Yesterday, we blogged about Dropping Knowledge by reblogging an item from the Repositorium blog. We since started emailing with its author Martin Springer, in which I discovered something of a soulmate.

He has been reading my original essay on the Political Economy of Peer Production, and started his own reflection here.

The key question he addresses is the following: “Can peer to peer be expanded beyond the immaterial sphere in which it was born?”

Martin Springer then comments, from the starting point of his experience in Germany and Berlin in particular:

“In the digital space knowledge workers built the economical model of their choice, because in the physical space they were pretty independent of salaries. To me this experience exemplifies that a P2P economy can flourish in interstices in the physical space.

A technical infrastructure could support Bauwens’ vision of “universal common property, transcending the limitations of both private and public property models and reconstituting a dynamic field of the Commons�. If the Interoperable DRM Platform (IDP) were real, licenses expressing and providing legal protection for the Commons could be connected with products and services. The IDP could also provide the interface to “time based complimentary currencies�, because contracts between users (license agreements being the result of license negotiations) can store value.

However, I can forsee many obstacles for a Commons based political economy. There is a growing resistance against interoperable DRM, both from the side of existing industries who profit from the stalemate as well from the side of civil libertarians who are concerned that the enforcement of license terms through DRM systems supports a development towards a constitutionalisation of private law. Consensus building processes on the technical side as well as the legal side could improve the situation.”