RE: Why Should You Consider Putting Your Extra Time, Effort, and Resources Into Being Part of The Collaborative Commons?
Great post. Upvoted, resteemed, and followed. The second video you included at the end is also one of my favorites as well, as one of 21 TED videos so far about the idea of basic income.
I think not only is the collaborative commons extremely important, but also we need to recognize the collective commons that already exists, and all the value we already create together in ways we don't see as mutual value creation because it doesn't involve money.
One of the reasons I so strongly support basic income is to decouple income from work so that people have the new choice to choose to create value without monetary incentive. How many more people would create incredible things for free if they didn't need money to live? I think that number is massive, and the effect profoundly transformative.
I also think that with money decoupled from income thanks to basic income, we can start to reform our IP laws, which I think are just insane at this point. It is valuable to give people a temporary monopoly on the intellectual property they create, so as to offer a head start. So patents lasting ten years is logical. But patents lasting for over a century is not logical. We want as much IP as possible within the public domain, and should disincentivize its exclusion, which is why I like the idea of treating IP like carbon pollution.
I think we should apply an annually rising fee to intellectual property, and distribute the revenue generated to everyone equally as an IP dividend. If a company like Disney wants to pay for excluding Mickey Mouse from the public domain, great, they can do that, but they need to pay for it, and it needs to get more and more expensive to do so, until they finally decide that letting Mickey fall into the public domain makes more sense than paying to prevent that. This also squares the circle considering that Walt Disney founded his company on stories that were public domain stories.
A rich public domain makes for a rich society.
Some think that money is the strongest incentive for anyone to do anything. Yup I think IP is somewhat silly and tend to be only effective for those with enough resources to record or take any legal action. I like your solution to getting more IP into the public domain and treating it like carbon pollution lol.