THE EPIC!
curioser: If you are awarded a patent for your invention, I don't imagine that should interfere at all with bringing it into any open-license venture. But I do not say this as a Lawyer(TM).
The reason (according to my understanding) is that you can formally deed the patent to the public domain (via some registering/public record keeping entitiy), or license the invention in some copyleft way, etc. e.g. grant to
everyone the right to use and license the technology for any purpose,
provided that anyone who exploits this license grants the exact same license to everyone else in turn. Therefore, anyone may implement or improve the invention in any way to create invention X, freely, and anyone else may in turn further the process to create invention Y, and so on.
Bytemaster: I wonder if there are good use cases for intellectual/media/art products having less friction in their development cycle than e.g. physical products? If so, I wonder if there couldn't be a scenario where e.g. an artist could get more "bang for their buck" (in the proposed setting) by e.g. having an "IPO" for a newly released work of art, then "cashing out" their own investment in the work if/when others "pick up" the work (or the work becomes popular) -- and then using that sale to further development of their own work? Because the thing about artwork (where it can interface so much with digital media) is the intangibility of it. People can assign whatever value they wish to it, totally separate from e.g. material questions in physical product/invention development. It seems to me that fact provides a potential vector for any art (released in the proposed scenario) to relatively quickly (or even phenomenally quickly) go up in value.
A sort of similar model is seen where folks who make very popular internet videos receive a cut of revenue from advertisements displayed in the same page as the video. It is simply because the video is popular that more page views are received, ergo more ads are displayed and the proprietors of those ads pay for the appearance of the same (and the owners of the page that display the video give the creators of the video a cut of that advertising money). (This is one way that YouTube works--and many people have made quite good money at this, where they've been so fortunate to produce "smash hit" videos.)
With your proposed alternative, where a prediction market pegs the value of e.g. an item of intellectual property (or "IP," be that a work of art or a description of an invention), the popularity element would be represented by whatever value the prediction market assigns to the IP.
Suppose releasing a music recording (a digital music file of a recording) in this model. What kind of factors would people weigh, in assigning that value in a prediction market? Well, possibly, for one, consideration of how much e.g. the song is circulating on the internet. Is the song incorporated into any music videos playing anywhere on the internet? If so, how many people are playing that video from so many pages every day? Or is the song freely distributed at any "vetting" web sites, where people go to download the latest freely-distributed awesome music? (However the heck anyone defines "awesome?") If so, how many times is that song being downloaded from so many free, public web sites? Or is the song being freely remixed or "covered" by so many artists? If so, how many artists, and how widely are those derivatives based on the work being distributed, and how much do people love them?
cob: I don't believe there can be any easy ways to track the value of a song in any
objective way. I think that the thing which makes a prediction market work is that it is absolutely transparent about the fact that it is based entirely on
subjectivity. Which, when it comes right down to it, I think is the honest way to go for
any invention/enterprise/work of art. To my thinking, the entire difficulty of ventures based on predicted return on investment, especially where media is concerned, is this silly idea of controlling how and where information is disbursed so that creators of it can get their "cut." The thing about e.g. a printed novel is that it's much easier to identify and control who created that paper brick and managed to sell it to people for far more than the paperweight value for the reason that people happen to find something very meaningful in all the abstract symbols printed on those pages (that's an overly elaborate way of saying that people like to read it). For that reason, it's relatively easy to discover how much people will pay for said paper brick, and also prevent anyone else who doesn't have copyright on its contents from selling the same thing.
But the thing about digital media is that it is ultimately impossible (or very nearly impossible) to control how or where it is copied. It is for that very reason that it becomes more difficult to identify how much people are willing to pay for that digital media--if you can even get anyone to pay for it at all. Supposing you succeeded in getting someone to pay for it--how the heck do you prevent them from doing the same, or simply copying it wherever they want to and however they want to? Hello World! Here's an awesome song I got! Take this copy of it! (ad infinitum). You could do some (BARF!) copy protection cryptography shenanigans with it (which would require somehow chaining it to something personally identifiable about the person you sold it to--say, their credit card number, and the CPU/ethernet card MAC address of the computer they downloaded it to--which is what iTunes does, by the way), but the more highly valued the song, the more likely it is that someone will circumvent the draconian information control/dispersal measures you try to impose on it. The only thing that it is usually relatively easy to establish about digital media is where _the_ first copy of it appeared, or who created the artwork. That is especially the case in this proposed solution--where it is registered in a distributed blockchain when it is released.
If, however, it is difficult or impossible to tell exactly how or where digital media is copied, depending on circumstances, it can be relatively easy to make some reasonable
guesses at how often that media is copied or used, if it becomes very popular at all. Hints about it will show up on the internet. And people who are really, really expert at monitoring the internet can make relatively well-educated guesses about how popular any given work of digital media is. This kind of information would be one factor weighed in an invention/artwork prediction market. Highly unpredictable human subjectivity would also come into play. If an artist tried to "pump" their latest artwork, and they found a network of fools/spammers who tried to make it appear as if the work of art had any aesthetic value for most people, where in fact most people think it's crap
then people who are expert at gauging aesthetic value would not fall for it (which, to some degree, means _everybody_--where "everybody is a critic"--or in other words, most people wouldn't fall for that trick).
Speaking which--my repeated description of this as an invention/artwork prediction market--I don't think that was in bytemaster's OP, but I believe that is a real potential. I think this model would work for any kind of idea, however they are formally embodied: whether they be ideas for inventions, or ideas expressed as works of art.
Moreover, cob: how on earth could this idea, or any form of it, work in any way that is _not_ statistical? Even the ideas for valuation/prediction methods I gave here which rely on folks "hunches" (ability to gauge aesthetic value) are also ultimately statistical: it's just that it turns into statistics of who likes which works of art, and how much, and which "gatekeepers" have good track records of accurately predicting who will like which works of art and how much.
Double moreover
where we are dealing with ideas of valuation, again, how could any practical implementation of value prediction models work without being statistical? Yo! Dealing with money! That means 1) Beans 2) People who count beans 3) People who are very expert at finding ways to count beans in ways you could never imagine (for which they endured years of grueling education to learn how to do), and yet those very imaginings drive the gross domestic product of, like, THE WORLD
Triple moreover please forgive me if I grill you.
MaxPWR: Your ideas give me food for thought. I wonder about the feasibility of "votes." I think MemoryCoin well demonstrated that votes as backing for real-world production/labor/value creation utterly stink. As much as our votes and non-votes for politicians and the politicians we didn't vote for but now wish we did vote for stink. I'm very skeptical about the idea that real-world value can be created merely with votes. There must be some kind of independent power that can run enterprising machinations entirely apart from votes. (And where politics is concerned, that power can and should be checked by citizens who call up their representatives and say "Hey! The fiscal policies that you are refusing to burn to hell kind of imploded the economy! Fix it now or you're fired!") That's a real quandary.
Maybe it could be solved with a meta-DAC that manages contracts and milestones? If agent A provably satisfies requirements of contract X, shareholders [A-Z] shall disburse to agent A funds Z. How in the heck do you manage that?
Which is all leading me to believe that some kind of model perhaps similar to Kickstarter, only using blockchain technology, might be an effective (or the only way?) to support an implementation of an inventions prediction market (where there is much more concern for creation of physical material goods).
Which further leads me to wonder if the scenarios I describe for a digital media prediction market are missing a lot of material reality--or, in other words, I wonder if digital media enterprising couldn't also benefit from some kind of Kickstarter-esque blockchain technology.
Good night. Or, more properly, good morning.
Topic: A Libertarian Alternative to Patents and Copyright (DAC) (Read 23916 times)
