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The unique identifications for
the author and consumer
rights offices will be in the form of a Persistent Uniform Resource
Identifier and the Handle System
appears to be the ideal global structure for them.
A secure rights protocol, to be defined and implemented,
will allow the administrative offices to exchange the author
rights identification and consumer rights identification
that will complete the transfer and logging of consumer’s registered-rights.
Both offices would keep a transaction record including the date
and time of the exchange that would provide an audit trail. The
consumer will receive the unique manifestation of the intellectual
product with a Property Rights Descriptor (PRD) field that contains
both the author and consumer identifications.
As discussed above,
the following consumers rights are granted when this uniquely identified
product is issued and the identifications registered:
- The consumer is allowed unlimited copying for their personal use.
- They have the right to consume the intellectual component of the
intellectual product. For example, when users receive a music
file with a PRD registered to them they will be allowed to play
that music as if they were playing a CD or record they had purchased.
There will be numerous author and consumer rights
offices. Creators and distributors will be able to choose which
author rights office will protect their intellectual products or
even set up their own rights offices. Consumers, likewise, can choose
a consumer rights office to record the transfer of product usage
rights.
The duplication of the rights transfer and product
information in the author and consumer rights offices will provide
redundancy in the case of one of the offices' databases being lost.
The lost database would become truly virtual but, in theory, could be recreated over time.
This description concerns only the basic rights
transfer in the DIPR system and takes no account of the distribution
of the product itself and the transfer of payments. It is feasible
that one organisation could deal with many aspects of the transfer
– say, promotion and sale of the product, distribution, Author
Rights Office functions and the granting of additional rights through
an Electronic Copyright Management System.
I also foresee that the establishment of a
network of rights offices, that are obliged to be secure and provide
secure communications, that would also provide a structure for a
secure payment system. The offices could effectively become 'banks'
for secure transfer of payments between consumers and providers.
A system of ‘Internet banks’ such as this might allow
the implementation of micropayment systems, with the low transaction costs that
are required, and could even allow novel payment systems such as
‘Microrefunds'
to operate successfully.
Structure of the Property Rights
Descriptor (PRD)
The Property Rights Descriptor (PRD) is the unique
identification that is attached to every product manifestation issued
in the DIPR system. It consists of, at a minimum, two unique persistent
identifiers; One issued by the Author Rights Office (ARO) and the
other by the Consumer Rights Office (CRO). It would have the following
form:
<PRD>::= <ARO
ID> “,” <CRO ID>
Each manifestation of the intellectual product
could be uniquely identified with just one identifier. Why use two?
The reason is that each party needs to have exclusive ownership
of a product identifier. The two parties, creator and consumer,
agree to ‘share’ some rights to a manifestation of the
intellectual component of an intellectual product, they are not
agreeing to share rights to their identifications of that
product. It is the identifications that are the fixed tangible reference
to an otherwise ‘intangible’ product manifestation.
A simple example can illustrate the above: A consumer
wishes to change his or her consumer rights office, for whatever
reason but say to an office which has a faster response time for
registering products. All they need to do is change the ‘consumer
rights office’ resource associated with their identification
of the product. No change to the author rights office associations
is required and the creator need not know of the change of consumer
office. If there were only a single identification both parties
would have to agree to the change and why should this be so when
each party owns their rights to the product?
Most products today have only one unique identifier,
say a combination of product number and serial number, which is
almost certainly owned and controlled by the author or his or her
agent. When this single unique identification is applied to a potentially
intangible digital product the consumer is at the mercy of the owner
of this identification. (See my theoretical
analysis of the DIPR system for further arguments supporting
the social and environmental needs for this dual office structure.)
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