“How do we reform IP legislation to hit that sweet spot with the absolute minimum of bureaucratic interference in the work and lives of creatives? I took a stab at that question years ago after I realized that patents on technological inventions were often used to prevent new, game changing technology from reaching the market, rather than promoting the application of new solutions.” ~Sepp Hasslberger

How do we reform IP legislation? As little as possible. Current law already leaves the sweet spot determination between “all rights reserved” and “no rights reserved” to the property owner(s). The main legal problem is defining the conditions of property ownership. Contracts requiring employees to automatically and permanently assign patents to employers, for example, need to be tightly regulated if not prohibited. A broad principle of equity sharing in property (physical or intellectual) needs to be established and permanent alienation of ones property rights without fair and forward-running compensation (such as on-going royalties, dividends, revenue sharing, usage rights, etc.) should be strongly discouraged or disincentivized.

Exceptions to the principle of on-going equity sharing would include things like:

* voluntary abandonment or death (remedies include the doctrine against perpetuities, laches, escheats, inheritance taxes, etc.)

* appropriate expiration periods on monopolies such as real estate titles, copyrights and patents

* eminent domain

Apportioning property rights and revenues to worker-owners in commons, cooperatives, etc.

* Gift economies often don’t scale well.
* Gift economies are full of implicit accounting rules in any case.
* Except in very casual and informal circumstances I (and I think most people) prefer explicit and transparent accounting rules.
* The desire for and benefit of explicit accounting can and often does arise at very small scales (within a family, a small group, a coop, or an intentional community, for example, as I have often witnessed).
* Accounting practice can add value and apportion value fairly when done honestly, transparently, competently, and responsibly.
* A claim that explicit accounting creates more fraud, waste, abuse, and inequity than implicit accounting (or no accounting) would be an extraordinary claim in need of very rigorous evidence (for starters it would contradict the bulk of my experience in group dynamics).
* You can’t go back and apportion revenues to past value-contributions if they haven’t been documented, so the accounting starts when it starts.

Poor Richard