Distributed Intellectual Property Rights is a system for identifying copyrights of intellectual properties in today’s electronic environments where intangible digital products can be copied and distributed at high speed with no perceptible loss of quality. Employing a distributed structure, Distributed Intellectual Property Rights is ideally suited to the Internet and could form the basis of sophisticated Copyright Management Systems (CMSs) of the future. It also protects the free distribution of information and guards the privacy of the creators and users of this information.

I will first discuss the shortcomings of today's distribution, tracking, and copyright systems, exemplified by the mass copying of music files in MP3 format, and then describe how a digital trading environment is created by establishing a system of ‘rights offices’ on the Internet. The advantages of this new system will be analysed in an empirical fashion and then submitted to a theoretical analysis using evolutionary theory of replicating units.

Finally I will discuss the issues involved in implementing such a wide ranging system, how it changes current thinking on copyright in a digital environment, and how this system can form the basis of Electronic Copyright Management Systems of the future.

This document covers the following topics:

Distributed Intellectual Property Rights 1

Background to electronic product exchange today 1

The philosophy of Distributed Intellectual Property Rights 3

Advantages of Distributed Intellectual Property Rights 7

Theoretical analysis of Distributed Intellectual Property Rights 8

Implementing Distributed Intellectual Property Rights 14

DIPR Business models 17

Conclusions from Distributed Intellectual Property Rights discussion 18

Glossary, Biography, and References 19

Background to electronic product exchange today

This is a moral issue as much as a technical problem:

The reason for the proliferation of downloaded MP3 music files is that it is easier to obtain music that way than to obtain a legal digital or physical copy and the process is so transparent that it gives little cause for reflection on ethical issues.

Many smaller software products (shareware) are distributed using the honour system where satisfied customers are expected to pay. Often a stripped down or older version of a piece of software will be distributed in the hope that the customer will later buy the full version.

Protection for individuals:

Most current efforts to record ‘rights of use’ of a digital product (to date mainly software) requires the purchaser to register with the producer or distributor of the product. Many people resist this procedure because they worry about giving away personal information which may then be misused. At the same time there is no automatic means for a user to demonstrate their right to use a product.

Attempts to limit copying of  products by adding hardware keys to playback machines or the distribution media can be indiscriminate and infringe the rights of individuals using legal information. Taxing storage medium also indiscriminately penalises individuals who are making copies of their own work or extra copies of products over which they have rights of use.

The problem is not limited to music files:

In the future all information that can be stored and transferred in a digital form will suffer from the problems listed above.

There are few standards for adding descriptions or product identifiers to musical products and only a few proprietary Electronic Copyright Management Systems ECMSs for registering rights to these products. Standards across the entire spectrum of digital products (music, software, text, video,…) are non-existent, although there are serious attempts to establish global identification and CMS's such as the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) initiative.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) calls for the development of an Electronic Copyright Management System (ECMS) but at the same time recognises the problems of privacy and getting the market to embrace such a system (WIPO - Digital Technology - Issues of enforcement - Para. 96)

Encrypting files is not the solution:

Once the key is made public to some users  there is little to stop an unauthorised  person from obtaining the key, decrypting the file, and then distributing the information in an unencrypted format. (Encryption works its best when you want no one to see the information and the key is kept secret.)

The philosophy of Distributed Intellectual Property Rights

The objectives of the Distributed Intellectual Property Rights system are listed below:

• Recognise that it takes work to formulate and present a new idea or intellectual product and that the creator of that product has rights over their creation: the right to have it identified as their work, the right to trade in it with others.

• Help users to identify the product and its creator and the user’s obligation to reward the creator for using the product.

• Protect the free flow of information.

• Use technology to make the legal route for obtaining the product easier than the illegal route!

• Protect the rights and privacy of all parties: creators, artists, producers, distributors, and users.

• Allow the new system to evolve from the today’s practices and standards in such a way that it can accommodate all current digital products as well as new formats. If possible the new system should include existing product identification systems and enhance or extend current Electronic Copyright Management Systems.

• Use the open standards and interconnectivity of cyberspace to maximum advantage.

When a user purchases rights to use an intellectual work that is distributed in physical form, such as a book or record, a contract is made between the rights owner and the user. The exchange of this physical product for a recompense completes the contract. Normally, one of the terms of this contract is that the user has personal use of that one physical copy only and may not reproduce it in any form. In an ideal world the creator should benefit in some way if the physical product is sold on or lent to another but this is not the case under the 'first sale' rule in copyright law.

A digital product distributed in electronic form has no permanent physical package and therefore the physical exchange described above is impossible. Trying to bind the user to only one digital copy is futile and even meaningless as this product moves around a computer system from permanent storage to active memory, to cached memory, to display memory, and to various backup storage systems. As products get moved across the Internet the situation becomes even less controllable

The solution

Form the contract between creator/owner and user by the exchange of unique identifications and make these identifications part of the digital product. After this exchange has been completed, allow unlimited copies in the name of this user, providing that the identifications and the product remain unmodified and intact.

The DIPR system:

Give all digital products a Property Rights Descriptor (PRD) and add a system of 'administrative offices' to the Internet structure whose function is to record licensed use of these products.

The following diagram outlines the distribution of digital products over the Internet today:

The desired distribution pattern is that digital products move directly from the product owner or via their distributor to the users while payments flow back to reward the creator. The secondary distribution of products between users and the flow of personal user information back to the product owners is less desirable.

This next diagram shows product distribution in the Distributed Intellectual Property Rights environment with its system of administrative offices:

The fundamental structure of this new system is that there will be two types of administrative office, the rights office and the licence office, and there can be any number of each type of office. This office structure helps limit the amount of personal information which flows back to the product owners and ensures that most of the products will be identified with a Property Rights Descriptor (PRD) as I will explain later.

Rights Office:

The rights office would act for the artist, creator, or legal owner of the product rights. It would contain details about the product and the owner and a copy of the product. The recorded details should be sufficient to uniquely identify the product and the owner and, possibly, subject to relevant international treaties, could be the official rights record. It is possible that a unique Product Identification code could also be used or applied but this is not essential for effective operation of the DIPR system.

The second function of the rights office is to accept licence requests and permanently record licence office identification and the licence office local identifier against this product.

A third function would be to confirm the valid licence from then on - when, for whatever reason, the legal owner of the licence needs to confirm ownership. A valid licence would consist of a complete matching PRD and a signature check of the intellectual product itself.

In this way the rights office would hold no details of the license holder but only a reference to unique licence identification.

The rights office functions could be performed as part of a more extensive Electronic Copyright Management System (ECMS) that would handle all additional licensing requests.

Licence Office:

The licence office acts solely for the user of the product. It records details of the users registered with it and allocates a unique licence identification when a user obtains the rights to use a product. It will send this licence code to the rights office at this time and, in exchange, will receive and store the associated rights office identification. It might also receive the product identification, if one exists, and might eventually provide a complete rights database for the user and therefore would also receive further rights information.

As with the rights office it would confirm this registration upon request so that the user can establish ownership.

As far as I know there is no equivalent of an ECMS that acts uniquely for the user as in this licence office structure. This could promote a whole new development of user rights management systems which record supplementary rights purchased by users in addition to the basic rights obtained in the Distributed Intellectual Property Rights environment.

Issuing a licence:

The unique identifications for the Rights and Licences offices would be in the from of a Persistent Uniform Resource Identifier and the Handle System appears to be the ideal global structure for them.

A rights protocol, to be defined and implemented, will allow the administrative offices to exchange the rights identification and licence identification which will complete the transfer and logging of user’s copying rights. Both offices would keep a transaction record including the date and time of the exchange which would provide an audit trail. The user will receive the product with a Property Rights Descriptor (PRD) field which contains both the rights and licence identifications.

The rights granted when the PRD is issued will allow unlimited copying of the product throughout the Internet and on the licensed user’s computer systems. As just copying the file serves no great purpose I foresee that issuing the PRD identified product to a user will also include the granting of basic personal use rights to that product for the licensed user. For example, when users receive a MP3 music file with a PRD licensed to them they will be allowed to play that music as if they were playing a CD or record they had purchased.

There will be numerous rights and licence offices. Creators and distributors will be able to choose which rights office will protect their products or even set up their own rights offices. Users, likewise, can choose a licence office to record the transfer of product usage licence.

The duplication of the basic licensing and product information in the rights and licence offices will provide redundancy in the case of one of the offices' databases being lost. The lost database would become truly virtual but, in theory, could be recreated over time.

This description concerns only the basic copyright licence transfer in the DIPR system and takes no account of the distribution of the product itself and the transfer of payments. It is feasible that one organisation could deal with many aspects of the transfer - say, promotion and sale of the product, distribution, Rights Office functions and additional licensing through an ECMS.

Structure of the Property Rights Descriptor (PRD)

The Property Rights Descriptor (PRD) is the unique identification which is attached to every product issued in the DIPR system. It consists of, at a minimum, two unique persistent identifiers; One issued by the Rights Office and the other by the License Office. It would have the following form:

<PRD>::= <Rights ID> “,” <License ID>

where              <Rights ID>::= <Rights Office ID> “/”  <Rights Office local identifier>

and                  <License ID>::= <license Office ID> “/”  <License Office local identifier>

(If the two identifiers were to be part of the Handle System then the ‘Office ID’s’ would be the naming authorities or prefixes and the local identifiers would be the item identifiers or suffixes.)

The issuing of the PRD creates a virtual product and grants a legal owner certain rights over that product. A virtual product is an agreement between two parties on the use of an intellectual product and any manifestation of that virtual product will consist of the PRD and the actual product. Not a single manifestation of a particular virtual product need exist but it will still belong to and be available to the identified owner.

Advantages of Distributed Intellectual Property Rights

Under the Distributed Intellectual Property Rights system each manifestation of a product is fully identified both up the chain of creativity to the original artist and down the chain to the final individual user of the product.

Note the improvement over most other Copyright Management Systems (CMS’s) and product identification systems; here personal and private information is protected for all users because all parties have their own distributed independent registration databases.

• Artists have rights registered.
• Users have registered rights that grant minimum copying rights and basic use of digital products and a route to restore lost products.
• Producers and distributors can also register their rights to use/distribute products and have an improved commercial structure in cyberspace that will offer new business opportunities (Pay as you use systems, advertising and promotion).

At one level the two 'offices', rights and licence, create a virtual market place that mirror's a traditional market where there is a seller and a buyer trading goods. This idea is analysed and extended in the section below: Theoretical approach to Distributed Intellectual Property Rights.

As its name implies, Distributed Intellectual Property Rights is a distributed system, not a hierarchy, and this closely follows the distributed structure of the Internet. Using peer-to-peer protocols, Distributed Intellectual Property Rights should be an open system and the protocols, even the software, should be freely available. DIPR will be one, non proprietary, system for all digital information; music, texts, books, images, movies, streamed information, ….. Users and producers adhere to one set of protocols just as all the users of the Internet benefit from common transmission protocols.

The Distributed Intellectual Property Rights system will improved confidence for all parties in the use of the Internet for electronic commerce of all kinds and therefore increase use of the Internet for distributing products.

Theoretical analysis of Distributed Intellectual Property Rights

In this section I analyse the proposed Distributed Intellectual Property Rights system from an evolutionary point of view and consider all items of information and products as replicators or memes. I look at each individual piece of information as a replicator who's sole aim is to reproduce or be copied and its adaptation to its environment is the only thing which affects its success.

I will also propose that we consider the whole environment of human interaction throughout cyberspace and analyse this interaction in terms of an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS).

Finally I consider how this new environment can influence different digital replicators and how the combination of the two could interact for the benefit of all.

Digital replicators

In general I define replicators as information, ideas, or an item of intellectual property that can be copied or can be considered to reproduce. Digital replicators are the same ideas or information but produced in a digital form that can be distributed over the Internet or some other medium. I only make the distinction because this paper discusses issues centred on the digital manifestation of replicators. Examples are well known: CDs DVDs, MP3 files, text files, software.

Digital environment

Although centred on the Internet I extend the idea of the digital environment to include digital products however they are distributed, this includes such items as CDs and DVDs. Human information producers and users are also considered to be part of this extended environment

Simple analysis of  some digital replicators

Richard Dawkins has established three properties that can be used to define a replicator: Fecundity, Copying/Reproduction-Fidelity, and Longevity. A replicator that is successful in all three of these areas will be a very successful replicator and will spread far and wide. Conversely, a replicator that has weak properties will be a poor replicator.

For this analysis I use these three properties as coefficients in an equation that predicts a replicators success at reproducing and therefore its success at spreading  throughout the environment.

            Replicator success quotient = Fecundity * Fidelity * Longevity

Each coefficient is given a value of zero to one based on the replicators performance in that area and the result will predict the replicators success. (Zero will mean total failure through to one predicting great success).

For example a replicator that always copies itself with so many errors that it is unrecognisable will have a fidelity score near zero and will not get far as a replicator. Equally, a replicator locked in a file with an unknown key will have near zero fecundity and will not spread.

For the Digital replicators mentioned above and a few others for comparison I have estimated values for the three coefficients and produced the table below.

The coefficient values are somewhat arbitrary but I believe give a good and interesting indication of the predicted success, as a replicator, of each of the media.

Considering the vinyl record (replicator value 0.14): Its fecundity is rated at 0.5 because of the specialised equipment required to produce a record. Its fidelity is rated good at 0.7 when you consider the music quality when a new record is played on a high fidelity system but its longevity is rated poorly at 0.4 because vinyl records can wear quickly and can easily be irreparably damaged.

Looking at the coefficients for the raw MP3 file: Its fecundity on the Internet is very high at 0.95 because of its relatively small compressed size and the ease of its practically free distribution. Being digital, its copying fidelity is good (0.9) and its small digital size makes long term storage feasible once it has been copied (0.8). This gives it an overall replicator value of 0.684.

Now look at the coefficients of the new MP3 file with PRD field supported by the distributed rights environment: Its fecundity value (0.7) drops in comparison with the raw MP3 file (0.95) because of higher distribution costs in the rights environment (note that I estimate these costs are still less than obtaining a physical CD (0.45)). Its fidelity is improved (0.95) because many copies are made from a master file and its longevity is ensured (0.95) because any lost files can be replaced from the master through the licence system.

A file that degrades or is inhibited after it has been copied once such as in the SDMI environment will have a much reduced fecundity (0.5) and therefore is a less successful replicator than some of the other formats. (This is obviously the aim of the SDMI and shows that it will reduce the number of file copies but I will argue later that this is not the desired result.)

The following table goes on to expand this analysis over a slightly wider field.

* Assuming sufficient bandwidth is available in the future.

Conclusions from replicator analysis

First off, if you look at the comparison of vinyl records (0.14), cassette tapes (0.189), and CD's (0.385) it shows why CD's have become successful and vinyl records almost obsolete despite the higher costs involved in producing CD's (more complicated technology and new equipment required). Following that it shows why the current rage in MP3 file (0.684) swapping is more successful. It also emphasises the advantage digital replicators have over the analogue equivalents and so demonstrates why the digital environment is going to be 'the future'.

The first table shows that the new MP3 file format with PRD fields added and supported by rights and licence offices has a similar replicator value to raw MP3 files. You might wonder what is the benefit of introducing the new complicated DRP system. The significant point is that at least 50% of music in the MP3 format would 'prefer' to take the new system route, where the product and owner of the product will be identified. The second point, I would argue, is that as the new system becomes established its fecundity will improve (costs come down) and so will overtake raw MP3 files as the preferred route. In the same way, any environmental pressure that promotes MP3+PRD reproduction over raw MP3 files, either moral, legal or technical, would further swing the balance in favour of new MP3's plus PRD's.

Regarding the second table: Assuming portable reader technology improves, E-books (digital text) will become very successful replicators and more so if producers were protected in the new digital rights system. Digital video on demand has the same promising future and, again, I would argue that if the rights system were in place the identified version would far out perform the raw version partly because the costs of local long term storage will be that much greater.

In the table below I introduce a further coefficient, the desirability coefficient, that includes a cost factor to obtaining the product. I consider the product to be a music file distributed in three formats, CD, SDMI protected product, and MP3+PRD, and for each format I compare its distribution against a 'free' MP3 file containing the same music. The desirability coefficient of 0.1 is arrived at by assuming 10% of the population who liked that particular piece of music would pay a reasonable cost to be able own and play the file and always have a perfect copy available should they loose their copy.

Note the predicted increase of sales of the PRD protected product over the other formats under the same market conditions. Assuming the costs of the electronic MP3+PRD product are less than any physically distributed intellectual products, such as CD's, then the purchase cost could be reduced and you could expect even more sales in the same market. Also, under the Distributed Intellectual Property Rights system, most of the MP3 files shown in the last line of the table would in fact include a PRD and so a least the product would be identified and the creator known even if it was not a purchased product.

If you were to perform this analysis on other products which contain information which might be updated regularly or software which is revised or improved regularly the desirability coefficient could be much higher and the PRD identified product would proportionally gain more of an advantage over a non-identified product.

Extended phenotypes at work

As I stated earlier, the two fundamental components of the Distributed Rights System proposed here are the Rights Office and the Licence Office. These offices reside on the Internet and work in close collaboration with human internauughts; creators with the rights office and users with the licence office. This close collaboration of the human mind, via the body, with the technological environment has been described by Andy Clark as 'the cognitive equivalent of Dawkins' vision of the extended phenotype'. A phenotype is the bodily manifestation of a genes programming. An extended phenotype is an extension of the genes influence to things outside the physical body.

Hence, a portion of the Internet environment truly becomes an extension of the human operators mind and therefore the brain/technology symbioses allows the Internet to be analysed as an evolutionary system containing many intelligent  individual organisms trading units of information such as the intellectual products described above. The Offices act as unique agents for human users and these agents are always available to act for their hosts. In this way human society is truly extended onto the Internet.

An Evolutionarily Stable Strategy

Dawkins also describes an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS), a theory developed by Robert Trivers, involving suckers, grudgers, and cheats and describes how these societies evolve into stable states. Suckers are defined as being too trusting and will continuously give away their services regardless of how often they are cheated. Cheats will always cheat others given the chance. Grudgers will retaliate if they are cheated but will quickly forgive and make their services available again.

Dawkins then describes how some organisms thrive and others become extinct. A population of grudgers or a population of cheats are the two attractors of a dynamic differential system such as this and he goes on to state that a population that stabilises at the cheat equilibrium is more likely to go extinct. Grudgers are basically nice guys who play by the rules but will react if someone takes advantage and they are more likely to become the stable population. There is selection between ESS's in favour of reciprocal altruism. The prerequisite of this society is that grudgers can recognise and remember other individuals and therefore hold a grudge, or not, when necessary.

Therefore, to extend society's moral codes, particularly reciprocal altruism, onto the Internet and into the digital age each individual has a fundamental need for a permanent presence (or agent) to act on their behalf and be able to recognise other agents. Hence the need for each individual to have an 'office' in cyberspace representing their interests. In fact I have proposed two types of office, one for the provider (rights office) and the other for the user (licence office), in stead of one generic type which could handle transactions in both directions. The reason for the two types of office is two fold; first it seems a natural distinction (provider and user) and second, it greatly simplifies the structure of each office and the type of transaction it handles.

I would like to believe that the society in which we live today is truly altruistic and could be modelled as simply as I have done above but even if this is not the case I believe this model does point to the direction which has to be taken: Both suppliers and consumers have to be represented and each product has to contain a record of the transaction between the two parties. 

Virtual ESS – Digital Stability

The ESS described above defines the physical donation of services where there is one recipient; once the service is donated that is the end of it except for the memory of it and the obligation on the recipient to repay. In the case where the service is traded immediately for money, goods, or services, the obligation is immediately repaid.

The donation of an item of information is more complicated! The initial trade between two parties can form part of the ESS described above and the offices I have proposed for digital information can directly aid an honest exchange. The complication is that the information is not dissipated on exchange, as a physical service is ‘used-up’, but is available to be passed on any number of times and the initial creator, who put the work into it, might well not know of future dissemination. The digital exchange of information exasperates this situation. As we saw in the section on replication this information 'wants' to reproduce and spread and does so more easily in digital from.

In the table below I analyse the different conditions under which the information or a digital product could be transferred and the levels of interaction between the creator and the user or recipient:

If the creator is always asked for permission and knows who the product is going to there is no problem, the rules for reciprocal altruism can be applied. The worst case is if there is a transfer of a product without the creator knowing it and the recipient does not know who created it either, under these conditions no exchange payment can never be made.

An intermediate case is where the creator has no knowledge of the transfer but the recipient knows who the creator is. In this case there is always the chance that some will play the game and pay up. The existence of the PRD, attached to the digital product, allows for this possibility and would always allow a recipient to register their own legal copy. Remember, as I have shown earlier, the information with the PRD is just as likely to spread as the information without the PRD. There is no penalty imposed on the PRD identified product.

I should emphasise this point: No environmental pressure should be applied which would inhibit the copying of a product with a valid PRD! Even if there are a billion people using the PRD product without purchasing the rights to it, this is still a better situation than an equal number of people using a non-identified product without usage rights. In addition to this, the widespread distribution of the product is of benefit to society as a whole and at a minimum probably good for the creators reputation.

An interesting situation arises if each legal recipient were to become a part owner of the information and receives a part payment if they passed it on to another known recipient. In this way reciprocal trade conditions can be spread much further through the population. This idea is described further in the referral process in the Business Model's section.

This analysis also highlights the advantages of providing information as a service instead of a product. When the information is part of a service it maintains the one to one trading relationship between two organisms which is so important. In this case the DIPR model provides the environment and structure which records the transfer of rights within the service.

This finally brings me to the end of my argument, albeit in very general terms, which demonstrates the need for this complicated system of both Rights Offices and Licence Offices in the Distributed Intellectual Property Rights system. It is the fundamental need for organisms who extend their society onto the Internet to be able to recognise each other, to have their own individual presence, and know who is playing the game or not. (This need to recognise one-another could point to the advantage of each individual having a unique, secure and persistent identification but that is another project).

Implementing Distributed Intellectual Property Rights

The Distributed Intellectual Property Rights environment described here is a sophisticated content identification system which also grants minimum copying rights to digital objects within the system. As I have demonstrated above, granting of these copy rights will, overall, benefit the creator by providing more sales and a wider distribution of identified content. At the same time it eliminates all the problems of trying to define a digital manifestation of a product and the almost impossible task of tracking objects as they flow through the digital environment leaving footprint copies as they go. It also avoids some of the proposed, technically expensive and complex, 'big brother' systems where the rights holder continuously controls and authorises file copying no mater where the user is located.

Current Copyright gives exclusive rights to the creator to use or authorize others to use their works. This includes rights to prohibit or authorize copying, broadcasting, performances, translations, and adaptations. The Distributed Intellectual Property Rights system does not change this area of copyright law. When the creator releases their work into the DIPR environment they authorize the unrestricted copying of that identified digital product on behalf of that identified user. Note that the PRD becomes part of the product and the ‘PRD plus product’ becomes a new unique manifestation of the product.  As just copying digital products for their own sake, with no other rights granted, serves no practical purpose I propose that issuing the PRD identified product might also grant the licensee some basic rights to personal use of the product, such as; read the e-book, listen to the music, watch the film, read the play (but not perform it in public), follow the instructions to make something for their own use (not for profit), or use the software on a non-commercial basis. In this situation the following conditions might apply:

Unrestricted copying, distribution, and individual use of the product while it remains in the Distributed Intellectual Property Rights environment but that is all. The following are some of the limitations that apply:

• Modifying the intellectual product or its PRD is not allowed in any way.
•   The product is not allowed to be separated from the PRD.
•  The product, which includes the PRD, can not be traded in any form. This, I believe, would be a departure from current copyright law where copyrighted work can be sold-on or lent. This 'first-sell' article was enacted to promote the dissemination of information. In this digital age there are not the same problems of distributing information as there were 200 years ago.
• The content, including PRD, is not allowed to be broadcast or used for any commercial purpose.
•   The digital product can be converted form one digital medium to another providing both mediums support the PRD structure and the intellectual content and its PRD are not modified in the process.

(Obviously the creator/rights owner can authorize any of the above or other activities but these would be negotiated separately to the rights granted in the DIPR environment. This is where ECMS’s  would come into their own and provide efficient, automated, access to a full range of rights.)

Legal treaties should be updated with new norms to protect artists, distributors, and users who use the new system and implement penalties for the removal of or tampering with PRD fields. Note, again, the change in legal priorities when it concerns digital products under the DIPR’s system:

• It should not be illegal for an individual to copy the product but it should be illegal to modify the product or the Property Rights Descriptor without the creators permission. (Article 12 of the WCT already covers the removal or altering of electronic rights management information).
• It should also be illegal to sell a product, or charge for any services related to that product, unless you are the creator, their agent, or legal rights owner.

Also the 'rights' and 'licence offices' would need some legal protection against fraudulent use or attack:

• Rights Offices would have a legal responsibility to register only products which have a legal owner and record only the valid licence ID's they are given during a transaction.

• Licence Offices would be required to only licence products to their own registered users and record only the valid product and rights information which is given to them during a rights transaction. Licence Offices would not subsequently be allowed to change the owner of individual products.

• Both offices would be required to hold personal and commercial information in confidence.

Security – avoid cheats cheating other users. Security of PRD fields:

•   Removal of PRD from product – This would result in an illegal product if it was previously part of DIPR system but, of course, there will then still be the problem of identifying the product with no product ID. I believe there are already organisations working in this area so there may be ways of tackling this in the future. As it becomes the norm to always have a PRD combined with a product it will become easier to track illegally modified products. A prerequisite for this situation is that creators giving away free copies of a product should be encouraged to use the DIPR system and, in fact, an established DIPR system would provide incentives for registering a product, even a free one.
• Change of part of PRD – Either of the main fields of the PRD could have been removed, modified or corrupted. It would be easily established as a corrupted or illegal product by checking with the Rights or Licence offices and there would be the possibility of finding a legal version from the remaining PRD.

There is a well established legal tradition of  protecting patented and copyrighted materials throughout the world and WIPO has been rapidly extending these rights to cover digital information in various forms through new international treaties. It would make sense that WIPO should establish a negotiated set of treaties for a Distributed Intellectual Property Rights system with all its new priorities.

The PRD identifiers, especially the Rights Office identifier, would also play an important role in directing the public to product metadata and the source of additional rights and, again, this is where the link to a sophisticated Copyright Management Systems ( CMS ) will be so important.

No transfer of owners of DIPR licensed products will be allowed. If the rights owner agrees to a change of ownership of a product a new PRD should be issued in the name of the new user. If a user wishes to change the 'Office' which holds their list of licensed products the new Licence Office is bound to register the same owner and owner details.

There are built in incentives to use the DIPR system over unidentified digital files which include; reduced number of viruses transmitted with legally obtained versions, and a route to obtain replacement or updated versions of the product. There is also scope to add environmental pressure which will make legal products with PRD's more successful and therefore more attractive. Some systems for producing this change is discussed in the following section on Business Models.

Normally there is a time limit placed on intellectual property rights but I believe the PRD identification should stay with the product indefinitely, either as the original existing PRD, or maybe a better solution would be to have a Rights Office available to issue free PRD's to products with lapsed copy right status.

The products or information in the Distributed Intellectual Property Rights system has no need of encryption (encryption would even be counter productive) but any transfer of quantitive or descriptive data between two parties should defiantly be protected. Data which represents money, an identifying signature, exchange of ID’s for issuing a PRD, consumption of a physical resource, etc, should be protected against errors or fraud. I see the development of secure digital payment systems to be essential for the expansion of the distribution of digital products and these systems should allow for small payments which are not handicapped by a fixed minimum transaction charge or proportionally large commission charge. The potential for owners/creators to earn many small payments (micropayments) for many products is part of the principle behind the distributed trading environment.

The necessity to establish a large set of new protocols will require a major effort but these are no more complicated than any of those already in place on the Internet today and certainly no more complicated than some of the secure digital environments being proposed today. The following development, testing, and implementation of software programs to make the system work will also require considerable effort but the same effort, or more, will be required for any Electronic Copyright Management System (ECMS) and the DIPR system would form the basis for all the more extensive CMS's.

A large public awareness campaign will be required to establish in people's minds the legal and social rights of artists to be paid for their creativity and work.

There are many other technical issues which would also have to be considered in order to implement this system. These include; increased storage and processing for all the new product licences, an increased number of reliable servers with the capacity to store large quantities of rights information, and the eventuality of updating all file structures to include PRD fields.

DIPR Business models

Following the principles established above in the Theoretical Approach, any business model working in the Distributed Intellectual Property Rights (DIPR) environment should look at ways that maximise the distribution of PRD identified products while promoting the one-to-one exchange between producer and user. Any digital product should be looked upon as a replicating unit in the DIPR environment. Any strategy that attempts to artificially protect a digital product or limit its distribution, is bound to fail.

Sharing of  informational material has always happened and always will. One of the advantages of the DIPR's system is that it could enable new revenue models which encourage sharing and paying at the same time. One way this can work is through a recommendation or referral process where one user could recommend a product to another by sending their copy of the Property Rights Descriptor. When the second user purchases the product the first user, who can be identified by the licence office identification in the original PRD, will receive a partial rebate against their initial purchase.

Discounts on follow-up products: Under this scheme a second product purchased by the original licence holder would be offered at a discount. This promotes the one-to-one exchange which benefits the provider and in this case provides an exchange benefit to the user.

Providing services which enhance or support a product will be another major component in the digital age and this again helps to maintain the close relationship between the creator and the user. Examples might be:

• Provide free storage and fast access for legal PRD products.
• Continuously upgrading or improving the product.
• Responding to individual requests for additional information or new variations.
• Subscription library service.

Rapid implementation of Electronic Copyright Management Systems to provide all the additional licensing requirements. Ideally ECMS's should run in parallel with the DIPR system and should all adopt a common set of standards and protocols but in any event the DIPR system would identify the ECMS just as readily as it identifies the creator or other product metadata.

The establishment and running of the new Rights Offices will also provide new business opportunities and the need for more Internet servers and databases. Some of the new opportunities might be:

• Selling licence services. Professional secure services will be worth a premium.
• Running free licence services paid for by advertising or product distribution.

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.

Glossary, Biography, and References

Basic use – Basic rights

I am not sure if there is a legal term for this type of use or a definition in copyright law but what I see as ‘basic use’ is the personal use and only the personal use of a product by someone who has purchased a legal copy. E.g. read an electronic book, show the film, or play the music. It does not include any rights to use the product commercially or in public or to reuse or resell the product. Any additional rights would have to be negotiated separately.

Clark Andy.

Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science

Natural Born Cyborgs? by Andy Clark

CMS

Copyright Management System (See: Electronic Copyright Management System ECMS)

Dawkins Richard

The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press 1976, ISBN 0-19-286092-5.

• Memes – Page 192.
• ESS and reciprocal altruism – Page 183.

DOI

Digital Object Identifier developed by the International DOI Foundation. The DIO is an opaque string which provides a persistent identifier of intellectual property enterties.

Digital Product

A digital manifestation of an intellectual creation. (See also: Product)

DIPR

Distributed Intellectual Property Rights – A system for identifying copy rights in complex electronic environments.

Easier

Quicker, cheaper, no forms, no shops, the thing to do, instant gratification…..

ECMS

Electronic Copyright Management System. See WIPO document Electronic Rights Management and Digital Identifier Systems (acmc1_1.doc) for an overview of ECMS.

Handle System

The Handle System technology, developed by the CNRI, provides a global name service for digital objects. For full details see http://www.handle.net/

Memes

• See: Richard Dawkins for original definition.
• See also: Meme Central
• In this discussion I relate Memes to a creative piece of work or intellectual property. Any one meme could have many different manifestations and there can be multiple copies of any particular manifestation especially when we are considering digital manifestations.

Micropayments

For more information on micropayments see w3.org/ECommerce. For an interesting discussion on micropayment systems see an article by Brad Templeton entitled 'Microrefunds and the "Don't Pay" button'.

Minimum copying rights

For a digital object to exist in en electronic environment it needs, at least, one electronic image of itself and probably many images to be a viable entity. A digital object under the DIPR system is given ‘minimum copying rights’ which allow it to be copied as many times as is necessary to make it available the legal user.

Physical Product

A physical item incorporating a manifestation of an intellectual creation. Note that a CD or DVD is an example of a physical product but they also contain a digital product and can be treated as a digital product in the DIPR system.

Product

A manifestation of an intellectual creation which in many cases will be a work in the literary or artistic domain which is protected by copyright.

Property Rights Descriptor (PRD)

A structured collection of identifying information add to any digital product. This information would include, at a minimum, Rights and Licence Office identifiers. The PRD field could be extended to include product identification, a product description, and any other useful information. The collected ID fields would provide a unique identification for an item of digital information which would allow the creator to be identified if they wish and the user of the information to demonstrate their rights to use it.

See Structure of the Property Rights Descriptors for more detailed information and proposed structures of the identification fields.

SDMI

Secure Digital Music Initiative

Signature Check

A random sample, or samples, of the original product compared with the copy being checked. The samples should be sufficiently large to confirm that the two copies are statistically likely to be the same product without comparing the whole product.

User

Any person or organisation which is benefiting from a product. (e.g. listening to music, gaining information or pleasure from a text, having a software product work for them,…)

WCT

WIPO Copyright Treaty.

WIPO

World Intellectual Property Organization