A modern method for managing intellectual property
As populations grow and society’s demands become more complex, human economy continues to grow in complexity too. Our ability to build more complex systems depends on the division of labor and the specialization of expertise that is enabled by dividing labor. Every dimension of human industry has fragmented, and will continue to fragment, into ever more numerous and narrow specializations.
The US Department of Labor recognizes something around 70,000 labor specializations. The more sophisticated our science, art, culture, and society become, the more types of specialization will be developed and necessary. But new types of specialized labor don’t necessarily supersede older types of labor. We may not have many coopers and chandlers anymore, but a winemaker has been a winemaker for generations, a cheesemaker, a cheesemaker. The methods and technologies may have changed, but the old ways persist and have value.
Many of these older, more generalized labor areas will always persist in some form. We still need to do all the things that we used to do, like harvest lumber, mine resources, grow food, and build structures. But even inside these broad areas, we no longer have – at any sort of economic scale – a lumberjack craftsman that cuts down trees and turns them into chairs. As examined in “I, Pencil”, the economy is so diverse and specialized that no single person actually understands how to make something as (formerly) ubiquitous as a pencil, and no single person can possibly craft one themselves.
To update the analogy, no single person knows how to make a computer. The amount of people involved in producing a single computer arguably and distantly contains the entire human race. We need thousands of people in the supply chain for a single stick of RAM or a single monitor from a single manufacturer, and even that discards the role that all the suppliers of more basic components and resources contribute to the finished product, such as who mines the ores, and who makes the equipment that the ore miners use, or who smelts that ore, and on and on.
And then once the computer is built, how many people are involved in programming it to turn it into something useful? And once the computer has an operating system and turns on, what about each application it runs, or the internet it connects to? Or all the infrastructure required to get power to that computer, to build the building it sits inside of, to provide the internet service it’s connected to, and on and on.
The scale of the modern economy is both marvelous and astonishing. But the way we approach our economy, using the traditional methods of business and government, is limiting and wasteful. Our economy has to constantly redevelop highly identical means and methods to deliver tiny variations on the same products, because each piece of intellectual property and operational know-how are owned by single organizations. The patenting system has been a marvelous promoter of inventor rights and temporary government monopolies for IP, and has led to the promotion of publication of what would otherwise remain as trade secrets. But the patent system is limited in its outdated structure, and only incorporates certain basic aspects of IP, while disregarding the new evolutions of IP that have developed since the patent system was adopted by the early US government in the late 1700s.
As with all other aspects of society, the world has moved on, knowledge and skills have improved, and what we both need and can do has changed significantly in the 250 years since America’s founding. It’s time for a new approach to business, confidential information, and intellectual property. I call this new approach, “open access everything”.
“Open access everything”, or OAE, is the idea that all human knowledge must be publicly available for it to receive any legal protection or be legally accepted into the marketplace, both of human ideas and of actual products. Every aspect of any product, company, and offering must be made available in its totality so that it can be examined and understood by anyone who is chooses to do so.
OAE does not mean that creators, inventors, developers, designers, etc aren’t compensated. On the contrary, in my envisioning this approach provides a more robust, explicit, and direct method of compensation to everyone involved in the invention, development, production, and sale of products and services, no matter how simple or complex.
OAE doesn’t mean that businesses aren’t permitted to keep trade secrets or confidential information, only that any products available for purchase or sale must have their entire detail required for reproduction or replication available, which is an extension of current patent obligation. Any corporation must provide public copies of its contract templates and agreements, as an extension of current copyright, but the same business would not be obliged to publish specific executed copies, simply the output details of those agreements.
All of these materials must be published into a publicly accessible digital repository with a chain of custody between the originator and the user. A few examples to consider include:
- Computer code, so that everyone knows what a piece of software does.
- Product designs, engineering, and specifications, so that everyone knows how to operate and repair products and equipment.
- Recipes and supply chains, from food to pharmaceuticals and any other chemistry, biology, or agricultural products, so that everyone knows what they’re consuming or putting in or on their body.
- DNA and other natural products, so that everyone can learn from and understand the health and ecological impacts of the material.
- Contract templates, securities, and other business agreements, so that everyone knows what they’re getting into, and what to expect from a business.
- Corporate ownership details that resolve to actual specific living individuals, so that everyone knows who is the beneficial owner and who is responsible for the actions of the organization.
- Corporate transaction details, so that everyone knows how organizations are related and connected, and where the money is going.
- Copyrighted material, so that everyone knows what exactly is claimed and by whom.
- Other relevant organizational materials not listed here, the list goes on forever and cannot be exhausted, as humanity will always produce more iterations.
OAE only applies to corporations, government, and other multi-person organizations and institutions like religious firms, not-for-profits, and other imaginary structures that are created by humans for the advancement of private or public concerns. OAE does not apply to private persons or their personal information. This approach does not, for example, require the publication of private personal details, such as the transactions a person engages or their communications, location, or activities. No private person is required to disclose what they’re spending their money on or where they’re going. Nobody should care if someone is buying sex toys, snorting coke, or where they’re eating dinner. Busybodies may care, which is their right, but individual, personal privacy is a right, as is bodily autonomy.
But corporations and organizations aren’t persons, and don’t have a right to privacy, even if the individuals who work collectively to create a corporation or organization do have a personal right to privacy.
OAE simply demands that, due to the complexity of modern civilization and society, that all non-individual-person information be published and locatable through a common resource, and that the organization can only receive legal protections, recognition, and support if it complies with OAE. This is a tit-for-tat, quid-pro-quo obligation – if you want the limitations of liability that organizing as a formal organization provides, then the organization must provide its detailed information under OAE to obtain that recognition.
This approach will dramatically reduce costs and waste across society by obviating unnecessary reproduction of capabilities and materials, streamlining corporate (and other organizational) operations, and enabling everyone to gain the benefit of improvements to human knowledge. This approach can eliminate human slavery, forced labor, and human trafficking on an organizational level, which is far more pernicious, harmful, and widespread than the same activities on a personal level.
This approach also preserves and enhances compensation to the individual persons who develop new human knowledge, and enables them to ensure they receive compensation for the use of the knowledge they contribute. It’s a modernization of copyright and patents to reflect everything we’ve learned since the late 1700s, and incorporates those lessons into a new version of the concepts of patent and copyright.
Everything in the OAE method would have an inventor/originator/innovator/contributor style tag, and use of any contents of the OAE archives would include mandatory payment systems by the users. This would enable any person or organization to make use of the products of human effort by others, while ensuring that the originator is compensated for their work. That’s why the system has to be digital, so that everything can have metadata attached to it, as well as transaction and distribution methods.
And when a person dies, since they are no longer available to be paid, their royalties are no longer due, reducing the cost of using the work of someone who has passed away, and ensuring that corporations cannot continue to charge for work whose originator is no longer alive. When someone’s prior work is improved, the derivatives and improvements continue to pay down a portion of income to the descendants (of the work, not of the person), but the new contributor who contributed the descendent by improving the ancestor receives a portion of the revenues resulting from the use of their work, too.
Over time, older works become less and less expensive to use as their originators pass away, eventually producing a zero-use-cost once all inventors are gone, and newer works that derive from them become less expensive too (since their legacy cost structures are reduced as the human ancestors of the ancestor-invention expire). This incentivizes the continued progress of human knowledge in order to constantly find new innovations to make money from, while ensuring that everyone has ever-lower-costs to access older human innovations.
Let’s take, for example, software. Most software is already copy-pasted from code repos and forums, but the people who write the actual code that is being copy-pasted do not financially benefit from the reproduction of their effort. Coders collaborate to solve problems, and in good faith, share their solutions with other coders. These coders are often employed by corporations. One coder comes up with a solution, shares it, and then another coder copies the method to solve a business problem. This freely-shared method ends up included in a piece of corporately owned closed-source software, and the corporation financially benefits from the solution shared freely by the originator.
Neither the originator nor the person who found and obtained the solution get fair compensation for solving the problem on behalf of the company, who takes the free work to benefit itself, and denies any benefit to others unless the corporation gets paid. Strange, isn’t it? The corporation demands payment for “its” work, but the corporation didn’t do that work, two people did who freely exchanged the information. This deprivation of benefit from the original inventor, and transfer of the inventor’s value to a corporation, is an outcome of the extremely outdated social and legal structures surrounding human inventiveness and corporate organization.
By putting all software elements into a public repo and tracking the specific authors of each line of code, as well as tracking evolutions and improvements to that code snippet over time, anyone wishing to develop an application can take advantage of the greatest abilities of all the coders to ever live, reviewed and improved over time. When someone finds an improvement or permutation of that code, the new programmer becomes an inheritor of the ancestral code, and also a contributor (inventor, innovator, etc) that begins receiving royalties when their own code is reused elsewhere. It’s an automation and digitization of patent and copyright, injected into the veins of one of the most important industries in the modern era.
Consider Microsoft, a company that people hate and depend on. Modern computing runs on Windows and Office. But Windows and Office are closed source, and because Microsoft gets to control the publication of its codebase, the products improve only marginally when, if open sourced, they could improve exponentially. The Company gets to constantly attack users and reduce the innate value of its products, not by improving, but by ever-more-desperately imposing injury and insult to the people who rely on Windows and Office through countless means, generally described as “enshittification” – the long-term decay of value of an entrenched piece of software. Instead of making Windows better, they add telemetry to track users, then inject advertisements into the workflow. This does nothing to improve the value for users, it actually deteriorates the user value, but it makes Microsoft a lot of money.
Under OAE, the entire Microsoft codebase (and any other kind of software someone wants to sell) would be obligatorily open-sourced. Anyone would be able to branch Windows or Office, and either include or exclude the newest features that Microsoft develops. At the same time, because anyone can branch the software, they would be able to remove features that Microsoft has developed that the user doesn’t want, develop new features that they do want, or improve on existing features. And since those user contributions would be part of OAE, Microsoft could then merge those new features into the next version, and the independent contributors would be compensated for that inclusion through the open-source license payment structures. Everyone benefits here: Microsoft gets a better product with lower development costs, developers get to contribute and get paid for it, and users are assured flexibility and value for the product that they’re paying for.
Instead of the constant decay in value that’s encouraged from monopolistic ownership of closed-source codebases, a core tenet of enshittification, Microsoft would benefit from the use of its software by others, and the continual improvement by others, but if Microsoft were to make changes that users didn’t like, the users could branch the software to exclude those changes. This forces Microsoft back into responding to market needs and demands, whereas currently users have no choice but to accept any abuses Microsoft imposes – enshittification.
Consider another example, the recipe for Coca Cola. It was developed in the late 1800s, and continues to be one of the most popular drinks in the world. However, nobody knows the recipe, and everyone who participated in its invention is long dead. Why should current corporate executives have the right to enrich themselves because of the labor of people who have been dead for more than 100 years? And by preserving in private a recipe that’s been around for generations, Coca Cola is able to use its proceeds to buy up new drink companies and oligopolize the drinks market, to the harm of consumers world-wide. Coke is depriving the world of knowledge that fundamentally informs the human experience, but the people depriving the world of that knowledge contributed exactly nothing to the development of the knowledge itself. They didn’t even contribute to the development of the knowledge that they’re using to then acquire other knowledge. They’re just benefitting from an outdated monopolistic business structure that may have made sense in 1790 but is outdated, baffling, and actively harmful today.
Why exactly is a 150-year-old sugar-water mixture a multi-billion-dollar organization when it contributes essentially nothing to the world except plastic pollution and obesity? Because a long time ago, someone came up with a tasty drink? It’s absurdity. Coke uses this monopoly over a single recipe to buy new drink companies, redirect the profits and benefits of those new drinks from the originators, and then kills those products at its leisure so that Coke has less competition. Most drink companies purchased by Coke, and their products, are slowly put out of business because it’s essentially impossible for these new products to become as popular as Coke. But they never have a chance to become as popular as Coke when they’re acquired then shut down. Why should countless recipes be kept private to continue enriching Coke, and thus incentivize the destruction of human knowledge and innovation for the sole benefit of Coke executives and shareholders? What have these persons done to earn such an incredible power in our economy? Literally nothing. It’s an accidental happenstance of our economy being frozen in time for generations, where persons and corporations inherit assets, rights, and benefits they’ve done nothing to earn or contribute to the advancement of.
With OAE, recipes for Coke products would be publicly available. Anyone using the recipe would still owe Coke royalties for use of its contributions to the world (to the extent that the originators are alive, which in this case, they are not, but for example the originators of Coke Zero are still alive, and such would qualify), but Coke would no longer have a monopoly on the supply of the products of the Coke recipe, and would no longer be able to use those proceeds to dominate the market and kill competition. They’d have the brand, for sure, but not a monopoly on the knowledge that the brand has. This would demand that Coke continue to contribute something useful to the world instead of just squatting on something that has become a core part of human existence.
Another related concern is the “right to repair” market. Apple and John Deere, for example, deny access to product information and intentionally obscure functionality to prevent people from repairing their own devices. This increases profits to the original manufacturer, but how does society benefit from this? Apple and John Deere benefit through externalization. They separate the benefits from the costs, keep the benefits to themselves, and assess the costs to the users. This process of externalization, or separating the benefit from the cost, is one of the core problems of our outdated social, legal, and government structures around patents, copyright, and other elements of human industry as it relates to the generation and use of knowledge.
With OAE, any product would have its entire specifications, requirements, engineering drawings, and supply chain made available. Anyone using these materials would pay royalties to the owner, but anyone would be able to use these materials to replicate the products or improve upon them. Apple and John Deere would still benefit tremendously, but no longer be able to separate the benefit from the costs and force costs onto their customers by denying those customers access to knowledge about the product the customer paid for.
The ability of businesses to obscure valuable human knowledge for their own enrichment leads to readily preventable dangers and obligates enormous government enforcement structures that would be smaller or in some cases unnecessary if human knowledge were more accessible, and product developers could work from an established body of known-good, known-safe designs, and iterate on those designs instead of having to start from a blank page each time.
For example, the Peleton toddler deaths from an unshielded treadmill. It’s long been known that treadmills must shield the underside of the tread to prevent ingestion injuries, where a person or body part is pulled into the mechanism and harmed. How to build a good, safe, reliable treadmill is no mystery, but it’s made unnecessarily more difficult when existing product designs and specifications are not available for study or improvement.
The same goes for automobiles and other equipment. These are difficult, complex systems that are well understood by automakers worldwide, and have improved dramatically in the last 100 years. Yet Tesla, Nikola, Lucid, and other new startup automakers have had to re-learn existing knowledge from scratch. Why? Who benefits from this, other than legacy shareholders of automakers, who are monopolizing knowledge produced long ago by dead men, and externalizing to society their monopolization of this old knowledge.
Even these companies, the Fords, GMs, Stellantis, Volkswagen, and so on, didn’t produce most of the knowledge themselves, they acquired it from other corporations they bought and killed through a series of market consolidations over the last 100 years. As a consequence of the strangling of human knowledge through outmoded monopolistic approaches to patent and copyright, most corporations don’t develop new knowledge themselves, they wait for someone else to develop it, starve that inventor of capital, then purchase the organization that owns the innovation once it’s been starved and desperate.
If all legal vehicle designs and specifications were publicly accessible, the rate of improvement of automobiles would be improved, so would competition, and yet the people responsible for innovations would continue to be compensated – and in fact, better compensated than they are now, by diversifying the number of users of the information. There would be improved standardization, reducing complexity of designs, reducing supply chains, reducing waste. People would be able to build a common core of knowledge based on what’s proven to work, and iterate at the edges. A new car company wouldn’t have to spend a decade learning how to rain-seal a sunroof, or install doors with aligned panel gaps, because proven methods would be readily available.
On and on, through every aspect of human endeavor, we can find unnecessary duplications of human knowledge and expertise that harm society while enriching private interests who did not actually contribute to the knowledge they’re using, they simply had more money than the inventor, so they bought that information, and now sit on it to continue deriving long-term benefits from something they never contributed to.
Consider medications – most medications are very old and well understood, but have patents on the processes to fabricate molecules. With OAE, contributing parties would still gain the benefit of their contributions, but anyone would be able to use them. And anyone using the knowledge, because their process, facilities, transactions, and supply chain would be public knowledge, would be obliged structurally to use safe processes. Instead of insulin costing hundreds of dollars a month because knowledge is obscured, or rare virus treatments being unaffordable or not worth development costs, by sharing this information publicly but maintaining private compensation for its use, medicine can shift from treatment-based monopolization to outcome-oriented healing. This shifts control and influence away from the bean counters at the corporate executive level and back to the doctors, pharmacists, and chemists at the labor level, letting people regain and retain control over their own productivity.
A big beneficiary of this approach is in entertainment. Music, movies, TV, games, and other forms of entertainment are enormous business, but they have huge inherent costs in production, distribution, hosting, and transmission. With OAE, the distribution, hosting, and transmission costs are nearly eliminated, leaving only the production costs. This enables new producers and content creators to exempt most of their cost basis, reducing financing demands to production costs. Since many new creators have wonderful ideas but poor access to financing, while existing content creators simply regurgitate the same material over and over, but they have huge access to financing to do so, we find that existing creators like Disney put out terrible quality products while new creators who have wonderful and fresh ideas can’t get funding to produce a final product whose quality matches the quality of their ideas. This also incentivizes producers to constantly innovate instead of relying on their monopolies to continually reproduce the same content – the 100th iterative remake of the Lion King or Little Mermaid or whatever.
Notably, the most regurgitated works are already public knowledge, benefiting from existing recognition of the expiration of the author’s sole right to use. Disney was built on this concept, most of their early works were based on the fair use of publicly available stories, such as Snow White, Cinderella, Little Mermaid, King Arthur, and on and on and on. All Disney had to do was produce an iteration. It worked well for Disney, so why is it now so important that we prevent others from doing what Disney was so successful at? Just to ensure that Disney’s shareholders benefit? What exactly are they contributing to the world?
For videogames, this OAE approach means that no matter how old a game gets, it can always be kept working, modded, or updated to new hardware or new platforms. Right now, monopolistic copyright of creative works means we constantly lose access to content that is silo’d in the ownership suite of major corporations, like Electronic Arts, Activision-Blizzard, Ubisoft, and other publishers that buy up developer houses, smother those developers, throw the developer’s IP into a cage, then forget it exists. Why can’t people freely access games that these publishers haven’t bothered to maintain or sell for decades?
The publisher clearly doesn’t care about the IP, to the extent they’re not taking action to maintain its accessibility, and yet despite the publisher/owner not caring about the IP, the law enables them to prevent people who do care about it from enjoying it? It’s insane, and it just doesn’t work. It leaves human creativity to rot and loss. Imagine if we weren’t allowed to re-read a book that was written a long time ago, for no other reason than the current copyright owner decided they wanted people to purchase new books instead. Should the world be deprived of To Kill a Mockingbird?
One risk of modern streaming platforms is content loss. Without physical copies ever being produced of new entertainment, the original producer can make content vanish at their choosing, without society having any ability to maintain a copy. What happens when Netflix de-lists Stranger Things or Orange is the New Black? Where will you get a copy to rewatch? Books, art, even VHS and DVD, left a physical copy behind that could be used by anyone who found it, if they had the proper skills and understanding, but digital services can make something that was important to society and culture, at least, for a time, vanish completely and be impossible to see, study, review, analyze, or have any form of interaction with. Our culture gets erased overnight, for no reason other than some nebulous boogeyman of a “shareholder” was ambiguously dissatisfied. That’s no way for a culture to grow, and not healthy for its members.
The study of human existence, our archeologists, anthropologists, sociologists, they have a right to maintain access to the product of human effort so that they can document and understand our society. And other humans, well, we have a right to enjoy the creative labors made by others, regardless if Netflix wants to bear the burden for hosting and streaming expenses for content they produced, but no longer believe in or care about (except to the extent of denying access to others).
We are facing a giant black hole in human efforts for future historians who look back but cannot get copies of software, games, movies, or TV shows. We can’t understand how to build, reproduce, or improve technologies, products, equipment, machinery, medicines, and other artifacts that we rely on to exist. Despite being the most content-producing time in human history, the most knowledge-producing time, and the digitization of content making it easier than ever for people to access and study human works, future historians are going to have the least access to that knowledge, and thus the least ability to study human society and culture from these times. It’s insane! How are we doing a worse job of preserving human culture than papyrus did 8,000 years ago? That’s not advancement, and why are we tolerating this insanity?
It benefits no one, not even the people who claim they’re benefitting because they’re making money. This approach drives up costs, lowers profitability, and lowers value for literally everyone involved, even those nebulous specters of “shareholders”. All we’re doing is preserving concepts that were enshrined in society hundreds of years ago, just because they’ve been around a long time, but the contexts that justified them no longer exist, and the people who came up with these ideas have been dead for centuries, along with the culture and society that found them optimal and appropriate at that time.
We need to wipe away the detritus of history, and build a new system that benefits everyone fairly, in today’s society, today’s culture, today’s context, while learning from, building on, and improving on the systems our ancestors handed down to us. That ability – to learn from, build on, and improve what our ancestors provided us, is literally the intent, purpose, and structure behind OAE. We’re just taking what they gave us, and instead of worshipping it like God’s inerrant word (when we all know that it was just ideas that people had a long time ago, and thus both innately flawed but also dependent on the context of the advancement of knowledge and understanding of society at that point in time), we’re improving what our ancestors gave us, and aligning those old ideas to the world as it is today, what we know now, and what we need to move forward.
The goal of OAE is to make it possible for everyone creating human enterprise to be compensated fairly for their work, and any willful contributors to be able to contribute to the development of human enterprise. Our current methods of paper-based, privately monopolized human production are an artifact of history, not an obligation that must persist unchanged forever and ever amen. The limitations of access and control may have been justified or obligatory in previous generations due to limitations of paper-based recordkeeping and organization, but new digital systems enable the adoption of dramatically more complexity in recordkeeping and organization that respect and incorporate the involvement of a lot more people without a related increase in the amount of effort required to maintain that recognition.
There’s no reason for us to adhere to the methods that worked well for our ancestors but now limit us, and as our populations continue to grow and everything gets more complex, we must embrace change so that we can continue moving forward, or accept our inevitable decline back to the previous developmental complexity that produces the conditions that the rules we’ve adopted are capable of functioning within. If we refuse to change and align our organizational structures and expectations to the new digital reality and the capabilities it provides, either society will continue to stagnate as it has been doing for decades now, in spite of incredible technological progress, or there will be a violent revolution of the beleaguered underclass who can no longer tolerate the shackles of “the way we’ve always done it”. This underclass, if not addressed and brought back to the table, will readily discard so much human progress in order to also discard their oppression. “Those who make peaceful change impossible, make violence inevitable.” I, for one, am not a fan of violence, and prefer to avoid it as much as possible. That means changing the old, outdated rules so that everyone benefits instead of just a few.
As society continues to grow and evolve, acquiring new complexity and new learnings, our approach to human economy must grow and evolve too. OAE is a step forward for human society that enables us to pursue the next iteration of civilization, and enables us to shed many of the old obligations of the former version of a paper-based society that have held us back and enriched a few at the cost of the many. By voluntarily adopting the principles of OAE, we can help existing organizations navigate these difficult and treacherous transitions, preventing a loss of human knowledge and preventing the inevitability of violent revolution that will necessarily occur otherwise.
If society stops evolving in response to human need and capability so that it can maintain protection for the people who have done nothing to contribute to humanity, but merely inherited these assets and structures that benefit them from those long dead, we will continue to find that such inheritors demand that they continue to obtain the benefits granted to them by their ancestors at the expense of everyone else. And this means that everyone else must labors on behalf of the beneficiaries of these unearned inheritances while having the benefit of their own labor separated from them, to provide these unearned benefits to the few entitled people who sit at the top of society.
We cannot justify that a few people benefit from the work of the currently living because of decisions made by the long dead, while the people who are doing the work today get essentially nothing for all the work they contribute. That path is not only madness, and is literally turning people insane, which can be seen from the enormous growth in mental health issues in society. And that path inevitably will produce violence and destruction when we finally reach a breaking point.
We must prevent the destruction of human knowledge and civilization, which requires that we stop separating benefit from cost, and stop driving all the benefits to the shiftless entitled inheritors of “the way things were” at the expense of the people actually alive and doing the work today.
Unless we adopt OAE so that the increasing complexity of society can be managed using the tools available to us now, wealth will continue to centralize in fewer and fewer hands, the incentives to create new things will continue to be starved, and human population will inevitably spiral into decline, destroying tens of thousands of years of progress.
And what do we gain from throwing away all of human history? A small number of people remain massively, unbelievably wealthy for a few more generations, until it all blows up?
Is it really worth throwing away humanity’s past and future just to make sure a few entitled people stay rich for a little while longer when those people didn’t even do any of the work, they just inherited it, while the people actually laboring get essentially nothing for it? This is madness, and it will ruin us.
Its time for humanity to embrace change, to update ourselves to meet the needs and abilities of society today, and steer humanity into a new future that works for everyone, where human knowledge benefits everyone, while preserving the rights of those who do the work. It’s time to open access everything.