The Right Track

Imagine that when you next buy a musical recording, a book, a chunk of code, or a film that you know that you own access rights to that work for the rest of your life and there will be a system in place to support these rights. You can anonymously use the content whenever and wherever you like, on the device of your choosing and in the format of you choosing. You can even legally pass on a copy to family and friends. At the same time you can actively support your favourite artists, performers, and creators and their work will always be attributed to them. Wouldn’t most people say this would be the ideal situation?

The proposed Rights Office system supports such a scenario. It proposes replacing the copy-based model of Copyright with a rights-based model. A new regime for our digital world that can use the Internet and modern technology to maximum advantage for distributing intellectual content while still recognising and rewarding the author and other players in the production chain.

My lecture would briefly introduce Intellectual Contributions as a new model for analyzing the trade in intellectual property and review analogue copyright in the light of this model. I then go on to look at DRM, levies and Creative Commons licences from the point of view of Intellectual Contributions model.

Following this introduction I will present the Rights Office system that proposes a distributed, peer to peer, rights management infrastructure that could provide the basis of trading intellectual works in the digital future. I describe the dual persistent identification system that provides the tangible reference that replaces the physical analogue copies as the trading commodity. I then describe how new business models operating in the Rights Office environment can remove the need for expensive DRM technology but still provide a revenue chain for artists and authors and how P2P networks could become the norm for distribution intellectual content. Of course there will still be cheats who won’t play fair but the Rights Office system has the potential to limit the worst case of cheating where someone illegally profits from another’s work.

Finally, I would like to have a discussion on the merits of the Rights Office system and get feedback on the possibility of developing the system at the community level as it appears to very difficult to introduce this concept to the established media players.