Merge pull request #496 from zhitzig/patch-2

Update 04-04-property-and-contract.md

contents/english/04-04-property-and-contract.md

@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@ Most large-scale cooperation in ⿻ societies takes place through the pooling of
 
 A core aim of Lick's original vision for the "Intergalactic Computer Network" was to facilitate the sharing of digital assets, such as computation, storage and data.  And, in some ways, such sharing is the heart of today's digital economy, with "the Cloud" providing a vast pool of shared computation and storage and the wide range of information shared online forming the foundation of the generative foundation models (GFMs) that are sweeping the technology industry.  Yet for all the success of this work, it is confined to limited slices of the digital world and controlled by a small group of highly profitable, for-profit entities based in at most a handful of countries, creating both tremendous waste of opportunity and concentration of power.  The dream that the internet could enable broad and horizontal asset sharing has yet to be realized.
 
-As with the other fundamental protocols we have discussed in this part of the book,  there has been significant efforts to address these gaps.  In this chapter we will review the potential of digital asset sharing to its current state, survey existing efforts, highlight some of their accomplishments and limitations and sketch a path towards overcoming these and enabling a ⿻ online asset sharing ecosystem.
+As with the other fundamental protocols we have discussed in this part of the book,  there have been significant efforts to address these gaps.  In this chapter we will review the potential of digital asset sharing and survey existing digital asset sharing efforts. We will highlight the accomplishments and limitations of the existing efforts, and sketch a path towards a robust and ⿻ online asset sharing ecosystem.
 
 
 
@@ -143,7 +143,8 @@ Yet many of the challenges to data collaboration are more organizational and soc
 - Management challenges: it is nearly impossible for an individual alone to understand the implications, both financial and personal, of sharing data in various ways.  While automated tools can help, these will be made or shaped by social groups, who will need to be fiduciaries for these individuals.
 - Collective bargaining: The primary consumers of large data sets are the largest and most powerful corporations in the world.  The billions of data creators around the world can only achieve reasonable terms in any arrangement with them, and these companies could only engage in good faith negotiations, if data creators act collectively.
 
-Organizations capable of taking on this role of collectively representing the rights and interests of "data subjects" have been given a variety of names: data coalitions, trusts, intermediaries, collaboratives, or, in a whimsical turn of phrase one of the authors suggested, "mediators of individual data" (MIDs). Some of these could quite naturally follow the lines of existing organizations: for example, unions for creative workers representing their content, or Wikipedia representing the collective interest of its volunteer editors and contributors.  Others may require new forms of organization, such as the contributors of open source code that is being used to train code-generation models, authors of fan fiction and writers of Reddit pages may need to organize their own forms of collective representation.
+Organizations capable of taking on this role of collectively representing the rights and interests of "data subjects"[^whoownsthefuture] have been given a variety of names: data trusts,[^datatrust] collaboratives,[^datacollab] cooperatives,[^datacoops] or, in a whimsical turn of phrase one of the authors suggested, "mediators of individual data" (MIDs).[^dataaslabor] Some of these could quite naturally follow the lines of existing organizations: for example, unions for creative workers representing their content, or Wikipedia representing the collective interest of its volunteer editors and contributors.  Others may require new forms of organization, such as the contributors of open source code that is being used to train code-generation models, authors of fan fiction and writers of Reddit pages may need to organize their own forms of collective representation.
+
 
 Beyond these formal technologies, organizations and standards, broader and more diffuse concepts, expectations and norms will have to develop so to ensure broad understanding of what is at stake in data collaborations, so that contributors feel empowered to strike fair agreements and hold their collaborators accountable.  Given the pace of technological change and adaptation in what data collaborations will thus become, these norms will both have to become pervasive and reasonably stable *and* dynamic and adaptive.  Achieving this will require practices of education and cultural engagement that keep pace with technical change, as we discuss in the following chapters.
 
@@ -155,10 +156,9 @@ Once they develop and spread sufficiently, data collaboration tools, organizatio
 ### ⿻ real property
 
 
-The challenges of achieving this will be significant and constantly evolving.  Yet in every challenge lies an opportunity.  While in some ways the deeply social character of data sets it apart from real world assets and challenges property and contractual systems design for them, in others it simply accentuates, through its unfamiliarity, many of the ways traditional property systems are themselves ill-suited to managing real assets today.  This can be seen perhaps most easily by taking one step away from the purely digital asset world towards digitally-related assets that more closely resemble and are governed by institutions closer to those for real assets.
-
-Two natural examples are the elctromagnetic spectrum and name spaces.  Both have been areas in which traditional property entitlements are being rapidly reimagined. 
+It will not be easy to achieve a plural approach to digital property. But it's instructive to remember that many property rights systems in other realms are contested and in flux. In some ways the deeply social character of data sets it apart from real world assets, and therefore our existing modes of designing property rights and contractual systems are not readily applied to data. But in other ways, the deeply social character of data accentuates, through its unfamiliarity, many of the ways traditional property systems are themselves ill-suited to managing real assets today.  
 
+We take one step away from the purely digital asset world, and look to two examples of digitally-related assets whose  property rights regimes are changing rapidly. These two examples are electromagnetic spectrum and name spaces on the internet.
 
 Traditionally, entitlements to broadcast on a particular electromagnetic frequency in a particular geographic range have (in many countries including the United States) been assigned or auctioned to operators with licenses being renewed at low cost.  This has effectively created a private property-like entitlement based on the idea that users of frequencies will interfere if many are allowed to operate on the same band in the same place and that licensees will steward the band if they have property rights over it.  These assumptions have been tested to the breaking point recently, however, as many digital applications (such as WiFi) can share spectrum and the rapidly changing nature of uses for spectrum (e.g. moving from over-the-air broadcasting to 5G wireless) has dramatically changed interference patterns, requiring reorganization of the spectrum against which legacy license holders can often serve as holdouts. This in turn has led to significant changes to the property system, allowing licensing agencies like America's Federal Communications Commission to relocate holdouts in auctions, and proposals by leaders in the space for even more radical designs that would mix elements of rental and ownership as we discuss in our "Markets" chapter below or leave spectrum unlicensed for specified shared uses.  
 
@@ -175,3 +175,9 @@ Treating name spaces as private property makes little sense, given that those wh
 [^DawnOfEverything]:  [The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything) (2021) book by anthropologist and activist David Graeber, and archaeologist David Wengrow. In this book the authors epxlore a vast range of political creativity and flexability surrounding how humans have organized themselves in the last 100,000 of years. 
 [^MysteryOfCapital]: The Mystery of Capital by Hernado DeSoto. In the book he emphasizes that the abstract representation of property through formal titles and documentation allows assets to be leveraged in the financial system, enabling them to generate wealth and spur economic growth
 [^Henrich]: see the "New Institutions, New Psychologies" chapter of Joseph Henrich's book the Weirdest People in the World 
+[^whoownsthefuture]: Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014).
+[^datatrust]: https://datatrusts.uk/blogs/data-trusts-and-the-eu-data-strategy
+[^datacollab]: https://www.datacollaboration.org/
+[^datacoops]: Thomas Hardjono and Alex Pentland, "Data cooperatives: Towards a foundation for decentralized personal data management," arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.08819 (2019).
+[^dataaslabor]: Eric Posner and E. Glen Weyl, Radical Markets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), chapter 5.
+