Faction license

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    Revision as of 06:35, 29 February 2004 by 142.177.99.8 (talk)
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    A faction license' would be a parametric license alternative to a single monolithic Consumerium license. It would not assign all rights to the Consumerium Governance Organization permanently but would only let the CGO use the information in Consumerium Services as long as it obeyed some ground rules that ensured the faction of due process in dealings with the other factions. This would help equalize power among those factions that do and don't have their own healthy buying infrastructure in place or work as operators. It would potentially work as follows:

    Each faction here could specify its own variant of Creative Commons to apply, and set terms for sharing information with the others along those parametric lines. For instance if one faction preferred not to release data for commercial purposes or had no right to do so, it would be able to set a price (infinite if the transaction is impossible) on relaxing those terms to allow commercial use. This being done in advance, any commercial deployment of the information would invoke a known-in-advance payment. This is exactly how the recording industry royalty system works: by specifying clearly in advance how much songwriters, singers, producers, arrangers, are paid, it is absolutely certain that no cease and desist letters will be received - the price for this rights clearance is also certain. Only instead of having a single entity per country to collect for all artists in that country, we have global factions to do it on behalf of all those who ask for similar terms.

    The only requirement CGO would have for materials in the Research Wiki then would be that they be clearable for a known price for release to the Signal Wiki. Anyone who wanted to consult that information directly in the Consumerium buying signal might then have to pay or trade something for that right. It would become possible to make a living providing hard to find or verifying hard to verify data. Once in the Signal Wiki, the uniform Consumerium License would apply, which might itself be a parametric license - though it should not be one that requires cash payments - though maybe revert currency is involved.

    Such a flexible system would encourage factions of very widely, even violently, disagreeing character, to make clear deals with each other to achieve the common purpose of releasing the maximum amount of reliable information, but would not require all parties involved to trust each other equally in wiki management.

    Though such a flexible system seems like a pain initially, it is a major advantage for Distributed Consumerium when there is great risk of data being splintered. Factions could presumably start variant Consumerium Services reserving the right to hack the data any way they wanted, but, they'd have to honour the agreements made with others who had authored ConsuML material, which might not be with the operators directly. In order to keep the due process in force, the CGO would act as a referee among the factions, some of which would operate hardware, and some not, but all of whom would use the same parametric license regime. The CGO would become something of a regulated market in information. Much like a stock exchange.