Thursday, June 7, 2012

AdaptiveRight and CopyRight

commentary by Roger Erickson


"It takes a village of idiots to keep itself from growing a child."

What good are, for example, the Library of Congress collected papers .... if they're not virtually accessible - in real time, simultaneously - to all of our 312million and growing population? How well is that collection leveraged, if the information is not distributed, by de-centralizing the access restrictions?

example: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/mss/eadxmlmss/eadpdfmss/2008/ms008009.pdf

At this time, access for an American to what Americans know, is governed primarily by access fees, under the guise of a very clumsy and constraining set of rules known as copyright.

CopyRight essentially enshrines an individuals rights to receive pay from a community in return for service to that community.

Copyright is meaningless if not checked and balanced by what I'll call "AdaptiveRight."

AdaptiveRight enshrines an aggregate's rights to distribute & leverage services provided by the members it spawns

Together, CopyRight and AdaptiveRight list the inseparable, 2-stage optimization process that defines a social species. Namely, protect the components AND grow the aggregate's capabilities.

In a social species, individual and aggregate rights are meaningless without the other. They are inseparable.

Thus, in every aggregate:

"success tracks the quality [& tempo] of distributed decision-making," and

"we generate tempo by decentralizing decision-making".

Nevertheless, that simple truth - teamwork - is, rather shockingly, poorly reflected in our basic approach to economic development, and is largely restricted to specific, ceremonial applications such as sports, theater and music.

For example, CopyRight is prominently featured twice on the main page of the US Library of Congress

Copyright Office
Copyright Royalty Board

In contrast, I can find no mention whatsoever of AdaptiveRight, or any similar language indicating rights to adaptive, Open Source public access, except via in-person viewing of physical materials.

This is illogical, and mal-adaptive.

Can our aggregate guarantee the welfare of all individuals in our nation? Clearly, we can easily do that.

Can we we continue subtly tuning our existing data-sharing rules so that they do not remain rate-limiting for our own, aggregate output and national adaptive rate? Clearly, we can easily do that too.

Can we do that fast enough to reduce our net Output Gap, which is growing faster than we can imagine? We could easily do that too. However, at least so far, we aren't choosing to do that.

WILL we do ever that? Can we generate the will to do that? Not unless we share our growing data fast enough to even be aware of our expanding options - and then get more aggregate practice at coordinating!

We're clearly voluntarily trapped in our own tautology, struggling to transition from individual hoarding of assets, to distributed, aggregate hoarding of coordination capabilities.

Our individual behaviors are quite plastic. With repetitive feedback, our neural and cultural circuits can indirectly reprogram and bypass our initial reflex behaviors, individual or aggregate.

Our aggregate behavior can be as plastic and agile as we want it to be. How agile our aggregate behavior is also depends directly on how open our aggregate feedback circuits are. Without Open Source, we cannot accelerate the agility of our own policy. Without aggressively titrating how open our distributed data-sharing can be, we voluntarily limit the adaptive rate of the USA.

It's that simple. We have a choice to make, and both speed and quality count in decision-making.

It takes a village to grow a child?

It takes a nation to grow a citizen?

What does it take to impair the adaptive rate of the children and citizens making a nation?

When did CopyRight become a euphemism for CopyWrong?

We're in the curiously tragic situation of watching parent generations beat the neighborhood kids for accelerating the process of learning from all and absorbing all. .... Words fail me.

That's the crux of why all bureaucrats attack innovation. Future demands always threaten the status quo. Yet we can't go back, and we can't stay here. Bureaucrats will just hunker down 'til their bureaucracy fails, while innovators charge ahead. You know which one will survive & evolve.



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