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 improved 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 every user having a unique, secure, and persistent identification but that is another project).