From suing music downloaders to bankrupting small businesses, copyrights and patents have slowed down innovation for years. That's right, slowed it down. You may think that giving inventors a monopoly over their invention would be a great incentive, but it really isn't. Most of the world's greatest inventions weren't created to make money; they were discovered through curiosity and most importantly tinkering with and improving earlier inventions. Everything was inspired by what came before it, and once we turn off this tap of fresh ideas, everyone suffers. The Wright Brothers didn't invent the airplane because they wanted to become rich, they did it because they wanted to fly.
If you want to see more concrete examples of the damage copyrights cause, go online. People live in fear just because they want to watch a movie but don't have the money. Engineers who create new products are shocked to find they've been sued by a company they've never even heard of, for patents they had no idea existed. In more serious cases, life-saving medicines aren't available to the people who need them because they can't afford to pay the sky-high licensing fees pharmaceutical companies charge.
Art wasn't meant to work this way. Life wasn't either. Information wants to be free.
But artists and inventors need to earn a living and gain prestige from their creations too. So what can we do?
If you've noticed, the biggest problem in all these scenarios is money. Someone wants to watch a movie or use an invention, but they don't have the paper to pay for it. Get rid of money, and you fix patents. Because of our reliance on "money", capitalism tends to create perverse incentives that actually go against human nature. Ideas are meant to be shared, but if you can't monetize it, you are forced to work another job or forego your dreams altogether. Perverse incentives lead to grocery stores throwing away food instead of giving it to shelters. It's the same kind of thinking that leads to there being four times as many empty houses as there are homeless people.
Think about an aspiring music artist in Colombia. They spend years honing their craft and slowly, surely gains a respectable fanbase. She's getting rave reviews and everyone loves her songs. There's only one problem: Although she has thousands of fans, nobody has enough money to buy her latest albums. Try as she might, she just can't make ends meet. One day this artist gets into a car accident and dies because she can't pay for a life-saving treatment. Now her voice has been silenced forever. Something that added value to each person's life has been taken away.
It may sound like a dramatic example, but it happens all the time. 20,000 people die each day because of hunger. Most of them are kids. If children are really the future, then think of what we're losing. Some of them would have been doctors or engineers. Some of them would have taken an interest in music. Maybe one of them would've been our singer.
Money has warped our values so much that we just don't get it anymore.
Art is meant to be seen and enjoyed.
Inventions are meant to be used to make life better for everyone.
And creators always deserve credit for what they've done.
The most beautiful painting in the world is worthless if nobody can see it. And if you've made this super-awesome new wonder gadget, it doesn't mean a thing if nobody can use it. Society wins when new ideas are freely shared and improved upon. You can already see this in the open-source movement, which consistently delivers products with higher quality and less glitches. Inventions don't derive value from how much money they make, they get their value from how many other people use them.
When you think about all this, the easiest solution is really the best one: Just turn uses or views directly into money and cut out the middleman. Times have changed. Before, we had no way of knowing exactly how many fans you had, or how many people read your book. Now, we can easily measure it by looking at your Youtube page. In simple terms, every time someone reads your book or uses your song, product or idea, you will automatically be paid because these actions create social capital. These payments will continue for the rest of your life. No mess, no fuss. The person using your product will not have to give up anything because the very act of them using your product IS the payment. In return for this privilege, all inventions and ideas will be open source, able to be remixed and used by others permissionlessly. The only protection that will be needed is trademark registration for those who want to build brands, and an unlimited copyright to your own image and voice.
Combine this with a few of the other social indicators we have today (likes, shares, comments etc), and we've built the beginnings of a brand-new economy. Friendship-Based Economy, Resource-Based Economy, Sociocapitalism- whatever you call it, it's based on the free sharing of ideas and goods plus fair compensation.
By measuring your social capital (or the value you add to society) we can create an economy that isn't based on debt, but a truly limitless resource: Human Creativity.
Let's go into a little more detail of how this system would work.
Like today, creators can share their work on the web to be seen by others. The difference is what I like to call the "CDS", or Collaborative Design System. The collaborative design system is an online social network that lets individuals work together to design pretty much anything. New cars, buildings, or even movies- the CDS has several dozen modules that let people from all across the world upload ideas or finished products and allow anyone to work on them. A physics simulator is built-in, so the designs can be tested virtually before being manufactured. All open-source, of course. Everything that is uploaded to other websites and social networks is automatically searchable through the CDS. CDSses already exist, although none are as comprehensive as the one i'm proposing. People already work together through Google Docs and Autodesk, but the CDS would be a complete online suite containing everything a creator would need from CAD to animation and editing software.
CDS design files are unique. In the metadata, everyone who worked on the file is listed, along with how much they contributed to it. People can contribute anonymously but they will not receive any payment when the finished product is sold or given away.
There will obviously be many versions of the same product, but that's the entire idea: The CDS is also a content-management system. "Idea trees" allow you to track the evolution of any idea, and see how it's been remixed and changed over time. Besides allowing people to design together, the CDS also acts as an online store where you can purchase and customize products.
Profit isn't made based off of how much the specific product sells for, because they are sold at the cost of the raw materials needed to produce them. How much each designer earns is determined by how much the project itself sells. Remember, the CDS itself is a social network. Projects can be liked, shared and viewed- and each of these give potential designs a boost in the rankings. Everyone who helped create a product is paid in proportion to how much work they did.
How much a project earns:
1 point- a like or a view.
2 points- an add (to a collection) or favorite.
5 points- a share or a comment.
10 points- a new subscriber/friend/use of a product or service.*
Every time an invention is used in a new product, the creators are credited 10 points. This is individuated so that if an invention is used in a TV and 500 TVs are made, the creators get 5000 points to split up.
The creators of the project do not set the selling price: It's automatically set by the CDS itself and only depends on the cost of the raw materials needed to produce it. Keep in mind that in a resource-based economy, production is highly automated so labor is no longer a factor. For this reason, only physical objects will be sold. Intangible objects (like music) cannot be sold because they require no raw materials to produce or copy. Creators are paid based on how many times their invention is used not just by consumers, but by other creators as well.
If you create a song and someone else samples it, you are still credited as if they used the entire song because they still used your song. Now, each time their song is heard it counts as a partial listen for your song too. (Uses and Views act as separate categories: Anytime someone uses your idea, it counts as a full use, but the amount of views added depends on the percentage used.) In this way, the amount of money a creator earns can rapidly multiply, far more than if they tightly held on to their content like in today's system. It's true: Copyrights and Patents as we know them today will not exist. But that's a good thing.
Via the CDS's idea tree and a ContentID-like system, creators will always know who's using their content- and if they don't like it they can ask them to stop. At the same time, your right is not absolute. While you can stop someone from using your exact interpretation of an idea, you can never stop someone from using the idea itself or building upon it. We're already seeing this online with the booming subcultures of fanart and fanfic. Both are where someone takes someone else's character and uses them in another original story. In this system, while the original author would still receive compensation, they wouldn't have the right to force the fanauthor to stop. This immediately takes care of those silly "sound-alike" music lawsuits.
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