notes-politics-ipInalienableRights

Idea: an inalienable right to:

to use, perform, copy, modify, publish, publicly distribute, or publicly offer and sell, any non-rivalrous good that they have created, or a non-exclusive license to do those things, without payment of royalty to others exceeding 2/3rds of the revenue or cost reduction, if any, gained thereof; provided that any distribution or sale is offered to the public on equal terms

Q: What are 'non-rivalrous goods'? A: A non-rivalrous good is one such that consumption by one consumer does not prevent simultaneous consumption by another; put another way, the marginal cost of production is zero (or in practice, not zero but relatively small). [paraphrasing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_%28economics%29]. Examples include copyrights and patents.

Q: What does 'without payment of royalty to others exceeding 2/3rds of the revenue gained thereof' mean? A: It means that eg if you write a book, you always have the right to allow others to read your book for free, but you can enter into a contract that says that if you sell the book, then you must give up to 2/3s of the revenue from the sale to another party. This is the closest thing to selling 'an exclusive' to your creation that these bylaws permit; a crucial difference between this system and the typical contemporary system (where you can sell all of your economic rights to a work) is that in this system, if some entity acquires rights to a work and then just sits on them, the work might not remain inaccessible to the public, because the original creator(s) are still free to give away or to sell it.

Q: Why 2/3rds? A: It shouldn't be 100%, because then you would have no way to defray any costs associated with the sale. So we have to choose a fraction, so how to choose? In such cases, i typically go for one of simplest fractions (1/2 or thirds or fourths or fifths). The simplest fraction is 1/2, but i felt that (given that we are allowing selling at all) you should be able to sign away the majority of your revenue to a publisher, so we proceed to the second-simplest denominator, 3, which gives us 2/3rds.

Q: Still, it sounds kind of fiddly. Is this a natural right? If so, how can something you just made up like that be a natural human right? A: My opinion is that the true human right is for ideas not to be property at all. The 2/3s thing is a compromise between what i believe the right should be (or, if you believe in natural rights, what i believe the right is), and contemporary practice. Another more radical middle ground would be to remove "that they have created", which would allow anyone to use any intellectual property, except that if they sell it, they might have to give up to 2/3s of the revenue as royalty.

Q: Why do you feel that (given that we are allowing selling at all) you should be able to sign away the majority of your revenue to a publisher? A: So that, assuming the publisher's marginal costs are low, it is possible for the publisher to make it worth your while to direct customers to their channel rather than buying directly from you, by promising you a greater share of the revenue than you are entitled to on direct sales; while at the same time the publisher makes more when customers buy form them rather than from you. For example, if you sell the maximal rights to a book to a publisher, then although you can still sell the book directly to customers without going thru the publisher, you only get to keep about 33.3% of the revenue from your sale. If that publisher promises you a 40% royalty from each sale they make, then both you and the publisher are making more when the customer buys from the publisher than when they buy directly from you, so your incentives are aligned. Contrast to a situation where you only owe the publisher 20% of your revenue from direct sales; now in order to allow you to make more when customers go thru the publisher than when they come to you directly, the publisher would have to give you more than 80% of the revenue from sales thru them; but in this case they make more money when people buy thru you, so your incentives cannot be aligned with the publisher.

Q: So what if i enter into such a contract with one publisher selling 2/3s of any revenue, and then enter into another such contract with a different publisher selling 1/3rd of any revenue? Haven't i sold 100% of any revenue from any sale? A: In this case, the second contract would be invalid. The right is inalienable; you cannot sell your last 1/3rd.

Q: Why "provided that any distribution or sale is offered to the public on equal terms"? A: This clause discouraged the creator from setting up a sham company that gives the work to another selected party for a cheap price, in order to evade the payment of royalty; it forces the creator to offer the work to all comers at the same price in order to take advantage of this right.

Q: What if a non-rivalrous good is jointly created? A: Then the creators collectively hold the rights described.