How it will start

The Lutsu manifesto turns intellectual property into public good and thus removes an established method of making money, namely the sale of usage rights such as license fees. Therefore the production costs, including the salary of authors and researchers, must be covered by other approaches. Where does the money come from?

There are several ways to get there. I like the following one.

First of all, the end of a particular way of making money is nothing new. It happens all the time. Cigarettes, analog cameras, diesel engines, are markets that have been lucrative in their time and have become useless more or less quickly. Selling usage rights for intellectual property is a market that is going to die sooner or later.

I imagine that some countries will form a Lutsu club and refuse to protect intellectual property from being copied. Citizens of those countries would have the legal right to freely copy and reuse anything that has been published anywhere in the world, including in countries that are not member of the Lutsu club.

These countries would operate a public commons service to manage the revenues from public commons. They will probably define a series of public commons taxes. I guess that such taxes won’t be based simply on usage because we cannot say that the one who reads a book or watches a movie about solidarity is the only one to benefit from it. We might even say that “using” some published content makes it more valuable and should be rewarded by a reduced taxation. No, I guess that the public commons tax will be a more general tax, based on income, wealth or whatever criteria is used in each country.

Content producers in the Lutsu countries would receive a part of the collected taxes. A public commons service will distribute the income in a transparent way. They might set up a system for measuring the “merits” of content providers. For example they might ask the individual citizens to “vote” for their favourite content providers. They might employ experts of different areas who would evaluate content.

Content producers located in non-member countries might not like this. They might try to protect their “property”. They might try to prevent “their” content from “leaking” into the free countries, for example by manipulating the Internet, or by other means. They might declare war against the Lutsu club countries. But there’s an easier solution: they can just open a branch office in some Lutsu country and apply for financial contribution. And they will receive a transparently allocated contribution that might eventually become bigger than their revenue from sales of copyrights in the other countries.

All basic activities of content providers would continue as now. Private corporations that currently rely on their property rights will convert to foundations or other form of public corporation and start raising funds like political parties or charity and religious organizations. They may reduce the costs for the fundraising work by collaborating with others.