free-software WordPress platform provide very useful inspiration.5The technology to be put in place will have to be safer, as the benefits of possible fraud are more immediate that those of spam. No system will be safe forever, they will have to be revised in face of new techniques and approaches to fraud. Despite all this, one should not overestimate the level of fraud in social systems in general, and infor-mation technology systems in particular.
Contrary to a common ideological bias, fraud in social systems such as the one we propose does not frequently emanate from ordinary recipients. Most abuse originates with established economic players, and most fraud comes from orga-nized networks. A typical example is the unemployment benefit system put in place, in France, for workers in the live performance and creative activity sector, called régime des intermittents du spectacle.6 When the total cost of the system in-creased, fraud and abuse were invoked among possible causes. Independent stud-ies were conducted, which concluded that the system was indeed being abused, mostly by large media companies, in particular broadcasters, including– ironi-cally– public broadcasters, who disguised permanent employment as intermittent in order to receive subsidies from the system. Direct fraud by recipients was found to be insignificant, even though people received benefits for activities whose inclusion in the system was not originally intended (Corsani-Lazzara-to 2008). There was also criticism against the high-level benefits distributed (Corsani-Lazzara-to some movie actors. Similarly, fraudulent use of social and health insurance bene-fits by ordinary recipients has been shown to have a limited relative financial im-pact (CAF 2010).
In order to be accepted, the usage measurement system must not install con-trols which would be perceived as a presumption of fraud, but it must not be naive either: it must be capable of detecting and – if possible – of preventing fraud if and when it occurs. No system is perfectly resistant to fraud. Existing copyright rewards are no more exempt from fraud than VAT, for instance. The reward system we propose won’t be either, but one can make fraud easier to detect, limit economic incentives for it, take various measures to eliminate frau-dulent data from measurements, and prosecute fraufrau-dulent behavior. As rewards are based on comparative levels of use, the best protection against fraud will come from the sheer mass of non-fraudulent data, but as fake data can be pro-duced at will, we must make sure that it will be hard to inject it in the system.
how many works can be reliably recognized.7In the application of the French HADOPI law, the representatives of right holders track use of 10,000 musical tracks and 1,000 moving image documents, a ridiculously small subset of our culture, although one which makes it clear in whose interests they are acting.
User-oriented applications such as Shazam8offer recognition of up to 8 million music tracks from ten second samples of audio for smart-phone users. Though we do not have data on their exact recognition performance, such systems clearly accomplish an impressive feat. However, this kind of gymnastics is not needed for our purpose: in the context of a reward system for a legal activity, there is fortunately a much simpler approach: let the producers of works identify them voluntarily, by registering and tagging them.
There are various traditions regarding registration of works. In the US, regis-tration of works was a condition for obtaining copyright protection until the Bern Convention Implementation Act of 1988, which came into force in 1989.9The US Copyright Register contains 61 million entries, of which 16 million are in a digital database. By contrast, European countries have not made registration of works a condition of author rights or copyright, even though some of them have compul-sory legal deposit laws. The system of registration we have in mind here is of a different nature, and is very similar to the system described in (Fisher 2004, pp.
203-205). It can be kept to the minimum needed for the administration of a re-ward system, namely:
– identification of the registrant;
– certification by the registrant that s/he is the single creator (in the sense:
author, performer or technical contributor benefiting for neighboring rights) for the work, or has been authorized by other co-creators. A presumption of entitlement10will apply: no check nor examination of the validity of the claim will be done (see below);
– identification of the creators and other contributors to the work and of their respective share (see below);
– provision of a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) pointing to a reference copy or location of the work available on the Internet (an exemplar in the modern sense);
– attribution of an unique identification code which, as we will see, can be clo-sely tied with the URI.
In countries with a registration tradition such as the US, the corresponding regis-ter is a natural choice to act as the registration agency. In other countries, it will have to be a new organization. The register must be public and publicly search-able and downloadsearch-able, in order to make it possible for creators or their repre-sentatives to check that their works have not fraudulently been registered by others. In all cases, opposition procedures must be possible, and associated
sanc-tions against the abusive registration of works must exist. The registration pro-cess should be a matter of minutes using the Web. If it takes any longer or if there is a transaction cost, it will represent a harmful obstacle to the diversification of rewardees. In contrast to (Fisher 2004), we think registration should be free of charge and funded as part of the management costs of the Creative Contribution, which are evaluated in section 10.5. Mass registration should also be possible, for instance for the works already included in a copyright register, or for works regis-tered with collecting societies. However, in both cases the shares allocated to various contributors will have to be treated with caution, as this information can not be readily transferred from other forms of registration: it depends on specific legal provisions and/or the contract provisions described above on page 120.
It should be noted that the registration described in this section is not a form-ality in the sense prohibited by the Bern Convention article 5.2:11it is not a condi-tion for obtaining copyright, nor for proving one’s rights in a copyright proce-dure.
It is worth considering in more detail the unique identifier and the information associated with it. An international standard exists that us widely used, for in-stance in the context of scientific publication archives: the DOI or Digital Object Identifier (Paskin 2008). In parallel, many other systems exist for specific cate-gories of published works, such as the ISBN12for books. The characteristics of the DOI make it suitable for use in a reward system for a very diverse set of works.
It is agnostic with regards to the nature of works. The production and manage-ment of unique identifiers can be distributed among various agencies. The DOI permits a durable connection between the identifier and a resource identifier (URI) pointing to a reference copy or location on the Internet, which can be up-dated by the registrant as and when necessary. Identifiers can apply to different levels of a composite work, enabling the definition of a single identifier for a blog or a personal photo gallery. This is important to handle the rewards to works that are composed of multiple units, each of which might not receive enough atten-tion to qualify for the minimum level of rewards. This type of grouping can be applied only to works that are all accessible at a unique Internet location, and thus truly constitute an ensemble that can be rewarded as a unit.
The use of the DOI might raise some concerns from the point of view of being an open standard: some patents apply to its implementation.13We nonetheless use the DOI as an example of a voluntary identification system that fulfills all the relevant functional needs.
Finally, in addition to the abusive registration of works, one possible form of fraud could be the production and dissemination of copies of works in which the digital identifier has been replaced by the identifier of another work. This can be prevented and detected relatively easily using cryptographic integrity checks.14 The exposure of the person benefiting from the fraud should also act as a power-ful deterrent.
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