Smary McCarthy of the Icelandic Fablabs has a recap of some of our mailing list debates about the possibilities for open hardware, and which licenses are optimal, in a long contribution on his blog.

He starts the entry by asking himself: How should one go about building a post-scarcity society in a patent-and-copyright-encumbered intellectual climate?

His reply in 3 points precedes the recap of the debate, for which I refer to the full entry.

Smary McCarthy:

“There’s no easy way to answer this, as the answer is neither obvious nor uniquely defined. I can posit three suggestions that I think are deeply related:

1. First, one of the things that will inevitably happen over the next decade, which has been going on for the past three decades, is that the idea of copyright will change. We are accustomed to an extremely rigid system for copyrights, born out of a greed which no longer really has any place in the realms of man in our new digital reality. Those who wish to uphold the old form of copyright are increasingly having to criminalize children and family folks, and any system which marginalizes the majority of the population (by stamps of unethicality, criminality, or whatever) is doomed to die (in the cybernetic sense) eventually.

2. Second, there has been a lot of talk about manufactured scarcity on Global Swadeshi recently, and in a number of other places. This has relevance here: We already live in a post-scarcity society on a number of levels. We haven’t achieved full cornucopia yet, but for all intents and purposes nobody should be want of anything. The only thing stopping us from having this kind of global equality is the patent-and-copyright-encumbered intellectual climate of which you speak. But that intellectual climate isn’t self-organizing. Rather, it’s a result of the assumption of scarcity, which leads people to believe they can’t survive without property, which leads to greed. This may sound simplistic, but it needn’t be more complicated. So if you want to build a post-scarcity world, start by breaking the current system and replacing it with something better. This can be done in a number of ways and I don’t support any single one more than any other, but as a rule the less violence applied the better.

3. Third, there is the option of doing the subversive hack. Nokia, amazingly, heralded this in the hardware market by saying that their patents were free for use in free/open source projects without royalties, and that they would not allow companies that did not follow the same guideline to use their patents. This was a big win, and completely parallel to the GNU General Public License or the Creative Commons licenses. Basically, these licensing schemes are viral in nature, and the more you spread the meme the stronger it becomes. Because of this I have been discussing open hardware licensing with a number of ‘big guys’ over the last couple of months, and I happen to know that Richard Stallman and Neil Gershenfeld have been discussing this issue.