Russell Yardley

Introduction

People are becoming more important, not less. This is because, in the digital age, greater connectivity is driving collaboration. In turn, this is fanning innovation and creating new ways of working, learning and living. That will result in increased productivity, which will provide a higher standard of living. What distinguishes the digital age is the connection between people and things, which is driven by the ubiquitous nature of the Internet. Given that the Internet connects billions of people and trillions of devices, and that everything is connected with everything else, this modern phenomenon will change how people relate, altering those relationships in ways that we have not seen before. These changes will come from increasing levels of trust that will provide individuals, firms and nations with a powerful competitive advantage. This will also come about because connected people will realise that they are accountable for their deeds and that will motivate them to become better people.

As has already become apparent, changes brought about by the digital economy will increase our dependency on others. For instance, the fall of Lehman Brothers caused financial pain even in remote and rural locations far from business centres in capital cities. Also, drought in one food bowl now causes food riots on the other side of the world. In addition, the essence of power will change as networks become more important than individual people, companies or nation states, and this change will resurrect the intimacy of the village because, in trusted groups, valuable collaborative behaviours will flourish and relationships will not just be driven by self-interest – for instance, ‘I help you in exchange for you helping me.’ But further change in modern society will be driven by people wanting to do the right thing to help others for rewards in reputation, respect and munificence. This is due to altruism, whereby that principle and practice is fostered by technological innovation in social media applications.

Still, there is a dire need to address current obstacles, so that people attain and maintain ready access to ideas in fomenting innovativeness, and yielding all the benefits. Copyright laws, developed centuries ago, are not suited to today’s technology, and a new balance is needed between private incentives for innovation and mutual benefits for society.

Facebook, Bebo, YouTube and LinkedIn emerged from a plethora of innovators, such as MySpace, Friendster and many others, to assist preexisting social networks improve how they operated, as well as providing tools for members to form new networks around an unlimited set of social attributes.

The culture evolving in Facebook is different from that of LinkedIn that, again, is different from Google +. This is because social mores evolve and gain acceptance across the member base and, importantly, the associated functionality, culture and social pressure changes member behaviour. Consider that printing in the fifteenth century, especially the use of movable type and the invention of Gutenberg’s press, encouraged consistency in spelling and that, together with improved visual clarity of words printed on the page, this obviated the need for reading out loud. Thereby, silent reading permitted the reader to apply their own thoughts to those of the author and that very element of human development eventually changed political structures and organisations. Just as printing presses changed politics, so too are the social media tools changing society.

Social Networking Sites (SNS) and the available social media tools assist people to create a public or controlled access profile that they can use to connect, communicate and collaborate with their networks of people. This online environment varies substantially from a traditional network in that connections of personal or business contacts can be traversed, as well as being used to expand dramatically both one’s own network and the understanding of who is connected to whom. Established networks of people can use a SNS to operate more effectively, to enhance the depth, ease and speed of communication and collaboration. But groups that have physical as well as virtual connections usually build trust more easily. Particularly, networks of people that are established online will require additional functionality and engagement to establish the trust that is required to conduct desired, effective online collaboration or communication. For a more detailed academic discussion of SNS, see http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x/full

Prior to the Internet, savvy political operators in large organisations had the ability to notice who was connected to whom, and how to penetrate those people networks for their own advantage. What SNS, particularly LinkedIn, have done is to make those people connections more transparent and obvious to a larger number of people.

With hundreds of millions of people signed up to the major SNS, the potential for understanding both constructive and destructive behaviour is enormous. Without breaching general expectations of privacy, these sites could aggregate information and connection patterns to identify and harvest productive practices, as well as design relevant tools to accelerate outcomes. Today, techniques to hunt for new connections and to farm existing ones are pretty basic. Generally, LinkedIn is seen as the preserve of recruitment companies and sales people. However, as the power of collaborating with people networks is established in most people’s minds, many more people will see the value of such services. Tools to define interests, opportunities and ventures to encourage valuable connections while protecting a member from unwanted, annoying approaches are clearly in their infancy.

Traditional networking behaviour

Dale Carnegie’s iconic book How to Win Friends and Influence People, which has sold more than 15 million copies since it was first released in 1937, is recognised as one of the most successful self-help books ever published. As a direct consequence, that title and Carnegie’s name became synonymous with the power of business networking, and the development of useful connections to create valuable business relationships. Basically, he was the first to define traditional business networking skills covering fundamental techniques in handling people, how to make people like you, winning people over to your way of thinking and being a leader.

Traditional social interactions relied on participants’ social skills to uncover common interests, shared contacts, shared knowledge and complementary skills among acquaintances. Hence, Dale Carnegie became such a household name in the 1930s by helping people to master these important skills. However, as might stand to reason, different types of people with different skills play different roles in this process, as Malcolm Gladwell points out in The Tipping Point. Mavens, or experts, have an uncanny habit of being at the centre of important events and thus providing an essential role in connecting people both with other people, and with relevant information. They learn how to be in the right place at the right time. Social media technology leverages these different roles to improve the networking process by providing facilities to push or pull social and connecting information in bringing to the surface people connections across any given network, so as to create value more quickly than can be achieved in traditional situations. This makes it much easier to identify people, interests and connections to shape opportunities and to create related value.

The ‘middleman’ was once able to charge a fee or, in economic parlance, charge a rent just for being a facilitator. There was no demand for adding value because the other parties were ‘in the dark’. But as communications improved, light was shone into those dark places and ‘middlemen’ either became valuable or were soon eradicated. This is happening to retailers today. Any physical retailer that provides the same service and role as an online e-commerce retailer must also provide the same range of goods, cost of delivery and price. Without providing a better service, a stronger relationship or a more trusted brand, modern retailers cannot charge a price higher than their online competitors.

Traditionally, businesses saw any other business providing the same services, or selling the same goods, as a competitor. However, as small businesses were outgunned by the buying power and market position of very large businesses, they soon formed buying groups and associations to address the comparative deficiencies. IGA (Independent Grocers of Australia) is a good example where small businesses joined forces to compete with the major supermarket chains. Companies in these groups networked either to increase revenues (through cooperative advertising campaigns) or to decrease costs (by bulk buying of stock). Any cost of doing business that could be divided by more than one entity can add dollars to the bottom line by sharing costs appropriately. In this way, competitors competed, and cooperated, in the marketplace. More efficient and effective online communications accelerates this process. As ideas and knowledge became more important to delivering a differentiated service, amortising the cost of creating the ideas and knowledge across more customers had significant impact on the applicable business and pricing models. New Internet-based communication and collaboration applications again accelerated this process.

Collaboration and cooperation

Businesses must think very differently in a digitally enabled economy. Just as Marmite, Promite and Vegemite were created from a waste product in the process of brewing beer, value can be created from byproducts in the digital economy. Luis von Ahn at Carnegie Mellon University brought to the world the squiggly graphic challenge that is used to distinguish a real person from a computer program trying to access a website. This is a very useful security service where automated systems could inappropriately access services directed at real people, and has become extremely popular, with hundreds of millions of challenges issued every day. Von Ahn recognised an opportunity here to utilise the ‘wasted’ time of these people wanting access to a website by using the security challenge to interpret scans of old books. He did this by modifying the challenge so that two separate squiggly graphics are simultaneously presented to the user, with one known to the security application and the other being a graphic taken from a scanned book. The known graphic determined if the user was a computer or real person and, when ten real users consistently interpreted the other graphic, their answer to the challenge was added to the text file of the scanned book. This service is translating 100 million words per day, or 2.5 million books per year. At that rate, the cost of paying interpreters, even from a low-cost economy, would exceed $1 million per day. If these low-cost salaries were cut in half, they still cannot compete against a service that has no cost of labour at all.

Using the above example, can you think of other potential digital economy by-products that could replace traditional services? Louis von Ahn has. He is developing www.duolingo.com to offer free foreign language lessons while translating the web by presenting sentences from web pages to language students, then combining (so-called wisdom of crowds) translations validated by proven performance of a large numbers of students to deliver translation of those web pages into any number of foreign languages. The ambitious yet achievable aim of this project is to translate the bulk of the web into every major language.

This process has been described as collaborative production of goods or services, and the same concept can be applied to consumption. Airbnb.com has used this collaborative consumption model to take a resource that would otherwise go unused (such as an empty bed) and connect the owner of that resource to someone who is prepared to pay for using it (say, a bed for the night). To make this system work, sufficient trust must be created for the provider and user of the resource to be comfortable in undertaking the transaction. Traditional babysitting clubs have now been extended with substantial online services, like www.findababysitter.com.au, which illustrates how communities can share goods and time that are in surplus of requirements, either for a fee or the reward of giving.

Online collaboration can go beyond production and consumption of goods and services to share using what American writer and advisor Clay Shirky has termed ‘cognitive surplus’, in his 2010 book of the same name, to create things of community value. That is to say, your surplus brain cycles, when not applied to earning a living or entertaining yourself, can be applied, together with those of others, to create valuable things altruistically. Wikipedia is a fine example.

You may not be able to design a digital process to generate your desired service for free. But there may be ways to reduce the cost significantly by more effective collaboration. In every industry, and in every market around the world, big companies and small are paying large numbers of people to do very similar tasks. These tasks could be as simple as evaluating products or services, creating induction programmes, a wide range of training modules used in everyday business or more complex projects, like planning to open an office in Beijing. If it were possible to find a similar company or person who was also planning to do the same or very similar task, and efficiently establish sufficient trust to help one another with ideas and knowledge and, most importantly, to share the workload and save resources, considerable productivity increases could be achieved.

This approach to collaboration and cooperation has not just suddenly appeared. It has evolved over the past couple of decades. In 1995, Acumentum (web applications), Cambridge Consulting (recruitment), Campaign Palace (advertising), FHA (branding), Geyer Design (interior architects), Invetech (product design), Mann Judd (accounting/advisory), Quantum Market Research and Royce Communications (Public Relations) became part of a business network they named the Australian Retail Solutions Group. At first, the aim was to incorporate and establish an entity that would bring together all the capabilities of members to better market the companies to larger companies and much larger projects. That approach was not successful. Even so, it did deliver significant business to the collaborative network through sharing business intelligence, work in progress and discussing ideas whereby various combinations of the members won tens of millions of dollars’ worth of business. The network remained active for almost a decade and it did not lose momentum until owners of the various businesses began selling their interests a few years ago.

Similar, small trusted networks continue to appear and organisations like the Hub Melbourne (www.hubmelbourne.com), a professional member community that drives innovation through collaboration, and the Creative Performance Exchange (www.meetup.com/The-CPX) an open community to exchange creative ideas and methods, help to show the way for applying new collaborative technologies and inventing new ways of working, learning and living.

Consider that the ubiquitous Internet has extended the geographic scope and improved the efficiency of finding the right collaborative partners, doing so while providing a ‘digital village’ environment where good behaviour can be rewarded and bad behaviour is discouraged. Motivation to participate in this digital village is driven by substantial increases in productivity as well as reputation, respect and munificence. Having spent three months developing a marketing plan to penetrate the 79 local government councils in Victoria, Australia, a web design company could be quite content with new business generated from some of those councils, or it could share the ideas, information and knowledge in their marketing plan with a non-competitive collaborator so that, with far less investment of money and time than they had to invest, their collaborative partner could also be rewarded with new business from the same 79 councils. In the collaborative digital economy, businesses are learning that it is not just their products and services that can be traded online. This can also apply to their trusted relationships, ideas, knowledge and tools developed by them over many years, and these can be traded for valuable consideration, which is not always just money.

Social media in the emerging digital economy

Every new communication technology breakthrough, from radio to television to computers, caused experts to become overly excited about the potential to revolutionise education, entertainment or business. Visions of replacing expensive people with cheaper machines in these people-dominated economic segments were mostly dashed and the early excitement quickly dissipated. Cinema has not replaced theatre, computers have not replaced teachers and, while computers are everywhere in business, people still like doing business with people. Where technologies have brought people closer together, they have been embraced, and where technologies have come between people, such as in interactive voice response systems, they were much less successful.

It is often felt that we are at a dawn of a new age, and that this moment has a significance unlike most others. Tom Stoppard wrote in Arcadia, ‘A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs’, and he goes on to highlight that relativity and quantum mechanics have yet to provide A Theory for Everything.

Will the excitement for Internet technologies transforming human relationships and driving massive increases in productivity come to very little? Or is this the door that will open to a new way of living? What has to be done to avoid disappointment? How do we achieve trusted valuable online communications and collaborations? The great successes in take-up of modern technologies have shown that these must fit the established behaviour and existing mental models of people, not the other way round. Steve Jobs knew this, and Apple products have become the benchmark of usability, as they are built from the inside out. For instance, the success of iTunes came from a deep understanding of all the required ingredients: accessibility, efficiency, engagement, persuasion, sales and delivery. Apple was successful in selling music to an audience who were all too aware they could rip CDs or access free downloads of their favourite music from a BitTorrent site, because Apple painstakingly attended to every tiny detail to make the process a better experience than any alternative, even when the alternative was free.

Now, contemplate the social media space. Facebook, LinkedIn and other SNS are beginning to recognise the need for a trusted, simple, yet powerful way for communities to do more than just connect, communicate and collaborate, and so provide an environment to conduct our lives more effectively. This means that we live in a very different economy to our parents. It no longer makes sense to talk about the digital economy being separate from the real economy because these online connected facilities are impacting the whole economy. Everyone is beginning to work, learn and live using a digital canvas, and those nations that provide the trust, integrity and safety in their digital environment will create more productive economies than those that do not.

What must be addressed in economic and public policy to meet this challenge? In order to build trust, and integrity, as well as provide a safe digital canvas for our society, we need a frictionless, trusted, safe payment system; also, we need to feel in control of our personal information, so we will need appropriate privacy and security. In addition, as this digital canvas is all about creating, enhancing and utilising ideas and knowledge, we need to fix our busted intellectual property (IP) system.

Building trust

Building trust in the connected economy will have important economic and moral benefits. Figure 12.1 maps trust against GDP per capita and is from a dated, although still very relevant, 1996 study that asked ‘generally speaking would you say that most people can be trusted?’ (Zac P J 2003 Trust. The Journal of Financial Transformations, CAPCO Institute 17–24); it is worth reviewing the key components that are presented in Figure 12.1.

The conclusion is that high trust leads to economic cooperation, which leads to prosperity, which enhances trust in a virtuous circle. Low trust leads to low cooperation, leading to poverty and further eroding trust in a vicious circle.

Distrustful economies in the lower left are in stark contrast to the successful economies in the top right. We should all be very afraid if the online world is moving us down to the lower left corner where there is low trust and lower GDP per capita. It doesn’t have to be this way. To protect our economy, we must question very seriously the fundamental lack of trust inherent in the World Wide Web. I accept that there is a place on the web for anonymity, freedom of movement, freedom of speech and freedom of association. Nevertheless, with the web becoming the very foundation of our connected economy, there is an essential need for identity and reputation. Also, we need to retain the trust that was, and is, fundamental to economic success.

Trust and collaboration

The striking patterns in most SNS are that these are built on how humans communicate and behave. Social networks can use social technologies to magnify communications and behaviours. Some people knit the people around them together to become friends, whereas others do not.

One pattern of carbon atoms creates graphite and another diamonds, graphite being soft and dark, while diamonds are clear and hard. The differences are created by the way that the same atoms are linked together. Similarly, the way that people are linked together in social networks can produce radically different outcomes. It is the ties between people that make the whole greater than the sum of the parts.

SNS have the potential to use social technologies to establish reliable identities and reputations for collaboration within groups. But groups are not better at everything. Would you want everything in your world to be designed by a committee? Too often today, we give tasks to individuals when groups would achieve more, and we give tasks to groups where individuals would do better. There is a mantra in much of the online culture that collectives make the best stuff, but that is patently not true. When you have everyone collaborating on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You do not get innovation, and you never get accountability.

Do you really think that a crowd could have painted the Mona Lisa? Or composed Rhapsody in Blue? Jazz bands benefit from individual solo performances and group collaboration. Individuals, like Lennon and McCartney, or Rogers and Hammerstein, often worked better in pairs. The ubiquitous, massively connected web gives us choice, and we need to become better at making these choices. When all creative things are subject to mass collaboration, there is no accountability and no greatness. Isolation can starve ideas. With the dictatorship of the majority there is palpable horror.

Exchanging value

Unfortunately, today, the web is straddled with a very uncompetitive payments system dominated by banks guarding their monopoly. We need a frictionless, ubiquitous payments system to exchange value efficiently as we communicate and collaborate with our networks, and with no additional charge for moving money internationally, nor with long delays in processing transactions.

The banks and credit card companies have built a proprietary, locked-down system for which, despite substantially lower costs for computing, storage and communications, they are charging similar fees as they did 50 years ago. Now, consider that Daniel Roth at Wired warned the banks, ‘It’s safe to say that the payment industry is going to change dramatically. As money becomes completely digitised, infinitely transferable, and friction-free, it will again revolutionise how we think about our economy.’

People expect governments to protect consumers with a sound and just legal system. The nineteenth-century scammers and snake oil salesman were slowly shut down by consumer protection legislation. The system continues to work today because offenders can be exposed by the trashy, but popular, current affairs programmes. While most of our economy was not conducted online, we might have tolerated an unregulated, unenforceable, ‘buyer beware’ online commercial environment – but not now!

Not only must a payments system be safe, secure and trusted, it must also be extremely easy to use. Digital payments need to use a device that people are already carrying, such as a smart card that replaces all credit cards, or a mobile phone.

Today, credit cards could display a number that changes every 30 seconds so that your credit card identity can never be stolen. Effective online consumer protection is available now, but it may take government regulation to make the banks responsible for the protection of transactions and the identity of their customers.

Just as child protection laws provide safety for children, and consumer protection laws create a safe and reliable place for commerce, we should look to our governments to provide the same in the online space because, without feeling safe and secure, there will be no trust, and without trust, we will not achieve the potential productivity gains that are necessary to attain the potential benefits from a digital canvas whereby we can create better ways of working, learning and living.

Our copyright laws are a mess

Having raised the importance of trust, payments systems and security, it is important to address the most fundamental challenge of the digital world – copyright. How often have you heard, ‘Copyright is dead, it’s an outmoded concept destroyed by students all over the world who refuse to pay for any digital content, especially music’? The conclusion to this discussion usually goes, ‘Like drug laws, copyright laws just turn students into criminals, and won’t stop downloading, so they are irrelevant and should be abolished.’ This expresses a widely held view, but this attacks the fundamental and essential core of any successful knowledge economy.

In the US, in the 1920s, there was a widespread disrespect for the law because of the failure of prohibition. Literature of the time, including The Great Gatsby, celebrated economic predators. Similarly, today, we all know a significant number of people who illegally download copyrighted entertainment, and there is a widespread disrespect for copyright law.

When US legislation provides for greater damages for downloading two songs in breach of copyright than it does for the medical negligence by a surgeon who removes the wrong limb in an operation, it is easy to argue that copyright laws are inequitable. When the Recording Industry Association of America can sue Jesse Jordan, a freshman university student, for $15 million dollars because his search engine technology enabled other students to illegally download music files, and his lawyers had to advise him to settle because, if he won, he would not recover any of his estimated $250 000 legal expenses. When the chance of a moral victory is coupled with sending your family bankrupt, then US copyright legislation is unconscionable. These cases are not an argument for or an incitement to break the law; they are remarkable evidence that these inequitable and unwarranted laws must be fixed.

While we have been ripping off music, and cheering as software and news became free, the work we were doing every day increasingly relied upon respect for, and valuing of, IP. But just as free software, music and news have undermined the value of IP, we have undermined the very basis for our emerging knowledge economy.

When Google takes the advertising revenue streams for our major newspapers because they can place their ads freely alongside any newspaper content, then who will pay the salary of the investigative journalist working on the next Watergate break-in? It is not the sensational story that is important; it is the need for constant enquiry into the power and politics of every nation that keeps our institutions honest and operating with some level of accountability to the people. That is important.

Chris Anderson, the great advocate of Free, argues in his book of the same name that ‘Everyone can use a Free business model, but concedes all too typically only the number one company can get really rich with it.’ It is not surprising that the two major advocates for Free, Google and Apple, are also the most guarded and proprietary about their core revenue-generating digital assets, and benefit greatly from others providing digital assets freely.

This is not a formula for an economy to create better ways of working, learning and living for all. It is a formula for turning all of us into digitally enabled itinerant workers never achieving Jefferson’s dream of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. This demonetised result for most digitised ideas will render the inventor all the poorer for their clever efforts. After all, there are only a few writers and musicians who actually make a decent living in the new digital utopia.

It is blindingly obvious that a knowledge-based economy must protect IP and build an efficient value exchange system for earning money from collaborating and communicating our ideas and inventions because, in the longer term, technology will just become better and better.

The advertising model is effective when a third party is prepared to pay for advertising in gaining market access to sell their product to your audience, but it is inefficient and ineffective in many areas, particularly when the value of that access is low, or when such access distracts your audience from the use of the product that assembled the audience in the first place.

This model worked well for the media industry, and brilliantly for Google. There are also excellent variations. Construction Data Management (CDM) applied this model to the construction industry by collecting building plans from architects without cost in exchange for providing the architects with costing data by region. CDM, in turn, built a revenue stream from manufacturers by charging them for access to information on building projects to help their sales teams in selling building products to construction projects.

Contorting this model to apply to everything, as the aforementioned Chris Anderson has done, is nonsense and will reduce economic efficiency when the total fees from third parties are less than the cost of the products provided. Put another way, the total costs within the economy must be met by someone, and a more efficient system with lower total costs and less ‘wastage’ will provide a higher growth in GDP and, ultimately, a high standard of living for its citizens.

If there ever was a paradox, then copyright is one. At a superficial level it is easy to agree with both sides of this argument. When an author labours for a lifetime, and produces a substantial body of work, why should the ownership of that work vaporise 70 years after their death? If the author had chosen to apply their labour to build physical objects, then their heirs could enjoy that value for an unlimited time.

Alternatively, why should a company that freely utilised the ideas from earlier stories involving animals and fairy tales strictly control the use of a mouse, or a rabbit or a deer in all film and television forever? If Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, both Elizabethan dramatists, had been given the same copyright protection in 1590 as Disney has been given for Mickey Mouse, would the works of William Shakespeare have achieved the same recognition 500 years later? For, in the words of Sir Isaac Newton, William Shakespeare stood on the shoulders of giants and, in Shakespeare’s case, the giants were Marlowe and Kyd.

If you want to quote Tom Peters from his seminal In Search of Excellence, there is no requirement to pay a copyright fee, nor do you need his permission to do so. With all the multimedia tools available today, rather than quote his text, it would have much greater effect if you inserted a short video of Tom making the point. But, because and only because you have changed medium, you are not only required to pay a copyright fee, you are also required to negotiate permissions first. Why is it that a learned speech is free to quote, but quoting with modern tools is now against the law?

At the turn of the last century, when the Wright Brothers first flew an aeroplane, American law held that a property owner owned not just the surface of his land, but all that lay below, through to the centre of the earth, as well as all the space above to an indefinite extent upwards. If American property owners were allowed by the courts to keep those rights, the airline industry would never have left the ground.

The connected digital economy, similarly, requires the associated law to change. If it does not change, then digital inventors of the future will be grounded because they will be negotiating with every digital property owner beneath every digital flight path that they wish to take.

There are many other examples where a new technology has changed the law. If the courts had decided that photographers required the permission of property owners to take photographs of their property, what a difference that would have made to photography. Imagine how much music radio stations would play if they were required to request permission from copyright holders before a song could be played.

The greatest advocates for the current copyright laws are the Hollywood film studios, and it was these film studios that took on iiNet in the Australian Federal Court by charging iiNet with authorising their customers’ illegal downloading of music files. One wit described this as an argument to charge road transport authorities with aiding and abetting every armed robbery because the robbers use roads to escape.

The irony here is that Hollywood was created by film producers escaping to the West Coast of the US to avoid paying royalties to Edison back on the East Coast, because he held patents on film cameras. The even greater irony is that the USA, being the copyright police of the world, was itself built on piracy of IP from the Old World. Clearly, self-interest is king, and the kings of self-interest have deep pockets. We therefore need politicians with great foresight and enormous integrity to withstand the certain onslaught from those vested interests.

What must change

The copyright system for digitally connected economies of the twenty-first century requires a radical overhaul. The complexity of this challenge is daunting. Those who create new things, whether that is music, memes, stories or services, and also establish valuable trust, should be rewarded by society. To do this, we need to give our innovators and inventors the power to control their innovations and inventions, to set their price and the conditions that apply to their creations. Modern technology gives us almost unlimited choices in how we might design such a system.

In his wonderful book, Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig argues that creators of IP rely on the ideas and knowledge that went before them, and that innovation requires access to those ideas and knowledge to be in the public domain. If the law causes, or at least permits, the public domain to become barren, innovation will be diminished. Consequently we need to protect IP to reward creation, and do so while building a public domain of knowledge and ideas.

Ponder the following. Harvard law professor William Fisher has suggested that all content capable of digital transmission should be marked with a digital watermark, and that governments should regulate a system, but have it developed by entrepreneurs to measure usage and collect payments based on this watermark.

I see the solution as an online automated system that:

This system would also stop the likes of Larrikin Music demanding royalties in the order of 60 per cent of millions of dollars, as already earned by the real creative people, for a four-second, rather vague reference in a musical riff in a hit song by Men At Work to the children’s song Kookaburra because a deal of that size could never be done before a song was released.

The US Congress and other parliaments have extended copyright protection for authors since 1908, taking it from 14 years to an author’s lifetime plus 70 years, or 95 years for a corporation. If this continues, as it is likely to do, we are operating under permanent copyright protection by stealth.

To simplify the system, we need to strengthen copyright. To reduce the high legal fees involved in current copyright cases, we need to make copyright narrow and clearly defined. Derivatives from a copyright work should be separated from the rights of the work itself and should be limited to a very short term – perhaps as little as ten years.

That is, where a film is made based on a book, or a musical is created from music, innovators will be free to create new works from existing works ten years after publication. But fees for exact reuse of existing works will require payment of a fee forever. It is justified in restricting the broader rights by providing permanent copyright in exchange for the narrower rights.

Conclusion

Listen to obituaries at funerals, and you will hear that society values what people do for each other, and with each other. Stories of joining together to achieve valuable outcomes, and of sharing the experience, are the focus of most eulogies. Wise counsel is to pay attention to the relationships that you have, and improve the quality of those experiences. Life is about communication and collaboration around common goals and aspirations.

SNS and technologies have evolved to become everyday tools that are used to paint our lives on a digital canvas with people congregating with others who have similar values, interests and ambitions. As in the village of old, your community knows your true character. In contrast, in the emerging digital village, it is difficult to pretend to be what you are not. Your past deeds are a permanent exhibition on your digital canvas and your reputation, respect and munificence the substantial currency of the digital age.

The immediacy and ubiquity of this connected world accelerates activity and relationships so that the communities formed are able to achieve so much more in far less time. Achievement, and the shared experience in those communities, will expand our feelings of self-worth through trusted relationships extending further around the globe than was possible in the past. Whether this is a superior way of working, learning and living will be determined by the efficacy of what is achieved with all our resources now at our fingertips, and must be pursued vigorously if we are to see the altruistic aspects of our emerging society blossom, and yield fruit.

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