Unlike prior eras when distribution of information implied and was limited by diffusion of items or warm bodies, the present pressing social needs relating to locating and organizing relevant diffused information. Four centuries of policy about copying rights have yielded an uncountable number of works bearing information, but very few systems through which to find and use it. The problem of socializing* the information, enabling us to know and consider it, not only remains unsolved, but is structurally prevented from being solved by our current concepts of copyright as relating only to authors, publishers, and consumers. A new role is indicated for someone to index authors' works, publishers' products, and consumers' information needs.
Public policy should therefore reassert its role to solve the social problem of knowledge distribution and use, by encouraging entrepreneurs to index and/or combine it in useful ways with other knowledge or people. As with copyright in its earlier incarnations, policy should not decide which method of socialization should become popular or succeed, but that anyone who wants to take a risk by investing in an socializing method should be able to try. Instead of attempting to shoe-horn 21st century problems into a 17th century paradigm, policy should recognise that the social value of knowledge production is not in exclusivity over the production or distribution of that information, but in its use.
To that end, socializers of information should be entitled to some protection to take earnings from the value they have added to knowledge and information (not "socialized information should be protected..." as with the current degraded model). A new (non-copyright) paradigm to gain social value from mobilizing big information would have the following characteristics.
1) Instead of barriers, there should be incentives to open or inter-link indexes of information. This is analogous to enabling lending libraries to assemble collections of items that provide additional value in aggregate.
2) Authors, publishers, and socializers of information should be incentivized to add context to published information, treating such meta-information not as works derivative of the works indexed, but as first-class original creative contributions.
3) The present monetary reward system for authoring and distributing information is based on traffic and referral, not on exclusive control over publication and derivative use. Protections for indexes should reward the most "open" socializing or indexing systems that would attract the largest number of hits, citations, referrals, or uses.
4) An index-right should recognize that information is not static. That is, the value added to knowledge by socializing it rests significantly in the socialized knowledge, and also in the methods and knowledge required to socialize it, and to supplement it with new knowledge and information as inevitably arises.
5) Elements of the current copyright system that generate social value through production of original knowledge information should be retained and enhanced, elements that inhibit generating social value should be phased out.
* in the sense interacting with others, not in the sense of collective ownership
Specific responses to prior offline comments:
- I agree that not all 'Free' software licensing schemes are equal. I provide no sympathy if your favourite scheme: protects the interests of the knowledge or its expression at the expense of broader social interests; relies on an artificial scarcity model; or claims to break the core of copyright but only tinkers at the edges. Reconsider why we have public policy in the first place.
- Copyright and index-right schemes would not be mutually exclusive. In fact, they add value to each other. The problem arises when one scheme is used with respect to activities of the other.
- I do not generally agree with tactics to constipate information flows "for the public good". Explicitly enabling anyone to flood the market with copyright-protected works has not co-occured with the publication and distribution of even a small fractino of copyright-protected works. Likewise, explicitly protecting the right of anyone to produce an index would not obviously flood the market with indexes or socializations.
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