Copyright, continued

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.

What societal problems do copyright solve today?

Copyright as a set of policies addressed two major concerns:
1) It encouraged the authorship of work by providing authors an exclusive right to earn an income on their works.
2) It encouraged the distribution of work by protecting publishers' investments in dead tree printing.

Such policies successfully resolved the social problem of inadequate dissemination of knowledge through methods of knowledge distribution. The policies did not stipulate which knowledge would become popular and pervade the culture of the people, nor did it enable authors or publishers to tax the people for using published works in their culture. Hymns and ballads and poems and all manner of national or religious or popular literature were performed and adapted and remixed in public both before and after copyright protections without compensation to their authors, and everyone seemed amenable. Scientific and philosophical texts were likewise freely recited lecturers and students and whomever else, providing great incentives to earn an industrial and social currency. With the exclusive right to earn income by authoring and distributing works of good quality, authors, and the people all profited from the expanding commons of information.

Concern 1 was based on the assumption that for authors to earn income, they required exclusivity to the rights to duplicate their works.
Concern 2 was based on the assumption that distribution of works requires producing tangible representations of the information they contain.

Since neither of those assumptions holds for some modern works--anyone can write and publish a blog at no financial cost to themselves*--and social benefits can clearly obtain even without the protections offered by copyright, why do we continue to expand the scope of copyright protections to new forms of work? Certainly, there should be considerations of moral rights of authors relating to attribution and the artistic, scientific, and creative integrity of their works, however such rights should not and cannot be primarily defined in terms of distribution, finances, or methods to ensure scarcity.

The primary purpose of public policy should be the advancement of public good in some way. So what societal problems do copyright solve today?

If the goal of entertainment publishers is to influence popular culture, what is the purpose of litigating against those who subsidize the distribution of works of entertainment? Further, how do they derive a legal right to collect perpetual royalties from the ephemeral popularization of items they've injected into popular culture?

If the goal of software publishers is to enhance the public's well-being through their expression of mathematical algorithms, how do the publishers derive a right to to determine for the public which uses are allowable? ("Free" [libre] software licensing schemes do not escape this criticism. If the rewards to authors are claimed to be primarily social through recognition, reputation of the authors should have more protection than the integrity of derivative versions of the works.)

The social role of at least some modern creative works bear little resemblance to the roles of works originally envisioned to be protected by copyright. Policy around such modern creative works should also reflect that modernity.

*this is a deception that I will address in a separate consideration.

Order and chaos are not the only opposites.

Inspect your body as you would a building. Your life and the lives of loved ones depend equally on the quality of the building materials.

Seek not to own that which cannot be acquired in full.

The fume of eternity lasts but a moment.

[My apologies in advance if I unintentionally brick the universe.]