Conclusions

“As usual, the devil is in the details, and by and large the past 200 years of intellectual property history have seen a successful, albeit evolving, balancing of those details. But the evolving information infrastructure presents a leap in technology that may well upset the current balance, forcing a rethinking of many of the fundamental premises and practices associated with intellectual property.” [34]

In this paper I have tried to rethink our approach intellectual property from first principles and I believe I have been successful in presenting a new view of the issues. Although, I believe, I am presenting a new comprehensive scheme I am by no means alone [35] in suggesting change or the direction in which we should go. I have proposed a rights-based model, rather than the traditional copy-based model [36] , that is specifically designed to regulate intellectual property in a digital environment.

Copyright was not designed for the digital age where the physical limits of a digital manifestation of a product are not easily defined in comparison to traditional copyright protected product such as a book. Copyright, by definition, regulates the physical copying of the intellectual product not the use of the intangible intellectual content itself. The collective regime and the Distributed Intellectual Property Rights (DIPR) system, described here, changes the emphasis to regulating the creative content, the intellectual component, of the intellectual product.

The DIPR environment is created by two sets of administrative offices on the Internet with the interests of the creators represented in the 'Author Rights Office' and the consumers rights represented in the 'Consumer Rights Office'. Persistent identifiers, which make up the Property Rights Descriptor field of a physical manifestation of an intellectual product, identify the offices that record the collective rights of these creators and consumers.

I have argued that this new scheme would, at least, regulate the distribution of digital products and provide clear rules for the use of these products and potentially provide many other benefits compared to the current situation. The DIPR system also avoids some of the pitfalls of any proposed scheme that restricts the flow of digital information with controls and encryption. Some of the advantages of the DIPR system would be; clearly defined rules for using identified digital products, registered consumer rights to intellectual products, protection of all personal information, protection of the common right of access to intellectual works, automatic and permanent archives of intellectual works and new marketing strategies for the rights holders who can form peer-to-peer partnerships with consumers.

For many this proposal will be counter intuitive as it challenges some of the traditional principles for protecting intellectual property and reverses many current efforts to limit the distribution of information and creative products but I believe that the digital products of the future should be packaged with information that identifies the source of the creativity not with ciphers that try to bottle-up the flow.