Conclusions from Distributed Intellectual Property Rights discussion

The Distributed Intellectual Property Rights (DIPR) system offers a model for handling intellectual property in a digital environment. Through the introduction of Rights and Licence offices and the definition of the Property Rights Descriptor (PRD) field, which then becomes part of a digital product, it creates a virtual environment which allows people to exchange intellectual products.

For many this proposal will be counter intuitive as it challenges some of the traditional principles for protecting intellectual property and turns on their head many of the efforts to limit the distribution of information and creative products. The digital products of the future should be packaged with information which identifies the source of the creativity not with ciphers which try to bottle-up the flow.

Digital objects are so easily copied in the digital environment (in fact in many active computer or network systems the product is being continuously copied from one electronic storage device or memory to the next) that any object released into the digital environment has to be given minimum copying rights. This does not mean that the structure or content of this digital manifestation is allowed to be changed or its identifiers modified.

While allowing the free flow of information and the ability to trace the creator the Distributed Intellectual Property Rights system, with its dual independent ‘office’ structure, limits the amount of personal  information which needs to be divulged by any of the users of the system.

The inclusion of the Property Rights Descriptor fields with these digital products will be an additional overhead and the Rights Office structure an added complexity to the Internet environment but it is these enhancements which will protect the value of intellectual property in the future. The value rests in the creativity of the artist not in a single copy of a digital file.

In the past the “idea work” could be associated with a physical product, which could be more or less regulated, and a tariff was added to cover the creative content. In today’s Internet age the reproduction costs of digital products are almost insignificant. Add to this a huge reduction in reproduction times and it becomes almost impossible to police the buying and selling of digital products under the old model. The Distributed Intellectual Property Rights system shifts the onus on society back to rewarding creative work directly rather than via the intermediate production process.