P2P Foundation

I’m not sure that many people really understand the innovative nature of the new forms of peer property that are used in peer production.

These new forms have at least 3 characteristics:

1) they are aimed against the private appropriation of the commonly created value

2) they are aimed at creating the widest possible usage, i.e. they are universal common property regimes

3) they keep the sovereignity with the individual

The third aspect is why peer property fundamentally differs both from private property and collective property.

Private property is individual but is exclusionary, it says, what is mine is not yours.

But state, that is collective property, is also exclusionary, but in another sense: it says, it is ours, but it means that you no longer have the sovereignity. It’s from us, regulated by a bureaucracy or representative democracy, but it is not really yours. The collective has taken over from the individual, and more often than not, coercion is involved.

But the General Public License, or the Creative Commons licences are different. Common property is not collective property.

Using them, the individual gets full attribution, i.e. the recognition of his personal property. You are freely sharing your sovereignity with others. This is especially clear in the Creative Commons licensing schemes, where the individual gets a whole gamut of options for sharing. You remain fully in control, i.e. “sovereign”, and there is no coercion involved.

Peer property then, is not just a third alternative property form, but also a transcendent property form, that combines the key features of both private property, it is mine, and of collective property, it is ours, to a form where it is both mine and ours at the same time.