Category Archives: Intellectual Property Preserve

Da Vinci's Notebooks: Pushing the Limits of Intellectual Pursuit

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The complete notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, as collected by the Project Gutenberg, are now available through Scribd iPaper, a unique new document format that allows for scrolling through book-length documents right on a static web page, without downloading. The service is a great complement to any project aimed at expanding knowledge, the free flow of information, and access to the great ideas of the past, present, and the future in progress.

We include Leonardo’s extraordinary texts here at HotSpring, as part of the foundations of our Intellectual Property Preserve, through which we seek to help creative individuals establish authorship or the provenance of unique theories, while providing the world with access to revolutionary ideas and creative expression. The commons is reborn with universal digital access to da Vinci’s work, and the long hours put in by the team at Project Gutenberg, to ensure that the most resonant classics remain available in all new media.

We will need to learn to think like Leonardo in order to address the biggest challenges of our age, which will entail reaching far beyond the conceptual limits of prevailing paradigms in science, technology and philosophy, to reach the next frontier, and help create a more intelligent, more resilient, more responsible, fair and open, human civilization.

Ziggurat Century: Global Civilization as the New Babel, with Reason for Hope

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We are living in a time of unprecedented global integration, where economies, security interests, legal systems, and languages and systems of learning have been dispersed and interwoven across the globe. There are obvious positive effects to this integration, along with certain overarching and seemingly intractable problems that cause real worry for even the most hopeful or studied observers.

Languages and cultures intermingle, yet seek to remain distinct and continuous, and individuals seek to enhance their own possibilities (requiring freedom of information, and freedom of movement), while seeking to prevent the corrosion of already structured social fabrics. The obvious problem is that some of our most vital human interests come into conflict more readily with those of others, when massive numbers of people mix and intermingle, individuals and cultures competing with one another for the spoils of a new global system.

But there is no reason this has to be a source of friction, suspicion or violence. It is also true that a more open system is more dynamic, more able to adapt to otherwise ‘trivial’ personal interests, and better able to establish truly just rules for negotiating tense competitive situations where decisions need to be made about whose interests are best served by what result. What is needed is devotion to that open system, and real pragmatic tools for helping that system recognize and address genuine situations of friction or crisis.

There are some 6,800 languages spoken in the world today, and more than half are expected to die off within the next 100 years, possibly much sooner, and possibly well over one-half. This rapid evacuation of global language culture —though some will say it brings the benefits of increased uniformity— robs us all of potential bridges across cultures where understanding can take place. As words disappear, so do ideas, comparisons, metaphors, symbols and the human element of perception.

And the degradation of the global culture, in this fashion, while it may be part of a process of integration which will deliver some much needed benefits for long-term peace and human wellbeing, is a stress on the sense of security or identity of those cultures which survive. A key focus at all times, in the new globalized civilization, must be to ensure that identities are not threatened by the mass expansion of media, rights, capital and movement.

The conflict of the Tower of Babel —a place where we presume too many distinct cultures and interests combined, and an empire collapsed— is a conflict of (abstract/thought-pattern) border tensions provoking animosity and rivalry. Actual border conflicts derive fuel and momentum from abstract border conflicts —visions of the world, racial prejudice, linguistic rivalry, competition for resources—, a tendency 21st century technologies, politics and societal developments must counteract.

Openness is part of the new era of information and communication, which has helped to make the world “smaller” or “flatter” or “come together”, if we think more optimistically. As interests and opportunities coincide across nations and cultures, limiting the degree to which geography determines the life choices of a given individual, we face the need to embrace or to fear and oppose the increased openness that offers the resources and the opportunities to meet our interests.

Similar to the way in which cloudscape-computing allows for much more resilient, secure, and super-fast computation, so a broad, integrated global society, if informed by and served by norms that protect the human individual as a creative and information-gathering entity, can achieve new dynamism and vastly more potent and timely means of problem solving, where needed. The new integrated web, the dawn of hyper-convergence, and the global hunger for digital technologies means human society itself is becoming a sort of universal library or information-store.

Technology can help us not only to communicate, but to share the work of solving basic human problems, and to transcend the nature of oppositional conflict. Productive adversarial systems can be woven into a broad social fabric that helps us to debate, confront and work through the challenges of our times without resort to armed confrontation: the ugliest and ultimately least productive of human talents.

The 21st century need not be the new fall of the Tower of Babel, but could be the agile and well-thought construction of an abstract ziggurat —a fortress, a temple, an storehouse of ideas and guidance— shared by the broad continuum of human societies and attuned to our need to communicate and co-create. If we understand the problem of our times is one of forging cooperative bonds that serve the individual and protect human rights, we will be best armed to persevere in the face of challenges to cultural and individual identity, and reap the rewards —as a species— of the information age.

Openness May Be New Gold-standard for Government, Business, Technology

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The open-source movement has been a revolutionary phenomenon of startling proportions. It has changed the way software works for us in our daily experience, by bringing costs down far enough that now anyone with an internet connection can launch a web-based publication in literally seconds. Its efficiency, its appeal, its human element, make it a standard to watch as other sectors of economics and public life evolve to integrate the latest communications technologies, and aim for optimum end-user freedom and flexibility.

What has worked in software development may work as well in business and in government. Historically, industrial development, national security, intelligence gathering, and long-term strategy have been thought to benefit from being kept under lock and key, surrounded by a bank of armed guards and armored exterior walls, both literally and figuratively. But now we are seeing that openness has a tremendous long-term health effect.

So, openness should be considered as a way of mobilizing the voluntary talent of millions of interested and free-thinking individuals, but also as a means of creating a common interest, in defense of which a community of free-thinking, and free-acting individuals self-organize to prevent breakdown. This is, in some ways, an integral part of the revolutionary vision for a democratic society that the United States was founded on, and it is, in the spirit of the early 21st century, a source of promise and renewal in the future of human society.

Markets like openness. Though those who sit atop them often like to see things work specifically and consistently to their own advantage. Consumers like openness. It allows them access to information, which empowers them, and which dignifies their role in the economic fabric. Firms that produce products accompanied by honest information, and/or by a willingness to take responsibility for problems related to their products, tend to build a loyal customer base.

Governments that allow citizen participation tend to find community activism is more productive, less antagonistic, and that the political system itself remains more stable. The more direct involvement people have in the decisions that affect them, the more likely they are to feel they have a role to play, and they will contribute what they can and care about the outcome. This has a positive effect on the efficiency with which a society can adapt to major challenges, on the micro- or the macrocosmic scale.

It is already true that nations with more open media systems and more open forms of government have shown themselves to be more dynamic in social and political terms and more able to adjust to changes in political, social and economic climate, without suffering disintegration or collapse. Open systems are more natural, and more resilient in the face of threats.

“Globalization” is in part based on this phenomenon, in the hopes that opening economic borders will have a dynamic and stabilizing effect, over the long term. A very serious problem, however, with the current state of globalized trade is that it relies heavily on the idiosyncrasies of markets where the political system is corrupt, closed or highly-manipulated, creating great potential for human rights abuse or economic oppression.

The system of forced opening of borders is haunted by its actual lack of openness or citizen-involvement. Development initiatives that consider the real interests of “stakeholders”, local or foreign, are more able to adjust to the real facts of human existence, and therefore are more relevant and more sustainable. That dynamism comes from listening to the voices of those affected, and that involvement is about the openness of a process or a system.

We are likely to see, in coming decades, a far greater reliance on the productive capabilities of such open systems, be they a commons of intellectual property and innovation, a stake-holder-based approach to development, an ecologically-informed approach to economics, or the democratization of nations and regions, in the interests of long-term human wellbeing and sustainability.

  • As part of our Intellectual Property Preserve, this article contains some ideas that are more proposals than reporting. If you would like to collaborate with the author or seek further information for a potential partnership regarding the implementation of some of these ideas, please contact The Hot Spring at: think.media@casavaria.com

The Commons May Eventually Replace the Firewall as Security Standard

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As the world acclimates to digital technology, and its usefulness in everyday life becomes increasingly relevant to how we achieve a higher quality of life, higher quality of education, and more efficient means of deploying solutions to complex problems, the standard for securing data and ideas may shift from closed environments behind firewalls to a new open standard, where the commons guarantees provenance, and thereby, rights, when warranted.

How the open commons can serve the public and the private good in digital media is still a serious question, as much theoretical as technical or legal. The Creative Commons movement has given new life to the idea that individuals might be able to create, license and effectively and universally update the licensing of their work.

The reasoning behind the shift in copyright “licensing” for creative work, the concept of the commons, is to build a virtual space where creative people can benefit from the creative energies of their peers, of others forging ahead of them, and of people working in disciplines they themselves do not master. If applied optimally, the system allows for broader and more effective audience-outreach for creative works, as well as for the creative individual to judge what sort of licensing agreements, exclusivity or openness best suits their particular project.

As we advance beyond the strict binary distinction between copyright-protected and public-domain, we can fill in the spaces where recently created works are useful as fodder or structural bases for new creative works, with each iteration of the original shared work serving as publicity, and as potential income. There also exists the possibility that by placing a creative work into an operable commons, we can protect against its being pirated or plagiarized.

The technical specifics of such a system are difficult to work out. It has to work in part on the good faith participation of a wide range of users. And it is not at all desirable to extend central control to end-users’ machines: one of the great flaws of DRM is their invasive quality, which is not only a potential risk to users’ data security, but also a mode of persuading against using products that carry certain types of DRM constraints.

But the power of the integrated online community, and its dispersed computing and observation capacity, is such that works within a commons system can be protected by voluntary community organization, without the need for intrusive software solutions.

One major advance that will allow this sort of commons rights protection system to be deployed will be real image searchability, where actual visual images can be searched for exact or near copies, in varying sizes and color distortions, without having to rely on file titles, keywords or metatags. This may even become possible for actual video as well, though the computing power needed for such visual-comparison searches online is not ready for broad end-user contact just yet.

If we look seriously at the technology needed to be able to implement the best pro-creative solutions for user-organized communities and commons-oriented licensing services, we find that computing speeds are an essential component to fast-paced global spontaneous community integration. Molecular computing solutions, which may be able to give us from 16 to 256 to 1024 times as much simultaneous circuitry potential as today’s fastest processors, bodes well for reaching the necessary speeds to do real image searches, video-cross-checks, and self-organizing anti-piracy commons maintenance.

While much of this may seem antithetical to the commons movement —anti-piracy policing, cross-checks to warn of or block illegal or unlicensed copying, etc.—, it is in fact an integral part of ensuring that trust-based commons networks can be relied upon by creatives as spaces where a work’s provenance, purpose and licensing are established, referrable, and adjustable, thus empowering the commons as not only an information distribution paradigm, but as a security measure.

Taking the Plunge: into the Commons of Ideas & Invention

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The digital age has brought the most potent test for the security of intellectual property, and thanks to the open source movement, has also shown that intellectual property is not always most productive or most valuable when kept under wraps. Increasing numbers of large firms and institutions are opting not only to use open source software —to avoid licensing fees—, but are also building their own products and services with open source code, meaning they cannot keep the contents safely secret.

What is being bought with the sacrifice of patentability or copyright protection is speed of innovation and the right to use the ideas of a vast community of researchers, programmers and hobbyists. Collaborative innovation, community-based research and commons licensing, are some of the key elements to this complicated new terrain of creative work and the dissemination of ideas. Optimizing our access to and enjoyment of these various elements of the 21st century creative economy will best enable us to achieve bold innovations and establish a broad community of interested people.

Code, research, enterprise and market penetration are all being democratized. The key to succeeding as a society, as a creative sector of economic output, will be ensuring that the best aspects of the open computing environment can be applied in the most pliable, useful way to the largest number of people’s interests, without compromising the creative structure itself. What will replace copyright and royalties is not clear, but the most likely form of compensation will be a blend of the copyright and the open source standards.

HotSpring hopes to create, by way of its standard discussion-forum interface, an intellectual property preserve, wherein new ideas not only emerge and can be improved and allowed to flourish, but where they are also recorded, labeled, given both semantic flexibility and ownership by those who do the most to promote or improve them. This standard for managing material contributions to our innovation- and productivity-oriented discussion forum, is integral to developing the best ideas in the optimum time-frame, across open networks of new media.