Bounty Hunters, Map Makers Gold Miners | Page 3

to me that the metaphor for this system is that of a bounty or reward offered by the public at large for any individual willing to take personal risk for a chance at successfully collecting the bounty. Writers and inventors in this system play the part of Bounty Hunters.
Before you let any preconceived notions and/or prejudices towards bounty hunters cloud your judgment, keep in mind that the same way a cake-cutting algorithm is usually used for something besides cutting cake, so too the bounty hunter algorithm isn't just used for catching outlaws.
In discussing this "bounty hunter" model to people, most thought of Bobba Fett when I said bounty hunter. Bobba Fett is a completely selfish bounty hunter in the Star Wars movies, a faceless, anonymous, soulless character who hunts the good guys. And with this character in mind, a lot of negative reactions were expressed towards the metaphor of writers as bounty hunters.
But to react negatively to a metaphor about intellectual property because it involves bounty hunters, is to react negatively to a cake cutting algorithm because you don't like cake. It isn't really about splitting a cake. And it isn't really about Bobba Fett.
And so, I present to you a tale of a fictional town named Eureka. Eureka was founded in the frontier of the wild, wild west. And it will see bounty hunters of all types.
Afterwards, we'll look at how the metaphor applies to stuff besides cutting cake and catching outlaws.
2 A Town that Never Was
Once upon a time, there was a town by the name of Eureka. It was a good place built by honest and hardworking folks like farmers and ranchers, carpenters and masons, bankers and railroaders. Life in Eureka was good.
For a while, anyway.
It didn't happen all at once, but troubles slowly beset themselves upon Eureka in the form of organized crime, gangs, and outlaws of various sorts. Sheriff Riley had a small group of deputies that managed to keep the peace with the usual troubles that might arise between good folks who had disagreements between one another or simply too much to drink. But his group was too small to chase after bank robbers and train-robbers and cattle rustlers and horse thieves all at the same time.
Since troubles grew slowly, Sheriff Riley and his deputies focused their efforts on whoever was causing the most trouble at the time. When the Coleman Raiders robbed a string of banks, Sheriff Riley and his deputies tracked them down and brought them to justice. Same thing happened when the Farley Gang robbed several stagecoaches. It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough.
For a while, anyway.
But then Tinker Tyson and his outlaws started robbing trains. The problem was that Tinker was really good at robbing trains and really good at not getting caught. He was as smart as he was brutal. After Tinker and his outlaws robbed six trains and killed over a hundred passengers, the Morgan-Jack Locomotive company threatened to stop all train service to Eureka unless the outlaws were arrested.
Sheriff Riley was a thorough but methodical man and looked at all the places Tinker Tyson could be hiding and all the different tracks where Tinker could find trains to rob. Eureka was in the middle of a vast, untamed territory. Riley told the railroad folks he figured with 150 new deputies, he could guarantee he'd either capture Tinker or force him to move on to another city within a year.
That was no where near soon enough, and the railroad company threatened to cut all service to Eureka unless Tinker Tyson was captured within a month. And they wouldn't come back to Eureka until he was caught.
A whole year without train service would kill the city of Eureka, and the townsfolk knew it. They also knew that even if they could afford to wait a year to flush out Tyson, they could never afford 150 new deputies on the town's payroll.
Victor Clayton, one of the biggest property owners in Eureka, came forward with $25,000 of his own money as a reward for anyone who could bring Tinker Tyson to justice within a month. Clayton knew that if Eureka lost train service, he could lose everything he owned.
The Haskell brothers had heads big enough to think they could take on Tinker Tyson. Unfortunately those big heads weren't filled with the smarts enough to know the difference between causing trouble in a local bar and taking on a band of professional outlaws. Tinker decided to use them as a warning to the others and had them killed. With that, no one else seemed interested in even thinking about collecting the reward. After a week, Clayton raised the reward to $50,000.
This got the interest of a local gunslinger by the name of Garrett who knew a thing or two about trains