The Commons May Eventually Replace the Firewall as Security Standard
Hyper-convergence paradigm, Intellectual Property Preserve ::
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.
admin @ May 2, 2008