Re: Fear of Life (was Microsoft, Automation)

ChuckKuecker (ckuecker@mcs.net)
Mon, 4 May 1998 10:17:44 -0500 (CDT)


At 15:45 5/3/98 -0700, you wrote:
>
>Another idea which has been proposed for selling IP is a "recursive
>auction". I've just seen informal descriptions of this idea so I don't
>know how the details are supposed to work. The general idea is that the
>artist initially creates his work of art (a new novel, say), and sells
>it for a lot of money to one buyer. This is the whole compensation to
>the artist so it may have to be hundreds of thousands of dollars or more,
>for someone who is really successful.
>

This is a nice idea. If it can be made to work for products such as my
company produces, I will gleefully vote to eliminate copyright and
trademarks.. I would make my killing on the first sale, and then could spend
my time creating new ideas rather than marketing the old!

As far as the IP anti-replication schemes go, unless the contracts
prohibited reverse engineering, I see a huge underground economy in sales of
these with the 'fingerprints' stripped out. A compiler that is hacked to not
look at them is another possibility.

I personally like the idea of the finished product automatically registering
itself with the creators. There is also the process where a compiler would
register each IP component as it was included in the end product. This is a
case where strong public key encryption will shine, if the compile must
handshake with the property owner's system everytime a product is compiled..

How about only selling the 'source code' for a product, encrypted, of
course, and letting each customer compile the end product himself? The self
registration system would then directly pay the component owners every time
a product was built...

Chuck Kuecker