A good friend of mine, innovative thinker, good engineer, and fellow optimist, Paul Sweazey, has written a great paper called “Preserving Our Right to Own” that I’d like everyone to read … and I do mean everyone. The paper starts out with the paragraph:
Introduction What if stores could no longer sell you products to own? What if you could only rent, subscribe, lease, or otherwise contract with corporations for restricted access to their products? It sounds unnatural, unreasonable, unfair, and unenforceable, and it would certainly give birth to a huge black market of off-the-record, untethered goods. Yet for a new and rapidly expanding category of products – downloadable digital products – we are dangerously close to the practical elimination of the right of individuals to own what they buy. No, there is no grand conspiracy to enslave the planet. Intelligent, reasonable people have led us to this point with the best of intentions and with a deeply-held faith in personal liberty and free markets. We simply have neglected to synthesize the conditions that enable individual ownership of digital products such as movies, music, books, games, and so forth. The purpose of this paper is to raise awareness of the problem and the solution, We can neither fix a problem nor embrace a solution that we don’t understand. We are reluctant to fix a problem if we don’t recognize how it affects us. Therefore, we need to educate ourselves. What does it mean to own copyrighted digital products? Why it is good for consumers, copyright holders, and businesses? How it can be enabled?
It then goes on to describe how we got into our current dilemma and the two extreme “solutions” that have been offered: nobody owns anything (it’s all licensed and you have no control), or nobody owns anything (it’s all free). In other words, it’s the RIAA/MPAA or the pirates, but they both are saying the same thing, just with different consequences. Paul proposes that there is a fine, Zen-like, third way that is based on the real world experience that we all have with our books, cars, houses, art works … anything “real”. That third way is “digital personal property”: a technologically- and legally-enabled way for people to actually own what they pay for, at least in the same way that people own intellectual-property-encumbered things like books, CDs, and DVDs.
Naturally, this outrages those on both extremes of the intellectual property battle since the DPP model is not “extreme” … it operates just like publishing works now. It allows content owners to publish and sell individual ownership of particular instances (meaning that they can gift or sell the instance, but they then lose access to the content) but no one gets to do unlimited redistribution without the cooperation of the original publisher. In other words, DPP allows iTunes or Amazon to sell songs or books as they do now, but those that buy stuff would then be able to give or sell it on their own.
I really like this … but Paul and his group (the IEEE P1817 Working Group) need more substantial support, so I’d like it if everyone would propagate this note and Paul’s paper everywhere and to everyone.
Thanks!
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Michael D. Johas Teener – http://Michael.Johas.Teener.myopenID.com/ – PGP ID 0x3179D202
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