Future of Copyright, by J.C. França

(This work takes part in the Future of Copyright Contest)

In my view, there's no future in copyright and intellectual property as is currently set.

And why do I think like that?

Because I see that unneeded complexity can bring us down easier than we can conceive, just like Joseph Tainter wrote in his book "The Collapse of Complex Societies" in 1988, and Clay Shirky resumed in his blog:

"When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification.... Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one."
(Clay Shirky, link here)

We are watching layers upon layers of complexity over something that was once called the public domain. If we take the current laws, regulations and models, and if we consider the current proposals worldwide, we can clearly set a pattern: The main purpose of laws that try to coerce the flow of information in a society based on an online culture is to create scarcity and, therefore, add value to goods that are otherwise approaching zero value, due to wide offer.

There's no incentive for that to stop. It's just too easy, for those who are in charge of the media machine, when combined with an well-oiled advertising machine, to add exceptional value to any kind of creation.

At this point, we might consider that the only way to fight against excessive greed is allowing a greedier player to enter the game.

Therefore, I propose the creation of a worldwide Tax on Intellectual Property, aka TIP. The details of that implementation are left to the experts. That would work as follows:
All goods labeled as intellectual property are subject to a tax, proportional to their potential of profit, aka PoP. If a large media corporation wants to guarantee their rights over anything that is supposed to be sold or licensed, they must pay a huge amount of money in order to have their rights enforced. Otherwise, they only have a grace period (I'm not able to determine how long it would be, but I guess that one to two years would be enough) in order to guarantee their revenue. The tax must be high enough in order to discourage abuse of rights.

When the grace period is about to expire, if the corporation still sees a PoP from the works, they would still be able to renew their rights for another two years, just by paying the TIP.

Well, that makes the TIP part. And what happens with the money that is collected?

First of all, the proceedings would be transparently exposed online. Every one on Earth would be able to know exactly how much corporations paid for what. Then there would be a Copyright Consortium, aka COCO, that would be in charge of buying, negotiating and licensing intellectual property worldwide on a Creative Commom basis, in order to make human creations available to everyone, everywhere.

In other worlds, the excessive profits would have a counterbalance, and the money obtained from TIP would be used to release intellectual works that should never belong to a particular human being or corporation in the first place.

It would also be possible to trade TIP for licensing, kind of a cross-patent deal. So, if I want to have the exclusive rights over a mouse forever, that would cost me such an enormous amount of money that I would just forget about that silly idea. Or, if I'm greedy enough to think that is is just fair to own the figure of a mouse that was taken from the public domain for good, and at the same time can't afford to do that, then I would have to give something in exchange. Like some of the zillions of copyrights that I already have.

COCO would be controlled by the public at large, who would vote on which works they would like to have released to the public domain. It's essential that the whole process and accounting be as transparent as possible. That's not an issue in our interconnected world, not technically at least.

That's it, folks.