* PhD thesis – “Property, Commoning and the Politics of Free Software”. J. Martin Pedersen. Thesis submitted January 2010, Department of Philosophy, Lancaster University. Examined by Massimo De Angelis.

The thesis is a philosophical and political inquiry into the material nature of immateriality and was published as the first of a two volume Special Issue of The Commoner and also presented on http://commoning.wordpress.com

The P2P Paradigm consists in our view here of three main aspects: peer production, as the availability of open and free input and free aggregation of cooperating individuals around common projects; peer governance, as the way these communities govern themselves and deal with their conflicts in participatory ways; and peer property, as the way of protecting the common output from private appropriation.

A previous treatment of this very important, but largely unstudied topic in the context of peer to peer developments, was:

* Code. Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Commons: Rishab Aiyer Ghosh (Ed). MIT Press, 2005.

Martin Pederson critiques that the Free Software Movement is opposed to seeing free softare as property, and argues there is much to gain by seeing it as property.

I find that some of Martin’s statements make quite strong claims:

1) that the free culture movement is not itself a civil rights movement but makes parasitical usage of previous civil rights struggles

2) that virtual commoners see themselves necessarilty separate from any real commons

Certainly there is a grain of truth in each of the statements, but at the same time, they could also be interpreted as unjustified simplications that seem to esssentialize these movements instead of seeing them as complex and pluralistic movements with many differences and shades of opinion. Personally, I know plenty of free software advocates who have no problem with seeing free software as a new form of common property, free culture advocates that recognizing their grounding in earlier struggles, and internet advocates that full realize the material grounding of their infrastructure.

Overall, the aim of the work seems destined create a more exclusively anti-capitalist commons movement, based on an alliance between the advocates of a land commons and those that fully understand the materiality of cyberspace, with an understanding of the unacceptability of current capitalist relations of production.

Martin Pedersen:

“I develop a view on property that is inspired by the phenomenon of Free Software. It is paradoxical because the Free Software Foundation, the self-organised civil society institution and social movement that defines Free Software, does not see the concept of property as relevant for Free Software. They vehemently reject the idea. In that sense I am standing outside the movement, insofar as we understand the movement as the voice of its leaders. But why should we?

Although I argue against their rejection of property, the main purpose is not to advise the Free Software Foundation on matters of policy strategy and tactics, but to provide the wider global network of social movements working to (re-)create commons with a map and matrix of property that can be used to advance their causes and to grasp just how multi-faceted a concept property is. Understanding Free Software as property is a very useful starting point for transcending existing conceptions of property, because when understood as property, Free Software opens the door for radically different configurations of property. Importantly, Free Software is an example of a community articulating their own relational modalities and thus defining how they self-organise to make space for a realisation of their “needs, desires, aspirations, affects and relations” (De Angelis 2005a). While it is certainly an important victory for community based, self-legislation, it is perhaps even more importantly a crack in property where the light gets in: if we inscribe the relational modalities of Free Software upon the concept of property, then the concept is forever changed. In other words, its “framing effect” would be entirely different and informed debate become possible.

Above I used the term paradox to avoid any association with self-contradiction. It might be read as if I am contradicting myself, declaring allegiance with social movements, then turning around to conceptualise the dynamics of a social movement in terms that they reject. However, the contradiction is on their part.

The libertarian values that the Free Software and Free Culture movements exhibit are not liberties that were won in the struggle for virtual commons and the right to share digital information and cooperate on software projects. The freedoms upon which the Free Software commons rests – the liberties that make it possible for such a movement to act and organise – are liberties won by struggling women and men, who with their bodies fought for land and freedom. The habeas corpus in which virtual commoners find themselves is an outcome of a struggle that has been unfolding for almost a millennia. Arguably, the leadership of the Free Software and Free Culture movements are separating themselves from the real commons. The commons of the land and the commons of the means of production and distribution are the fundamental commons without which virtual commons are merely lambs for the profit slaughter.”