Very good question, thanks, Kevin. I'm absolutely PRO. Pro-ownership. To record inventions and innovations, to assign them to ... names, those 'names' to be rewarded, to unleash market = to boost prosperity. Up until very recently we didn't have any other means but centralized ledgers, centralized fiat currency monetization, double-entry book-keeping recording of emergence and non-self-enforcing rule-set for protection of ownership and transactions which all require trust i.e. force ot coercion - immensely more costly than any PoW. Since 2008 we have already tripple-entry accountancy and self-enforcing technology. I expect that a system for recording and trading all kinds of intellectual property, even such which we deem as such which the present day clumsy and expensive and slow, IP legal system can't handle -- based on forms of cryptographic tokenization, where to copy would mean automatically a sale / reward event / ... shall emerge an prosper. And will boost the overal economy because the share of knowledge in products grows exponentially ... I also expect such a system to be paradoxically PATENTABLE :) :) :) - a 'patent to end all patents'' :) In fact I have in mind pretty elaborated idea about such, but can't reveal it yet because it is proprietary... Imagine a system where you just throw all what comes to your mind, without any requirement for form, aside from being machine understandable, the system extracts the essence, timestamps and account assigns it, is accessible only from within and rewards every look on it ... Sounds very Tauful, ah?
Wonderful article! Thanks. Your points are valid, and I think I have some of the answers. I have several articles to post on scarcity and Clusivity in general, and I also thought over procedural generation, SAT methods... I'll try here to mark few things in prior.: [1] the existing IP system is an attempt to turn the abundant into scarce. Abundance is function of ease to copy. Easy copy = lots in numbers = higher supply = lower price. Copyright by fiat ( 'to be', i.e. coercive) methods restricts the supply in an attempt to defend the dev cost in IP sense. Its effectively equivalent to excise duty or war-on-drugs to keep copycost high and to limit the supply and mainstreamability. It does it in clumsy, expensive and inefficient way but that's all we have now. All we have now is: law, trust which is == (literally equivalent to) force, and double-entry hierarchy of accounting. Yes, BOTH generation of IP and protection of IP (even of the fuzzy 'knowhow' i.e. trade secrets ) can be automated. [2] Generation by brute force walking over the whole phase or combinatorial space has been discussed many times. On my humble opinion it is as expensive as randomness. [3] EVEN if the Ledger upload is fee-less computation, internet etc. do cost. [4] Protection by cryptographic scarcitification - especially by use of zero-knowledge tech is ... unavoidable. Imagine IP objects as unique non-fungible 'cryptokittens' like digital objects which protocol excludes permissionless copying. Like imagine, only your 3D printer can be addressee of download and can print out only as much copies as stated into the tag of the instruction script package. Cause THIS is theonly method we know up to now to scarcitify and iniquify diesmbodied information. [4] The economic and moral dimension - you can still upload in the IP Ledger a thing without to scarcitify it. Kinda Open source. [5] The other important moment is that such a system is fit even under the present day IP legal system. Cf. 'Prior art'. [6] And the other other important moment in this line of thought is the non-monopolizability in digital way. I.e. there must be something which keeps the IP Ledger to be unique in order to prevent same structural objects to be uploaded independently on diff. ledgers. [7] Last but not least ... as you said how to distingwish? My answer is morphism, resemblances. If you imperfectly copy a thing, or create original inspired remake, how much it resembles/differs from the original entry is a measurable thing. Hence we end up with kinda reward-split or co-ownership multi-sig ( rather the former ) arrangement. ALSO the IP Ledger system could be timed - i.e. the items inside to fee-fade (become cheaper) or fee-cut (become free) with time. [8] Such a computation is stupid to be shoveled into the very blockchain so most probably the blockchain will be just clockchain and the IP Ledger would be layer on top of it. Layered structuring of networks seems to be natural unavoidability wrt scaling. Like TCP/IP - the lawyering was the breakthrough to give us Internet, and like with BTC/Omni or BTC/LN ... ... Sorry for the long answer but ... you see each sentence of this reply is at least couple of articles to post :) Except writing a voluminous book which gets outdated in the writing, a puzzle pieces issued serially which puzzle pieces could be upgraded / topics readdressed one by one / ...
One other very special observation. IP Law does not protect the Big Corp. Exactly the opposite. I suspect that due to their self-blinding hierarchic nature the Big Corp are quite innovation impotent no matter how much manpower and cashpower they throw. The riches of the 4 horses of the Infocalypse are still coming mostly from the groundbreaking innovations they did in daddy's garages and without dev money. They made money with knowledge. BUT, they failed and fail to make knowledge with money. They made money outta knowledge only because these brain-made things were protectable vs the Big Corps of the day. Not to steal and use it but to destroy it. And not deliberately but from hierarchic blindness and impotence :)
Very good question, thanks, Kevin. I'm absolutely PRO. Pro-ownership. To record inventions and innovations, to assign them to ... names, those 'names' to be rewarded, to unleash market = to boost prosperity. Up until very recently we didn't have any other means but centralized ledgers, centralized fiat currency monetization, double-entry book-keeping recording of emergence and non-self-enforcing rule-set for protection of ownership and transactions which all require trust i.e. force ot coercion - immensely more costly than any PoW. Since 2008 we have already tripple-entry accountancy and self-enforcing technology. I expect that a system for recording and trading all kinds of intellectual property, even such which we deem as such which the present day clumsy and expensive and slow, IP legal system can't handle -- based on forms of cryptographic tokenization, where to copy would mean automatically a sale / reward event / ... shall emerge an prosper. And will boost the overal economy because the share of knowledge in products grows exponentially ... I also expect such a system to be paradoxically PATENTABLE :) :) :) - a 'patent to end all patents'' :) In fact I have in mind pretty elaborated idea about such, but can't reveal it yet because it is proprietary... Imagine a system where you just throw all what comes to your mind, without any requirement for form, aside from being machine understandable, the system extracts the essence, timestamps and account assigns it, is accessible only from within and rewards every look on it ... Sounds very Tauful, ah?
My thoughts are still cloudy on the matter, but much of it stems from how things used to work. Maybe it'll change in the future when playing field is more levelled. Wrote this two years ago, https://steemit.com/philosophy/@kevinwong/the-end-of-intellectual-property-on-imagination-artificial-intelligence-and-procedural-generation, looking forward to update it as I gain better understanding :D
(I'm not a legal expert, more or less just talking out of my hind lol)
Wonderful article! Thanks. Your points are valid, and I think I have some of the answers. I have several articles to post on scarcity and Clusivity in general, and I also thought over procedural generation, SAT methods... I'll try here to mark few things in prior.: [1] the existing IP system is an attempt to turn the abundant into scarce. Abundance is function of ease to copy. Easy copy = lots in numbers = higher supply = lower price. Copyright by fiat ( 'to be', i.e. coercive) methods restricts the supply in an attempt to defend the dev cost in IP sense. Its effectively equivalent to excise duty or war-on-drugs to keep copycost high and to limit the supply and mainstreamability. It does it in clumsy, expensive and inefficient way but that's all we have now. All we have now is: law, trust which is == (literally equivalent to) force, and double-entry hierarchy of accounting. Yes, BOTH generation of IP and protection of IP (even of the fuzzy 'knowhow' i.e. trade secrets ) can be automated. [2] Generation by brute force walking over the whole phase or combinatorial space has been discussed many times. On my humble opinion it is as expensive as randomness. [3] EVEN if the Ledger upload is fee-less computation, internet etc. do cost. [4] Protection by cryptographic scarcitification - especially by use of zero-knowledge tech is ... unavoidable. Imagine IP objects as unique non-fungible 'cryptokittens' like digital objects which protocol excludes permissionless copying. Like imagine, only your 3D printer can be addressee of download and can print out only as much copies as stated into the tag of the instruction script package. Cause THIS is theonly method we know up to now to scarcitify and iniquify diesmbodied information. [4] The economic and moral dimension - you can still upload in the IP Ledger a thing without to scarcitify it. Kinda Open source. [5] The other important moment is that such a system is fit even under the present day IP legal system. Cf. 'Prior art'. [6] And the other other important moment in this line of thought is the non-monopolizability in digital way. I.e. there must be something which keeps the IP Ledger to be unique in order to prevent same structural objects to be uploaded independently on diff. ledgers. [7] Last but not least ... as you said how to distingwish? My answer is morphism, resemblances. If you imperfectly copy a thing, or create original inspired remake, how much it resembles/differs from the original entry is a measurable thing. Hence we end up with kinda reward-split or co-ownership multi-sig ( rather the former ) arrangement. ALSO the IP Ledger system could be timed - i.e. the items inside to fee-fade (become cheaper) or fee-cut (become free) with time. [8] Such a computation is stupid to be shoveled into the very blockchain so most probably the blockchain will be just clockchain and the IP Ledger would be layer on top of it. Layered structuring of networks seems to be natural unavoidability wrt scaling. Like TCP/IP - the lawyering was the breakthrough to give us Internet, and like with BTC/Omni or BTC/LN ... ... Sorry for the long answer but ... you see each sentence of this reply is at least couple of articles to post :) Except writing a voluminous book which gets outdated in the writing, a puzzle pieces issued serially which puzzle pieces could be upgraded / topics readdressed one by one / ...
One other very special observation. IP Law does not protect the Big Corp. Exactly the opposite. I suspect that due to their self-blinding hierarchic nature the Big Corp are quite innovation impotent no matter how much manpower and cashpower they throw. The riches of the 4 horses of the Infocalypse are still coming mostly from the groundbreaking innovations they did in daddy's garages and without dev money. They made money with knowledge. BUT, they failed and fail to make knowledge with money. They made money outta knowledge only because these brain-made things were protectable vs the Big Corps of the day. Not to steal and use it but to destroy it. And not deliberately but from hierarchic blindness and impotence :)