Friday, September 23, 2011

[fmfwahff] Copyright and the surveillance state

An author writes (say) an e-book, perhaps an effort that took years, and for the purposes of this argument, a book that is undeniably beneficial to society to have been written.

However, in a hypothetical world with weak copyright protection and easy duplication, the author can't make money selling the book, and this lack of incentive might cause the book to never be written in the first place, to the detriment of society.

If only there were a way to measure the book's effect on society, then the author could be compensated by public funding.  But there is!  Though it initially seems like a horrible idea: Big Brother watches who reads what book, and then watches the effect of the book on the actions of each person, and then the secondary effects on people interacting with the reader.  Somehow all this surveillance information gets boiled down to a dollar value which the author gets paid.  A horrible idea, but perhaps less horrible implementations are possible. 

For some subjects, the social effect might be obviously measurable in some way.  Public funding could be guaranteed in advance in proportion to the ultimately measured effect.  (The author might hedge risk through a publisher.)

If we could only weed out spam and sock puppets, for some books which are not considered shameful to read, we could try to count personal public announcements (e.g., Twitter) of having read the book, and its effect on the person.  Maybe polling.

The book might have a significant social effect because the reader is in a position of power, but those in positions of power should govern transparently; it's not so horrible to be watching over them closely, even monitoring what they read.

(I've written about other schemes to provide incentive despite weak copyright.)

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