[Upd-discuss] Karl Fogel's idea; Andrius in Bay Area

[ms@ms.lt]

Karl Fogel,

Thank you for your position paper which you submitted on March 30, 2008
for our COMMUNIA workshop "Ethical Public Domain: Debate of Questionable
Practices". http://www.ethicalpublicdomain.org
http://www.communia-project.eu

I apologize for not replying earlier.  At the time I was overwhelmed with
guests and with the workshop.

Your ideas are very strong and I note your website
http://www.questioncopyright.org and organization.  In particular, I like
the idea of people assigning a value to their work so that people would
have the right to bring it into the Public Domain by purchasing it AND
having the copyright registration fee be proportional to that stated
value.  I think that is a great example of a broader principle that Public
Domain have primacy over Copyright.

I have posted your postion paper at:
http://ethicalpublicdomain.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=2028014%3ATopic%3A2741

Karl, where are you located?  I am currently visiting the San Francisco
Bay Area until June 22.  I would like to meet with advocates of the Public
Domain and look for ways to work together.  Perhaps we can organize
another "Ethical Public Domain: Debates of Questionable Practices" in
2009.  We would have more time to prepare and could perhaps involve
corporate and government representatives.  In general, I would like to
make contacts in companies like Yahoo! and Google who would be interested
to support an ethic of the Public Domain.  (For example, Yahoo! owns
Flickr, but Flickr doesn't make it possible to assign photos to the Public
Domain, as it does for the Creative Commons.)

Thank you, Karl!

P.S. I am a winner of the Knight News Challenge awards
http://www.newschallenge.org/the_includer
and will blog at the PBS website http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/
about developing an "Includer" http://www.includer.org, an offline device
for Africans and others to read and write emails stored on their USB flash
drives which they can then later upload and download at an Internet cafe.
I will write about related Public Domain issues, too.

Andrius

Andrius Kulikauskas, Minciu Sodas, http://www.ms.lt, ms@ms.lt, +1 312 618
3345
-------------------------------


Hello.  Sasha Mrkailo invited me to submit a position paper to the
Communia "Ethical Public Domain" workshop.  His invitation is here:

   http://www.questioncopyright.org/tools_of_change_2008#comment-3079

I saw http://www.ethicalpublicdomain.org/wiki.cgi?PositionPapers, but
I couldn't find a way to submit the position paper.  So I'm emailing
it to you.  I realize this may be too late for you to include -- my
apologies, it's been a busy few weeks and I simply didn't have time
before this weekend.  However, I hope you will have time to read it
and perhaps present it.

The paper is a very brief proposal for a new kind of copyright law.
See http://www.questioncopyright.org/balanced_buyout for a longer
explanation of the same idea.

========================================================================

    The Balanced Buyout Option: How To Turn Monopolies into Markets
    ---------------------------------------------------------------

The copyright system we have had for the last three hundred years was
not designed to support creation.  It was designed to support
distribution, by guaranteeing certain monopoly rights to printers, in
order to make printing an economically viable enterprise.

If we were to design a new copyright law for the age of the Internet,
we might simply decide to have no copyright law at all.  After all, it
is already clear that there is no shortage of creativity, distribution
is essentially zero-cost, and accurate attribution is best protected
by widespread distribution anyway.

However, we might not want to jump directly from today's system to
having no copyright law at all.  There is an intermediate step that
might be politically more acceptable, at least for now.  This
intermediate step is a copyright system designed to create a public
domain market instead of a monopoly market.  It is fairly simple:

A new work (a book, a song, a movie, etc) would first get an automatic
three to five years of copyright.  The primary purpose of this initial
period would be to give the work a chance to establish itself, without
interference from competing derivatives.

After this initial period is over, the copyright holder must register
the work with the government in order to keep the monopoly.
(Registration was formerly required for copyrights in many countries,
in fact, so this part is not new.)  When the owner registers the work,
she must choose a number: the total value of the work.  That number
can be as low or as high as she wants, but her registration fee will
be a percentage of that number, so she has an incentive not to declare
too high.

Now comes the key: since the owner has declared a total value for the
work, anyone can look up that value in the central copyright registry,
and pay the owner that amount to liberate the work into the public
domain.  This would be a mandatory transaction.  The owner must
liberate the work for that amount, because she has been paid exactly
the amount she declared the monopoly to be worth.

Since the value of a work may change over time, registrations are
renewed annually, and the owner may change the declared value each
time.  The registration fee will, of course, adjust along with it.

Note that liberation is different from purchasing the copyright
itself.  A copyright could still be rented or sold, just as today, and
might be sold for less or more than the registered total value (since
the prospective purchaser might prefer to keep the monopoly, rather
than liberate the work into the public domain).  The new owner would,
of course, be responsible for registration upkeep thereafter.

After twenty-five years, there could be no more renewals of
registration: the work must pass into the public domain.  Twenty five
years is long enough for anyone to hold a monopoly on a replicable
work.

The exact numbers I have used are not important.  The initial period
could be longer or shorter; the percentage of total value required for
registration upkeep could be 1% or 5% or something in between; the
final limit could be twenty years instead of twenty-five.  The
important point is that keeping something out of the public domain is
a privilege, not a right.  The owner of that privilege should pay the
public for it, and the public should have a meaningful choice about
the transaction.  This system accomplishes both goals.

(See http://www.questioncopyright.org/balanced_buyout for more.)