tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-59013702024-03-08T16:07:38.687+01:00Common RightsCommon Rights is a project to develop a new system for regulating intellectual property that replaces the copy-based model of Copyright with a rights-based model.Nicholas Bentleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06324477964586677091noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5901370.post-87499388373348697802010-10-19T21:23:00.002+02:002010-10-19T21:35:21.659+02:00Common Rights as Part of the Digital Agenda?I will presenting my ideas on regulating Copyright at the <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/events/dae/2010/index_en.htm">European Commission's Stakeholders day</a> on Monday the 25th October. Anyone in Brussels on that day please contact me if you would like to discuss the Common Right philosophy.Nicholas Bentleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06324477964586677091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5901370.post-80331326627551361992007-09-09T09:17:00.000+02:002007-09-09T09:42:52.374+02:00How to contact Rick Rubin?Lynn Hirschberg has an <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/magazine/02rubin.t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1">article in The New York Times Magazine</a> about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rubin">Rick Rubin</a> the new co-head of Columbia Records. Hirschberg reported:<br /><br /><blockquote>Rubin has a bigger idea. To combat the devastating impact of file sharing, he, like others in the music business (Doug Morris and Jimmy Iovine at Universal, for instance), says that the future of the industry is a subscription model, much like paid cable on a television set. "You would subscribe to music," Rubin explained, as he settled on the velvet couch in his library. "You'd pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you'd like........"<br /><br /><br />............"It will be very difficult, but what else are we going to do?"</blockquote><br /><br />What else can be done? If Rick Rubin could listen to me I would tell him about the Rights Model that could include the 'anywhere you'd like' subscription model and do so much more.Nicholas Bentleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06324477964586677091noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5901370.post-1150749000572177132006-06-19T19:36:00.000+02:002006-06-19T22:30:00.616+02:00The World We Want<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman";" lang="EN-GB">Common Rights vision of the world we want:<br /><br /> - <span style="font-style: italic;">A world where all information is available to all people all the time for study, education, health and the advancement of society.</span><br /><br />This was the original goal of our copyright regime, I believe, and it should remain the goal in our new digital world. A dynamic rights regime could achieve this while still recognising and rewarding creative effort of individuals.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">This site is part of </span><a style="font-family: times new roman;" href="http://www.theworldwewant.org/">The World We Want network</a><span style="font-family: times new roman;">. Please tell the world what you want by blogging about it this week.</span>Nicholas Bentleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06324477964586677091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5901370.post-1077784596025661132004-02-26T09:36:00.000+01:002004-02-26T09:39:26.076+01:00Music to my ears"My suggestion is to junk the current structure entirely and recast copyright as an exclusive right of commercial exploitation. Copyright owners would have the sole right to exploit their works commercially or authorize others to do so, but would not be entitled to control noncommercial uses."
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<br />This is what <a href="http://www.law.wayne.edu/litman/">Jessica Litman</a> said to <a href="http://www.algonet.se/~mpawlo/">Mikael Pawlo</a> in a <a href="http://grep.law.harvard.edu/article.pl?sid=04/02/25/0344203&mode=flat">Greplaw interview</a> this week. Let me repeat it.
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<br />"My suggestion is to junk the current structure entirely and recast copyright as an exclusive right of commercial exploitation."
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<br />Thank you, Jessica Litman, for putting it so succinctly. This is exactly the intuitive response that I call for in <a href="http://www.commonrights.com/Abstract.htm">Common Rights</a>.Nicholas Bentleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06324477964586677091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5901370.post-1077474747552629402004-02-22T19:32:00.000+01:002004-02-22T19:40:27.780+01:00Copyright or Not Every other article I read on digital goods and copyright proposes one of two extremes, either:
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<br />1) Keep copyright as it is and shore it up with more laws, lawsuits, controls, DRM, and anything else you can think of to reduce the efficiency of digital distribution. Roughly the course we are on now.
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<br />2) Or, abandon copyright completely, allow free access to all content for everyone, and reward artists from a central fund. Many have proposed solutions in this category and one of the latest being an <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/35498.html">article</a> in the Register by Andrew Orlowski interviewing <a href="http://www.62chevy.com/bio.htm">Jim Griffin</a>. This course has some merits but also <a href="http://sims.berkeley.edu/~fredrik/research/papers/EvaluatingDRM.html">disadvantages</a> – how to collect the money, who distributes it, who gets to register as artist, and how can you stop people gaming the system.
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<br />In the <a href="http://www.law.wayne.edu/litman/papers/paradigm.htm">past</a>, <a href="http://www.law.wayne.edu/litman/">Jessica Litman</a> has called for a complete rethink of copyright, "Most fundamentally, I would argue, we need to fasten on some measure of a copyright holders' rights other than the familiar reproduction." but she is now <a href="http://www.law.wayne.edu/litman/papers/sharing&stealing.pdf">proposing</a> a hybrid 'copyright / free distribution' model that I fear might inherit the disadvantages of both.
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<br />Why not a third way; a totally new model for dealing with intellectual property? <a href="http://www.commonrights.com/Common-Collective.htm">Collective rights</a> where, for starters, it establishes everyone's basic right of access to an intellectual product, goes on to give the author singular rights to trade the product commercially, and goes still further to allow others to take 'shares' in these rights to the product and so support it, promote it, share it, and use it as they wish. This approach allows distribution models from single item purchases, to subscription or levy systems (Griffin bundles), to free promotional offers, all without DRM or technological controls.
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<br />Not copyright, not nothing, but <a href="http://www.commonrights.com">something new</a>.Nicholas Bentleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06324477964586677091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5901370.post-1076866476642991662004-02-15T18:34:00.000+01:002004-02-15T18:41:39.496+01:00No future for DRM<a href="http://www.securitypipeline.com/contact.jhtml;jsessionid=GV50PTP5GBHRGQSNDBGCKHQ">Mitch Wagner</a> has posted an <a href="http://www.securitypipeline.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=17603511">article</a> on why DRM won't work and also provides a few pointers to what the future might look like for media companies. Wagner rightly states, 'If people are unwilling to buy something, technology and law won't make them buy it.' and then goes on to ask the question:
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<br />'So what's the alternative? I don't know. Right now, digital media are available for free over pirate services over the Internet. How do you get people to be willing to pay for it? The technology and content already exist, what's waiting to materialize is the business model to harness digital media.'
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<br />Yet again, I would like to propose <a href="http://www.commonrights.com">Distributed Intellectual Property Rights</a>. Although the <a href="http://www.commonrights.com/Common-Collective.htm">Collective Rights</a> philosophy refers extensively to 'rights' and draws on some 'rights management' technologies, such as persistent identifiers and secure databases, these rights are granted to all individuals to allow access all intellectual work and they bear little resemblance to the rights granted to authors and publishers who control copying under copyright. The business model Wagner is looking for is one which will allow digital media to compete with free. DIPR creates the peer-to-peer Internet structure for such a model where creators can provide the 'essential services' to 'known' consumers and where these services can outperform the free. In the case of journalists part of this service is 'timeliness' as Wagner points out.
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<br />Read <a href="http://www.commonrights.com">DIPR</a> and tell me why this approach is wrong.Nicholas Bentleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06324477964586677091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5901370.post-1076268230594030832004-02-08T20:23:00.000+01:002004-02-08T20:29:18.200+01:00In 1710 the copyright term was set to 14 years extendible by another 14 years. In 1842 the British said life-plus 7 years. In 1908 Berne said life-plus 50 and in 1998 Mickey upped the stakes to life-plus 70 years. When will the term tussle end?
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<br />I propose that if authors were to publish their work under the <a href="http://www.commonrights.com">Distributed Intellectual Property Rights</a> system the collective rights model would allow the author to choose the term of his or her controlling interest in the creative work.
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<br />"How can we possible allow this?" is the cry I hear from the Creative Commons camp and many others who take an interest in the issue. "Surely, no work will ever reach the public domain again!"
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<br />On the contrary, I maintain that the time for most works to reach the public domain would be reduced under DIPR for, unlike copyright, there is a cost, albeit small, to maintaining a <a href="http://www.commonrights.com/Identifications.htm">persistently identified</a> work. Under copyright there is no cost to maintaining the copyright after producing the initial tangible manifestation and this is why there is a group proposing the <a href="http://eldred.cc/">Public Domain Enhancement Act</a> where for a fee of 1$ after a period of fifty years, say, a rights holder would be able to maintain their copyright if it was still worth 1$ for them to do so.
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<br />Better than this artificial public domain enhancement cost, the ongoing costs of maintaining a collective work in DIPR will persuade owners to relinquish their rights to a work immediately it has finished paying its way. Let the author decide when this time arrives and therefore the length of the term.Nicholas Bentleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06324477964586677091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5901370.post-1076143928925182512004-02-07T09:52:00.000+01:002004-02-07T09:59:00.983+01:00In '<a href="http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9855">Who Owns New Knowledge?</a>' <a href="http://www.dol.gov/asp/programs/history/reich.htm">Robert Reich</a> highlights the digital conumdrum: "This problem didn't exist in the old economy. Most of the cost of any given product was in the making of it. But in the knowledge-based, digitized economy almost anyone can pirate almost anything, almost right away. In other words, the old rules about private property no longer work."
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<br />This, again, leads me to the question I keep asking: Why don't we forget the old copy rules and try a new system of <a href="http://www.commonrights.com/Common-Collective.htm">collective property</a> where communities of consumers share the product with the author? There are already examples of this principle at work such as Magnatune's <a href="http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7220">open music experiment</a> where they have found that consumers will pay more than the minimum asking price for the freedom to own and use the music with very few restrictions. <a href="http://magnatune.com/">Magnatune</a> issues their music under the <a href="http://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons</a> licence but, as I said <a href="http://commonrights.blogspot.com/#106706482872621305">before</a>, if the CC principles were extended and took advantage of a true P2P environment imagine what <a href="http://www.commonrights.com/Copyright-DIPR.htm">other benefits</a> might arise. Nicholas Bentleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06324477964586677091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5901370.post-1075660788108764662004-02-01T19:39:00.000+01:002004-02-01T19:46:24.436+01:00How can you compete with free?
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<br />This was the title of the popular <a href="http://www.weforum.org/pdf/Session_Summaries2004/048e.pdf">Digital Rights workshop</a> at the <a href="http://www.weforum.org/site/homepublic.nsf/Content/Annual+Meeting+2004%5COpen+Forum+Davos+2004">World Economic Forum</a>, Davos, and the participants went on to post the following requirements for a successful business model:
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<br />+ The appeal of simplicity
<br />+ Convenience
<br />+ A filtering function (to direct customers to what they want and/or personalize it)
<br />+ A peer-to-peer mechanism or function
<br />+ Possibly new and attractively designed appliances
<br />+ Defined and undefined added value (quality, transparency, pricing structure/model)
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<br /><a href="http://www.u-blog.net/loic/note/44652">Loïc Le Meur</a>, one of the participants, went on to <a href="http://www.u-blog.net/loic/2004/01/24">post</a> the question, "What type of business models do you think will appear?"
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<br />I would like to invite the panel to take a look at the<a href="http://www.commonrights.com"> DIPR</a> system. DIPR uses P2P protocols to exchange unique identifications that grant unrestricted access to the digital product - very simple and convenient for the customer. The same identifications provide filtering and metadata and access to backup copies to further help the customer. In addition, these dual identifications also establish direct but confidential, virtual, links between the author and the consumer which can then be used for all sorts of enhanced business transactions such as free samples, follow-up promotions, even rebates on successful products.
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<br />Because DIPR does not rely on DRM controls the customer can take their choice of any <em>attractive</em> reproduction equipment available!
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<br />How to compete with free? - Let the customer buy a collective share of the product. What does Peter Gabriel think?
<br />Nicholas Bentleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06324477964586677091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5901370.post-1075395989600308982004-01-29T18:06:00.000+01:002004-01-29T18:22:20.343+01:00During the last five years people have regularly ask me why I spend all my time studying the issues of copyright and digital media. 'What is the problem?' they ask and I try to explain. I think that from now on I will refer them to the <a href="http://robertboynton.com/">Robert Boynton</a> article '<a href="http://robertboynton.com/?art_id=363">The Tyranny of Copyright?</a>' as it appeared in the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/">NY Times</a>. In my mind it sums-up the situation perfectly.Nicholas Bentleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06324477964586677091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5901370.post-1069181554441149282003-11-18T19:52:00.000+01:002003-11-18T19:57:08.653+01:00<a href="http://www.shirky.com/">Clay Shirky</a> talks of the <a href="http://www.riaa.org/">RIAA</a> ‘Crush the Connectors’ strategy in his <a href="http://www.shirky.com/writings/file-sharing_social.html">File-sharing Goes Social</a> writing about the Internet. Shirky’s article traces the history of decentralised file sharing networks – Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa – and the RIAA strategy to put them out of action to protect the rights holder’s copyrights.
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<br />Shirky predicts that the result will be very small social networks where groups of trusted acquaintances or friends will readily share files in a relatively secure environment. That is an environment where illegal copying will not be easily exposed and then not easily prosecuted.
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<br />The <a href="http://www.commonrights.com/Common-Collective.htm">Collective Rights</a> philosophy identifies the same natural social interaction, where friends and relatives want to share, and accepts this situation. The <a href="http://www.commonrights.com/Abstract.htm">Distributed Intellectual Property Rights </a>system for regulating intellectual property then makes such an environment for limited sharing legal.
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<br />You might ask why this will be an improvement over the current copyright situation? By making small social sharing groups legal DIPR will further encourage formation of these groups and these groups, as Shirky says, might well then turn into buying groups. In addition, the DIPR system includes the author in every one of these tight knit groups by granting both the purchasing consumer and the author collective rights to the product. Collective rights identified by two <a href="http://www.commonrights.com/Identifications.htm">persistent identifiers</a>. It is these social ties that will build commercial support for the author not a sustained legal campaign by rights holders trying to limit copying.
<br />Nicholas Bentleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06324477964586677091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5901370.post-1069002167080627592003-11-16T18:02:00.000+01:002003-11-17T09:48:02.226+01:00<a href="http://www.teleread.org/">David Rothman</a> has another great idea – an <a href="http://www.teleread.org/blog/2003_11_09_archive.html#106891854421072122">open common standard for e-books</a>.
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<br />In my view an open standard for formatting the content of e-books almost exists. <a href="http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/SGML/">SGML</a> is an open standard for document mark-up and <a href="http://xml.coverpages.org/sgml.html">XML</a> is a more manageable implementation of SGML. A well-defined <a href="http://www.w3schools.com/dtd/default.asp">DTD</a> might just finish the job. The <a href="http://12.108.175.91/ebookweb/discuss/msgReader$2165">Universal Consumer eBook</a> proposal covers a lot of this ground. It also seems to me that an end-user mark-up language could be defined at the same time so that the consumer could transfer bookmarks, anchors, and notes from device to device as they move the book around. It would be then up to the technologists to make the latest gadgets handle these common mark-up standards.
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<br />What muddies the water are attempts to combine rights management (media control) with document formatting and mark-up. If rights management is needed at all it should be implemented at a separate level as a common rights management system for all digital information (text, music, video,..)
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<br />The <a href="http://www.commonrights.com/Common-Collective.htm">collective rights</a> regime calls for a common <a href="http://www.commonrights.com/Identifications.htm">identification standard</a> (a relatively simple goal), argues that rights control of identified products is unnecessary and predicts that the combination of these persistent identifiers and a common mark-up language will provide guarantied accessibility now and in the future.
<br />Nicholas Bentleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06324477964586677091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5901370.post-1067064828726213052003-10-25T08:53:00.000+02:002003-10-25T08:53:49.313+02:00David Rothman of <a href="http://www.teleread.org">Teleread</a> posted some <a href="http://www.teleread.org/blog/2003_10_19_archive.html#106690329538444021">thoughtful comments</a> on my collective rights proposal and he urges people ‘to take a look at both <a href="http://www.commonrights.com">CR</a> and <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org">Creative Commons</a>’.
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<br />Rothman is absolutely on target, Creative Commons is definitely pushing forward in the right direction by allowing authors to offer some of their copyrights to improve the lot of the consumer and they back this up with legal licenses. I even tinkered with the idea of publishing Common Rights under a Creative Commons license before I realized that I should have faith in my own system and use <a href="http://www.commonrights.com/Identifications.htm">Property Rights Descriptors</a> to protect my work while allowing others to access it.
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<br />The Creative Commons license scheme, however, has some shortcomings:
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<br />1) Creative Commons allows the author to give away some of their rights but they can’t specify to whom. This makes it difficult to use in a commercial situation where an author might like to give away some of their products for promotional reasons but license others for a reward.
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<br />2) There is no record of which product has which license; a third party can change or add a license to a product and hoodwink a forth party. Creative Commons recognizes this problem and is trying to instigate a ‘<a href="http://creativecommons.org/technology/embedding">license verification link</a>’ where a link in the product refers to the license metadata rather than only including the metadata in the product.
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<br />3) Creative Commons relies on the author to maintain the public copy of the license allocated to the product. This poses two problems:
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<br />a) The author can fail to maintain the site that holds the license metadata and therefore lose control of the product licensing.
<br />b) The consumer could find himself or herself using a product for which they thought there was a Creative Commons license only to find that the rights holder has failed to support it. This is a critical weakness of the system for the consumer.
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<br />The <a href="http://www.commonrights.com/Abstract.htm">Distributed Intellectual Property Rights</a> philosophy addresses all these issues and more.
<br />Nicholas Bentleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06324477964586677091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5901370.post-1066586497124266992003-10-19T20:01:00.000+02:002003-10-19T20:01:37.223+02:002nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th PRD issued !
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<br />Today, four Property Right Descriptor (PRD) <a href="http://perso.wanadoo.fr/combe/Common%20Rights/PRD-DIPR.htm">identifications</a> were issued under the <a href="http://www.commonrights.com">Distributed Intellectual Property Rights system</a>. These four PRD’s uniquely identify the all the pages on the <a href="http://www.commonrights.com">www.commonrights.com </a>website and the printable version of this paper.
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<br />These manifestations of the DIPR product are registered to <a href="http://perso.wanadoo.fr/combe/Common%20Rights/Biography.htm">me</a> and under the rules of the DIPR system this allows anyone to view these copies of the DIPR product but no one else is allowed to make copies of this work, claim they own it, or use it for any commercial purposes. If you would like to make non-commercial copies of my DIPR paper for your own reference, or to spread the word, please contact me and I will issue a PRD to you. (If you want to use this work commercially you should definitely contact me and maybe we can make a deal).
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<br />Why have four identifications been issued for only two works? Well, each product has two identifications; the first ID identifies the author (me) and the second ID identifies the consumer (in this case me again) who is allowed to hold one or more copies of the work. Please go to <a href="http://www.commonrights.com">commonrights.com </a>to find out how all this works.
<br />Nicholas Bentleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06324477964586677091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5901370.post-1065951980877636232003-10-12T11:46:00.000+02:002003-10-13T20:20:53.333+02:00Take the 'Copy' out of Copyright
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<br />If you take the copy out of copyright what are you left with? Rights. - When we are dealing with intellectual property everyone should have rights not just the author. The author, or their agent, has come to be known as the 'rights holder' and while I maintain the principle that the author should remain the primary rights holder I also <a href="http://perso.wanadoo.fr/combe/Common%20Rights/Common-Collective.htm">suggest</a> that others should also be able to obtain rights to the intellectual product.
<br />Nicholas Bentleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06324477964586677091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5901370.post-1065596495699585062003-10-08T09:01:00.000+02:002003-10-08T20:39:22.210+02:00Often, when people think of Copyright, MP3, file sharing, intellectual property, or digital rights management they think of either pirating or ‘big media’ taking control. This need not be the case. The <a href="http://www.commonrights.com">Distributed Intellectual Property Rights</a> (DIPR) environment changes this situation by granting rights to the legal user: the right to own the intellectual product, the right to copy it, the right to back-it-up, the right to a new copy if all else fails, the right to use it when and where they want, even the right to lend it. All this providing they don’t abuse the rights of the author.
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<br />You don’t think it will work! Read about collective rights and the <a href="http://www.commonrights.com">DIPR</a> system and tell me what you think.
<br />Nicholas Bentleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06324477964586677091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5901370.post-1065378662472686712003-10-05T20:31:00.000+02:002003-10-05T20:31:02.170+02:00Announcing the start of the Distributed Intellectual Property Rights BlogNicholas Bentleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06324477964586677091noreply@blogger.com0