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Main article: A moneyless economy based on reputation and need
The ratings system solves the problem of IP in a moneyless society. If we had a post-scarcity moneyless society, then our relationship to property becomes less important in the first place. Nobody would “own” anything big, just their personal possessions: clothing, food, maybe a house. These are either not worth stealing or impractical to steal. And a post-scarcity society with a reasonable income distribution should produce people with little incentive toward theft.
The ratings system solves this problem more directly too. It naturally provides credit in the correct way for new ideas. As a more efficient information processor, the ratings system does not depend on when someone filed a patent or whether they have the resources to do so. It simply recognizes those with good ideas as they are presented. The inventors just won’t “own” the ideas as property.
This notion recognizes that our current IP system is driven solely by business needs, not any inherent need of the inventors themselves. Inventors are almost always motivated by either an internal interest in their subject or the recognition they will receive for having made an advancement, or both. Businesses, however, want IP protection so they can profit from the ideas their employees create without any competition.
This may seem legitimate. After all, we do want someone to commercialize good ideas so they can be made available to consumers on a wide scale. But from a macroeconomic perspective, it doesn’t really matter if the business the inventor works for commercializes the idea or a competitor does. The point is, if it’s a good idea, it should be commercialized as quickly as possible. It would seem, in fact, that opening the field to competitors earlier should provide for faster commercialization.
But isn’t it fairer to allow the inventor the sole right to benefit from his invention, at least for a time? If we were all lone inventors commercializing our ideas ourselves, perhaps. And, more worryingly, perhaps not having an IP system might discourage us from inventing at all. But this is rarely the case. The truth is most inventors work for larger businesses and, as we pointed out above, they are motivated by either recognition or devotion to their subject matter.
But wouldn’t businesses stop hiring inventors, and stop investing in R&D, if they knew they didn’t have IP protection? That seems hard to believe. What they would probably do is simply go to greater lengths to keep their “inventions” secret until they were ready to roll them out. Companies already have the concept of “trade secrets”. We might counter this with the notion that trade secrets are costly to maintain but it would be foolish to state with any certainty the macroeconomic effects of one IP policy vs. another. There are arguments both ways and only experience or simulation is likely to reveal the overall economics.
In any event, all this discussion presumes a moneyed economy and businesses that function on the profit motive. In the ratings-based economy, businesses may certainly exist but they would exist for ratings, not profit. Contributions to society become the metric by which a business is rated and so, other things being equal, an invention-oriented business would certainly be rated higher than a non-invention oriented one. Those businesses that then succeed in commercializing inventions would also be rated highly. But this fact should simply motivate the original inventor to do a good job of commercialization, for the sake of better ratings, without taking away the incentive to invent in the first place. The fact of IP has little meaning in a ratings-based society, and even less so in one that includes a moneyless economy.
Still, though, we might have a concept of IP in the sense that we have a concept of “your idea”, or “you stole my idea”. What we’re saying here is that when ideas are used they must be used with attribution. So someone’s idea comes with “the right” to be recognized for it. In some circles (academia, journalism) this is serious. You can lose your job, or be seriously weakened, for failing to do this. So it is conceivable that a community would adopt a rule saying that you must cite your sources. But then again, isn’t this what the ratings system is for? To figure out who is honest and promote those who are? To identify the frauds? It would seem that “the rule” in this case could simply be a cultural norm enforced by the ratings system.
But if the ratings system is going to enforce a norm like this, isn’t it a fine line between a norm and a rule? This is a general problem. If we expect the ratings system to enforce a standard of honesty that we kind of subjectively all agree on, wouldn’t we want to codify this at some point? The codification serves two purposes: it makes clear what the standards are (no one can claim ignorance) and also can include a systematic mechanism for punishment should they be broken. It seems natural to think that a community would want to reflect its values through codification. Obviously this is possible once a community is born and has a mechanism to create laws. But it is likely they won’t need it if the norm is working. And, given the information overload that a direct democracy imposes on its members, they are likely to not fix what is not broken.