Policy objectives
From Project VRM
Contents |
Project VRM Policy Objectives
I'm just sayin' it is our system...
Alignment and Impact
Project VRM redresses imbalance in today's economy from a systemic perspective. On the one hand, a new way of doing things that impacts today's behavior, and on the other hand an evocation of greater detail in our understanding of progress. Consequently, a call to bring this understanding into our laws.
Alienated consumers don't read
At stake is the principle of the final sale. A vanishing virtue of our economy, it is an explicit separation of interests and obligations among those executing a transaction. In a less complex time, a purchase was a final sale and you were free to utilize your newly acquired asset as you saw fit. This rendered tremendous values from the engine of unintended consequences. Whole industries would never have come into existence if the transactional principles we increasingly enable today had been in fashion then. The poison that is acting to hobble our economy is the increasing substitution of the license for the sale.
What you don't know makes us rich
Project VRM is an effort to re-engineer the transactional relationship given the tremendous leverage systems can give citizens. It also begs the question of what should constitute a transaction, and are we prepared to sacrifice the freedom and sheer economic wealth attributable to a sales finality for the unproductive tangle-foot of transaction by license? This is to invite the very definition of an economic depression.
2 by 2
Examined, is there a procedural bright line that might represent a squaring of the relationships that Project VRM also addresses? There is: It should be made a principle of our economy that each license must be the obvious result of an engaged negotiation. That any transaction lacking such a genesis is by definition a final sale. Evidence of the required genesis can be found in the portfolio of licenses an organization has given out. Any number of similar licenses beyond some small number* is evidence of a lack of good faith, a lack of engaged and unique negotiations, which reveals such transactions as final sales.
The principle on which to build our future economic growth is that a license can only exist as the result of a negotiated transaction, while all others hew to the principle of the final sale. Irrespective of any words, signage, or protestations otherwise, a transaction that does not embody evidence of a preceding and unique negotiation is for all time and purpose a final sale. A license is a negotiated object by it's very nature.
* serendipity can easily be avoided with a limit of no more than a score, and perhaps as few as a dozen undifferentiated agreements.
Generosity
This begs the question, what kind of transaction is a gift? Is a gift really a transaction? Must a gifted license exhibit an individually unique genesis or is this the proper locus for the shrink-wrap license? perhaps yes..
What is Project VRM's purpose when people just want to give you stuff? If Project VRM is going to enable the progress of capitalism, what new policy questions echo the project's technical developments?
--Ed 0x1b 04:43, 4 January 2007 (EST)
Information Ownership & Scope
I understand that part of the goal is to shift the ownership of information, and thus to shift power. I believe that there are addition bits of information which need to be shifted as well.
Does / Can / Should the VRM project also include information about things after a transaction?
My personal itch is my dead laptop... same dead display... 3 times... I've effectively thrown away $1500 on this piece of crap. I'd like to at least be able to warn others (staking my reputation to it)... to avoid the vendor in question. (Not mentioned here to keep things civil and un-biased)
Is this type of information something that belongs in the VRM scheme of things??
-- MikeWarot January 9, 2006
