 Citizen empowerment and dealing with government is through assuming authority to manage what leaders do in our name. It requires exercise of owner authority. That authority is available on things where we, as a public, find such agreement that we are able to speak as a people who own the nation. We speak as the owner to the hired leaders who otherwise accept their own privilege. Gaining that level of agreement is our challenge. It starts with something to accomplish that has an agreed value to we the people. In this section, we will address three opportunities for citizens to interfere with what authority-based government has done in our name. The value of our interference is that every time we exercise our authority, it puts our real authority in your face before leaders who are otherwise sure that citizens can be manipulated, divided, and or effectively ignored. Our source for patent and copyright law is directly written into our Constitution as to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to the authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. The purpose actually served by our laws is to secure these benefits to corporate organizations and their privileged leaders under the theory that the inventors and authors were not to be effectively privileged. Privilege supports privilege in harvesting the beneficial results of commoners. The redefining of the purpose to support non-citizen corporate interests is flagrant dismissal of the constitutional duty placed on Congress. Instead of supporting useful arts and sciences, patent laws promote planned obsolescence, the removal of public use of valued items so they can be replaced with new protected items. The control allows to privilege leaders is support for what privileged leaders would prefer that the public purchases. Granting follow-on patents allows business leaders to withdraw patent and items from the market so that items that break cannot be repaired or again purchased, no matter what value the public may have in them. The effect is endless extension of the protection, even as the benefit to the public is withdrawn. It is protecting the provider from having to compete with other patented versions. This has nothing to do with promoting the progress of science and the useful arts. It has nothing to do with serving the public, the inventors, or the artists. What it does accomplish is authorizing and supporting corporate entities as they restrict the benefits that progress of science might provide to the public. I note that this is statute law passed by Congress. There is no reason for it to continue except for the unwillingness or inability of our congressional leadership to do what they were directed to do in the Constitution. Doing this was a duty that Congress was assigned in our initiating document, a duty our leaders refused. Our empowerment purpose returns to a black box understanding that government was to generate a productive output that would be received by and valued by we the people of the United States. There is no other performance to be considered. Correction is a direct application of performance orientation and approach. It is a lesson in how you will be empowered and will empower yourself and others through what you initiate, manage, or support as an action by we the people. Our approach demonstrates how we identify those things of such personal values as citizens that we can come to agreement on a mandate to our leaders for their action. There are two recipients for government services in this provision. There is the public that is to receive the benefit of what inventors and authors produce. There are authors and inventors who are to receive the benefit of public support for their efforts productive results. Our understanding of value is the first application. We only value what we receive. If we are not receiving the value, then it has no value. The public value associated with supporting inventors and artists is pretty obvious. The public gets the benefit of what is invented. The public has access to artistic works. Central encouragement of inventors and artists is a value to we the people. To the contrary, permitting corporations to withdraw selected inventions and artistic works from public access sharply reduces that public value. Supporting control of invention by those who do not invent or create artistic results severely limits the value for authors and inventors. It limits the value of their work. What we have as patent and copyright law works to defeat the public purpose that is set upon our lawmakers in the Constitution. And if you are ever so bold as to bring this up to one who accepts their own privilege in rule, you will receive the common and repetitious response that this is the way these laws work everywhere in the world. It is presented as the right way to do things. It is presented as the best way to promote the useful arts and science as it assures maximum funding for inventive and artistic efforts. And if you persist, the final dismissal is in the spirit of, it works. And we do not fix things that are not broken. Inter repetition, privilege in our leadership does work. It does get things done. The problem is that it is very poor at getting things done. It promotes stability, resisting everything that would cause changes, whether beneficial or not. As a deeper consideration, we have the historical lesson of the long period of stability associated with stable and long-lasting feudal society. We call it the Dark Ages, because there was some little actual improvement accomplished. It was a long period with little, it might be called, progress. Progress in the science and arts is not supported by putting the right people in charge of it. It is not supported by transferring the benefits of invention and copyright to the right people. This is not the value for we the people who invent or author works of art. It is just one more way for privileged leaders to harvest the benefits that might be earned by those who invent or author works of art. We do have some historical knowledge that can help us see a reasonable direction for seeking agreement. We have the very concept of the common law. This common law was developed as a way to assure the relative peacefulness of society and support of business. It was a way to use law and order for the lives of the peasants so that they would be productive, which provided a foundation for privileged leadership harvesting their own wealth and position from supporting commoners. The English common law was, when feudal government ruled, subject to the king's administrative rule. The king's law would rule over the common law. The king's law could take actions for the good of the rule, as in supporting the calling up of commoners to serve in public projects or military actions. It was changed with the action that initiated the Magna Carta, leading to more of an administrative role for the king, eventually shifting authority to parliament and the people's representatives. In the American Revolution, feudal authority was denied, and the common law officially embraced as the basis for American law. What we have is privileged leadership accepting that their legislation replaces the American common law. It is the nature of privileged leadership to put the sovereign government back in charge, saying to the good of the people for the purpose of assuring their welfare through benevolent rule. You are the public. What does putting the right people in charge of inventors and artists deliver to you? If you are the artist, does giving benefit of special government protection to your boss provide value to you, or does it take value away? You are the public, the only party in interest. If the implementation created by our privileged leaders is not serving you, it is time to consider pulling the plug and getting a different direction. With this study, we have an alternative approach, and it is designed to optimize what we as people can accomplish. We have a limited history of what performance science can do. It multiplies productive output. For intelligent applications, we must also recognize the human cost, and it is the cost of change. We rightfully note that human beings approach change as a cost, not as a benefit. There is human value in being able to rely on the stability of our environment. We do not generally value change, even for an improvement potential. Intelligence supports investment. Stepping forward when we have a fairly certain understanding that the benefit of some change will justify it, what it will cost us. In this situation, privileged leaders are not true parties in interest. Their resistance to change is expected, but should not be a consideration beyond the ability to cause harm to those who might implement a change. We, the people, are the only party in interest. We have a government that has avoided our clear instruction to do what leaders feel to be the right thing, copying and supporting a damaging system instead of supporting us. The question of cost and benefit is for us to answer. There is no authority in any public leader to avoid our constitutional assignment, or to modify it to better support foreign nations. Our choice is between accepting the cost of change, to have our government serve us more effectively, or to continue as we have with whatever it costs us to do so. So why are there patent laws? Where would these come from? They were special privileges granted by sovereign authority to those whose special productivity support the sovereign's administration. They were things that the government of privileged leadership considered to be of value. The granting a special benefit was an encouragement for those who would do something from which the aristocracy could benefit. It might not even be an economic reward, but be special recognition such as granting knighthood. The key was a benefit to the sovereign that could be rewarded. We did not have much in the way of advancements to honors it during the Dark Ages. The application of privilege was given full potency, and the resulting stability was to the point of social and economic stagnation. With the founding of the American colonies, there was a significant relaxation of privilege in leadership, even from that in England. The people had to be inventive to live in some level of prosperity. There was no aristocracy in charge to harvest benefit from the inventiveness of people. There was no system of special reward from the crown for citizens who excelled in the colonies. The colonies were somewhat isolated from aristocracy. There were generations being born in the New World, without even the experience of what remained of feudal privilege in England. The American Revolution further distanced the people from experience with privileged rule, that colonists generally identified themselves as English subjects, but it had a somewhat different meaning when the authority of government was a month away. There was only a watered-down version of it active in their lives. The people had become considerably less dependent upon privilege leadership. In the founding of the new nation, and especially constitutional government, we have a whole new concept of governance. It was a new definition of we the people as a corporate owner and initiating legal authority. It was empowerment of the government through a business document, an effective contract by and among the people. The people could not grant sovereignty over their neighbors, because they did not have that sovereignty to grant. Under the law covering such agreements, a person could only give what they actually owned. The source of power for patent law had to come from the people, not from a sovereign who benefited from what some commoner accomplished. The purpose of the welfare of the people is stated right up front in our Constitution, and it is the purpose for the people, the public, not for special people in charge. The Industrial Revolution came with a new class of industrially privileged. It granted them privileges as corporate leaders. It could be their corporate name on the patent. Granting ownership of patents to corporate bodies instead of citizens is wholly wrong. What this did accomplish was treating government benefits as a commercial item. It is now being bought and sold as an intellectual property belonging to employers. This provides us a few opportunities that we can pursue with the purpose of so defining value that we can establish mandate for our leaders to implement. The first is to strip corporations of any and all government rights. The idea that they are somehow in competition with citizens for a voice in government is ludicrous. Granting corporations representation as criminal behavior, allowing corporate entities to buy influences in the operation of government, comes within the definition of bribery, of felony. Leaders who accept benefit from corporate entities are engaged in criminal acts. They can and should be recognized as public criminals and treated accordingly. This is a startling level of change. How can this possibly be presented so that people can accept it? The answer is to present it in stages that can be accepted. The change in law of patent and copyright is one early step in reclaiming citizen ownership. Our active rule is that there is no value in patents unless it is received by the public, by citizens who are the ultimate customers of government. Unless the inventors and artists who create publicly valued works are not the ones who receive benefit of government protection, there is no public purpose being served. Mandating a change so that only citizens can receive patent and copyright protection is a huge step in denying corporate privilege. And we ask again if citizen protection is to be a service provided by government for its citizens or a service available to those who can afford it. We may not be able to find agreement on such things, but raising the question just clarifies the value that we should be getting as inventors and artists. One of the first things to go is the concept that employment by business is some reason to grant patent to employers. There is no public purpose in protecting employers through their private contracts with inventors and artists. These private arrangements have nothing to do with the public protection purpose that is set on Congress. The government is not even a party to these employment arrangements, and the idea that these can control who gets the benefit of public protection is outside any legal authority. This travesty allows the corporation to buy and sell patent rights of the owner. It defeats the very public purpose for having public protections. The difference is endemic. If it is the inventor or artist who holds the patent, then if they change employers, their protection goes with them. The corporate business will no longer be able to treat public protection as their property. The corporation will only benefit by working with the patent holder. This will not make the invention less valuable as the customers do not make their purchase decisions in accord with who holds patent rights. It just serves the inventors and artists instead of serving privileged business leaders as if they were the public. We must always return to the central concept that stands behind our constitutional government. It is that we the people set purpose upon government that would come to exist under our constitutional agreement. It is the purpose of we the people. It is government that will see to the needs and wants of people. As specifically stated, this included placing a few important duties upon named public officers. Among these, set into our congressional representatives, were the duties and responsibilities that were to be served by granting public patent and copyright protections to artists and inventors. They were to be no dark ages in the United States. This was to be a government that served the people. This was a challenge to those who would rule over the United States. It set a duty upon Congress. Our leaders set the purpose of serving the people aside. They chose to do the right things and to do them well. And so they did the right thing and it was promoting those who contributed most to running the economy. It was supporting the corporate barons in their efforts to secure the benefits of common citizens who worked for them. Our challenge as those who are learning orientation to performance is that what they have done is not what they were instructed to do and not what they were authorized to do and not what served the purpose for their being provided authority. Fundamental to this is that orientation in business law to its historical foundation in the law of master and servant. Employment law includes the concept that the employee is bonding him or herself out into temporary servitude when signing an agreement. It is the us and them concept that is now used throughout business law. It is not considered an agreement between equals but an acceptance of employees in the employer as temporary master. We have spoken also concerning the limit placed on congressional authority. They are not even allowed to pass laws and interfere with the obligations of contract but they have felt quite free to step into master and servant legal relations. The legal master is to give the benefit of the work that the servant performs. So that remnant of our history of leaning towards slavery was written into the patent and copyright law. The master owned productive results of employee efforts. This is just historical knowledge. It is how the purpose of serving we the people has been set aside in a very public forum to intentionally deny legal protection to those who Congress was legally bound to protect. It was serving a purpose they were forbidden to serve. This is an area of opportunity for those who would set change upon our leaders. It is not in itself a great change but will likely be resisted strongly by our leaders. We the people are when we find our agreement able to mandate a change to support our purposes. Perhaps the easiest change for we the people to mandate is one that removes incentive to use patent law for abusive purposes. That is where the most money has been harvested from the public and accordingly provides the most incentive for change. Other changes may be pursued along with removing the abuse as this involves a fundamental rewriting of existing laws. The citizens ability to challenge a patent is not just a patch on what we have but the entrance of a contrary public spirit of government service. The primary source of abuse is not the patent itself but protection of patent and items that have been withdrawn from the public. The practice of planned obsolescence is so violently opposed to public benefit that its removal is a point of change that may find ready public agreement. Correction is not even that difficult to sell. It is that the public purpose is securing the benefit of the invention. Removing a patent and invention from the public also removes any reason to secure it. Correction is a direct authority for any citizen to challenge the continuation of patent protection from any invention that is withdrawn from the public. If the public benefit is gone, the purpose for patent protection is also gone. Note that this also opens second attempt patents for inventions that were granted protection but never pursued to the benefit of the public. They can be declared null and void, opening the way for others to complete the invention and bring it to fruition. The purpose is benefit to the public and patent is not intended to limit it. To this we have another consideration. Is patent and copyright protection to be a commodity that government sells to those who seek and are willing to pay for it? Or should it be a public service that is granted to inventive and artistic citizens? Answering this may be a separate challenge as it involves committing public funds and may well be more an issue than the protection itself. The final thought on patents is that of intentional international patents. There is a general community of invention protection that promotes corporate privileges. This will be disrupted as actually serving the public is not currently supported in other nations either. This change will certainly have significant worldwide effect. Our guide for this is the doctrine of reciprocity. We do not have to accept the limits of other nations but can accept their patents even as they can accept ours. Our relationship with foreign patents will be altered. We also have to consider the nature of public charity. This is payment to good causes. You know, doing the right thing with money taken from citizens for the purpose of operating their government. In our performance approach we recognize the two essential metrics. What we commit to government and the value of what comes back to us because of our commitment. Taxing the public is a challenge all in itself. It removes customer choice, the very concept of value being delivered to the public. It makes the question of what public charity actually entails. We know that it is delivery of value from the public resources to those who are in need. It is benefiting some people at the expense of others based on their needs. Our immediate challenge is that this is not the personal definition of charity. The person has a value decision. That is more important or valuable to direct personal resources to someone else than to use it for other purposes. Note that personal charity can be well described within our performance model. It is a purchase decision based on value committed to receive what the charitable person values. On trying to address public charity in these terms we hit the immediate challenge of value. What we value is prosperity. It is having sufficient resources to have choices in where we expend in order to get what we value. It is our money that is being expended on public charity. Money sees from us to operate our government. If leaders tap into this money for other purposes it is embezzlement. A felony. Leaders who engage in it are criminals. It goes beyond simple misrepresentation. What we are doing is simply wrong for anyone who claims to be a representative. We next ask the performance question of what we, the ones who pay for public charity, both receive and value as a product of the expenditure. The answer seems to be one of giving us notice that it has been spent. That we are somehow beneficiaries of our political leaders doing the right thing with the money we entrusted to their care. We have two related questions to guide our analysis. The first is authority of government. The second is the duties and responsibilities of elected leaders. For authority, we have to recognize the hard legal limits of authority. We are the source of all government authority in the United States. And we can only legally provide our government with authorities that we have as individuals. We do have public authority where we, the people, are agreed to fund the existence and operation of our government. We do not have like authority to put our hands into our neighbor's pockets for the purpose of charity. If we do not have that authority, then we cannot authorize government to give public charity with other people's money. We also have the challenge of duties and responsibilities set upon our elected federal officers. They are authorized to see to the welfare of we, the people. Not to the welfare of some of the people at the expense of the rest. Having a good cause is not justification for issuing benefits to some citizens with other citizens' money. That is embezzlement. As to the economy, we have granted authority to the government to perform some functions of management for the benefit of we, the people. This provides us a potential alternative to public charity, and it is management of the charity of citizens. The only way this service can have value is to support the charitable decisions of citizens. There is just no way to justify criminal giving of charity by decision of public leaders. If the federal government can, and probably should, provide for the management of charitable funds as a public service, it would at the very least involve identifying needs to be served and publication of both costs and benefit information in support of citizen decisions. There would be the benefit of having a fair broker to manage the giving, connecting the available resources to the needs, and watching over the expenditures as the representatives of those who volunteer that charity. Resistance by leadership is likely to be stiff, but uncoordinated. Gathering to intentionally perform embezzlement is conspiracy to commit the felony. Resistance will be personal, and not be able to overcome any public agreement to the contrary. This is a no-cost opportunity, a win-win approach for benefiting our nation as well as us as individual citizens. And we are the only party in interest. Our final subject in this section is the national debt. For addressing this threatening situation, we need to again look at the agency of our public leaders in light of the American common law. First, an agent represents people they are not sovereign rulers. They only represent specific persons. Then an agent only has the authority to represent as granted or supported by the ones they represent. What they do otherwise is on their own authority, and they are personally responsible for unauthorized actions. Here is the first breaching privilege. Our leaders only represent the public that elects them. They do not represent the next generation. The debts incurred by parents are not passed to their children. There is an absolute legal block to inherited debt responsibility in our law, passing debt to surviving children as a form of slavery, and it's wholly unacceptable. No matter what laws Congress passes, our children are not born in debt. Collecting on a debt from children after the parents have died is not supported in law. Payment for our national debt is probably becoming uncollectible at the rate of around 2% a year. The opportunity to change things is front and center on this one. Any representative who espouses children being born in debt is likely to be replaced quickly by the voting public. Raising the public challenge of the credit of the United States with other nations is unlikely to make any difference. Government leaders maintaining privilege by impoverishing the next generation will not be well accepted. The challenge once raised is not easily set aside. The second assault on privileges also legal accountability. The agent who takes actions not authorized by people they represent is personally liable. The leader who incurs public debt that will not be paid back by the public is on the hook to pay from his or her own resources. They can be sued by those whose loan is being refused and they can be sued for all they have. That is within the nature of our law. When once crimes become known, they can be held personally accountable for both public and private damages that result from their actions. What is wonderful about this as a spur to change is that every citizen has immediate standing to sue at law for personal damages. That is going to be scary to any leader who would act based on privilege instead of representation.