructs representing proof of authenticity in case conflicts will arise. #. There is no need to artificially limit the duration of registered copyright, given that copyrighted work is beneficial (taxed) and accessible to the whole society (as outlined below). After all, we consider this approach to work well enough when it comes to real estate ownership. Consequentially, it can be applied to imaginary property as well. #. Prospective copyright owners may be allowed to claim rights over existing creative work, if they can prove their involvement in the creation of the work in question and are willing to compensate the society appropriately (from the taxation and access standpoint). It seems beneficial to allow people to take ownership over works, which otherwise will be considered "orphaned", so that those works will not deteriorate into oblivion. #. Owner of the registered imaginary property should be allowed to give up a responsibility on it. Rather than allowing the works to slip into an unclear realm of "public domain" it seems beneficial to set up special, non-profit organisations, which would act as non-exclusive owners of abandoned works. Society should encourage creation of special, non-profit organisations to serve as right-holders for copyrighted work passing into public domain through non-registration or non-payment of taxes (either declared or malicious). Such organisations can also act to discover and reintroduce orphaned or forgotten creative works, which has no apparent copyright holder. Currently such works are essentially removed from circulation and productive use due to unclear legal status. Proposed system may contain provisions for re-assumption of lost copyright as stated by the rule above. ************************************************************************** Duties, copyright owners should be subject to in return for rights granted ************************************************************************** #. All registered copyrighted items shall be subject to a proportional tax. The value and the expected income generated by the item should be declared in advance by the owner, and can be adjusted on annual basis. Zero valued items registered by for-profit organisations or individuals should be taxed at some small rate as well, in order to discourage mindless accumulation of dormant copyrighted works, which quite often happens nowadays. Generally speaking, indirect taxation of profit generating creative work happens already, by means of income or corporate taxes. It seems beneficial to separate imaginary property tax into a distinctive category (similar to real estate taxes) for a more careful accounting of the non-producing sector of the industry. The implementation of this rule should not be too problematic, as most serious copyright owners (such as book publishers or film makers) already do their accounting by work item (for process and profit optimisation purposes). #. Owners must allow consumers (in a broad sense of the word) access to the registered copyrighted work under customary and acceptable terms pertaining the type of work in question. This particular rule must be enforced with fines or denial of copyright ownership of the title. While this rule may sound somewhat controversial, it is the only way to ensure that owner takes care of the copyrighted work. Acceptable licensing terms can be calculated on the basis of item's tax value, which is necessary to satisfy the rule above. For example, licensing cost for the master copy of the popular feature film or source code of the popular application may be declared to worth many million dollars, but these items will get taxed appropriately in return. On the other hand, compressed version of the same movie or a binary application build will bear much lesser licensing price and correspondingly lower tax obligations. The fairness of this rule is well entrenched in real estate area. Neighbourhoods, in general, do not allow private owners to build excessively high fences, paint heritage properties in shiny colours or prevent people from using the adjacent sidewalks. Same concept should be valid in imaginary property realm. ************************************************************** What problems should proposed copyright system really address? ************************************************************** To conclude, I would like to summarise the problems which are expected to be dealt by the proposed system. It so happens, that publishers of creative works, acting in their interest, maintain in good order only certain popular subset of the creative works in their possession. They even act to provide access to those under a relatively reasonable terms, as dictated by many socioeconomic factors. However, contemporary laws encourage accumulation of copyrighted work titles in the hands of major owners, who do not have any interest in maintaining or distributing these works of lower potential value. The work may even perish outright without its owner even noticing, causing harm to the collective memory of humankind. "Orphaned works" present additional major problem. Currently, there is no way to make use of such works, which are believed to be under valid copyright, yet the owner can not be established or located. In the real estate practise, property which had fallen into disrepair and has a large unpaid tax debt on it is appropriated by the society with an intend to find a better caretaker (either private person willing to pay the debts or community manager). There is no reason why same practise can not be applied to imaginary property as well. While it may appear that copyright is some sort of luxury, relevant only in well-fed society of prosperity and abundance, it is, in fact, a major mechanism regulating the collective memory of the society (as already mentioned above). Human civilisation had already matured to a stage, whereupon it must start to utilise the collective intelligence or give up technological progress outright. Therefore, issues of collective thought management must be brought to the forefront of public discussion and dealt with actively, despite the giant obstacles imposed by ignorance and greed. `General comments, corrections, objections? `_