Intellectual Contributions
and the
Rights Office System
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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)
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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:-
- Managing
Copyright in the Digital World, 26th August, 2005, Indicare.
- Trading Rights to Digital Content, Section 3, Rights Models,
Virtual
Goods: Technology, Economy, and Legal Aspects, Nova, ISBN:
978-1-60456-486-0
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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