Text: Lionel Maurel.  English translation: Pascasle Garbaye. See P2P Foundation wiki for original French version.

About

The purpose of this policy, proposed by Lionel Maurel, is to establish the governance principles in force within the association “La Coop des Communs” for the management of the rights to the productions of its members, in particular within the framework of the activities of its working groups.

The Coopyright proposal has the advantage of simply implementing a certain logic of reciprocity, but without having to write a new license, since everything is based on two already well-known Creative Commons licenses.

It’s about articulating:

• ”’Internal reciprocity”’: working groups remain free to choose whether and how their productions are made public.

Unless special circumstances warrant it and after approval of the board of directors of the association La Coop des Communs, they are by default placed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Attribution – No Commercial Use – No modification),

For the active contributors to La Coop des Communs, the reuse of workgroup productions would be carried out according to the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 licence (Paternity – Identical sharing).

The Coop des Communs does not ask the authors for an assignment of rights.

The groups will therefore have to deliberate on their uses.

• ”’co-management, between the groups and the association, of the uses according to whether or not they are the result of non-profit or limited-profit organisations”’.

In the case of lucrative commercial use, a fee may be charged. A non-profit or limited lucrative use should be exempt from royalty.

The system is made operational by the ability to discriminate against the non-profit sector and limited lucrativity. An international application could be based on the current interpretation of these terms in each country concerned.

Introduction

For several years, a debate is in progress on the opportunity to create new licences, which would be neither “free” licences (such as GNU-GPL type) nor “open” licences (such as Creative Commons type). Many proposals, based on the concept of “strengthened reciprocal licence”, have been elaborated. The first proposal, coming from Dmitry Kleiner, was the Peer Production licence and the Belgian Michel Bauwens worked out the concept of “Copyfair”, which is for him fundamental for a transition to “Commons Economics”.

He summarizes these ideas as follows:

Copyleft licences allow anyone to re-use shared knowledge provided that modifications and improvements are added to these same commons. It’s a major step, but we cannot ignore the need for fairness. When moving to production of physical objects which requires finding resources for buildings, raw materials and payments for contributors, the unimpeded commercial exploitation of these commons favours extractive models.

Thus, it’s essential to maintain the idea of knowledge sharing, but also to request reciprocity for the commercial exploitation of these commons, to open up a sphere of activity for ethical economic entities that internalise social and environmental costs. This could be achieved through copyfair licences, which allow full sharing of the knowledge but ask for reciprocity in exchange for commercialisation right.

Bauwens think that Copyfair licences are one of the elements that will allow to bridge the gap between the Commons approach and the cooperative movement, by renewing the latter in the form of “Open Cooperativism”.

The problem is that proposals are on the table for several years now, but they are slow to produce concrete results. Since many prototypes have been designed, none of these new licences have been, so far, adopted on a significant scale and it is difficult even to quote concrete examples of projects that would implement such principles.

I must confess that this “deadlock” could led me to think that a “design error” had been made and I expressed serious doubts about reciprocal licences (doubts that, to tell the truth, have not yet completely left me…). However, the reason for this delay is also the great difficulty of defining legally the concept of “reciprocity” which can have several different meanings, not always compatible with each other.

Things were there until I crossed paths, last year, with the association La Coop des Communs, which goal is to “create alliances between the Commons and the Social and Solidarity Economy”. It brings together researchers, SSE actors and activists from the commons, promoting an interesting mixing between these different cultures.

But, La Coop des Communs itself has been quickly confronted with the choice of a licence for its own productions. It appeared that this could be an excellent ground for experimentation to try to implement legally the idea of “reciprocity for the Commons” by establishing a bridge with SSE. These reflections led to a proposal – in which I participated – called Coopyright (a pun on the idea of “cooperative copyright”).

A presentation is on La Coop des Communs website, but I will take a moment to explain the specificities of this proposal and what it is likely to generate.

A synthesis to overcome previous blockages

Coopyright draws heavily on previous proposals (Everything Is a Remix !), trying to overcome their respective weaknesses

The main source of inspiration remains Dmytri Kleiner’s Peer Production Licence, which was devised from the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA licence. His idea was to “specify” the NC option (Not for commercial use), stating that only entities with a cooperative form can use the resource.

More precisely, Peer Production Licence formulates its “reciprocity clause” as follows:

c. You may exercise your rights for commercial purposes only if :

i. You are a company or a cooperative owned by workers (worker owned)

ii. All financial gains, surpluses and profits generated by the company or cooperative are redistributed to workers.

d. Any use is prohibited by this licence for a company whose ownership and governance is private and whose purpose is to generate profit from the work of salaried employees.

We are therefore in an “organic” vision of reciprocity. The aim is to be able to distinguish between commercial entities of different nature, leaving a free use to “cooperatives” while keeping the possibility to submit to authorization and royalties classical “capitalist” companies. The problem is that this clause is drafted in a very restrictive way and, as it stands, only a small number of cooperatives can meet these criteria.

This is well explained by the lawyer Carine Bernault in an article about reciprocal licences :

The organic criterion adopted (“a company owned by its employees or a cooperative”) significantly reduces the possibilities of exploitation for commercial purposes. Moreover, the licence doesn’t define the notion of cooperative. However, if we look at the French cooperative production companies or SCOPs as an example, they are particularly characterised by an allocation of “operating surpluses” which must benefit, at least 25%, to all employees. Therefore, there is no guarantee that a SCOP fulfils the conditions, laid down in the licence, to engage in a commercial exploitation of the work.

For those reasons, the Peer Production Licence is, in my opinion, more a “proof of concept” than a real usable tool, because if the general idea of an “organic” criterion is interesting, the scope of application of the licence is too narrow. It doesn’t even apply to all cooperatives and forget the multitude of other institutional forms that SSE can take (associations, mutual funds, ESUS, etc.).

The second source of inspiration is Commons Reciprocity Licence.

In this proposal, the idea is to move away from an “organic” conception of reciprocity to promote reciprocity “in action”. In this vision, regardless of the status of the actors, the aim is to allow the free and unrestricted use of the Commons for those who contribute in return to the Commons. It would produce a more flexible and less discriminating result, since any company can have access to the resource, as long as it participates in the maintenance of Commons. But, this type of proposal also has weaknesses (and probably even more serious than those of the Peer Production Licence): how say exactly what is a Common? And what constitutes a “contribution to the Commons”? Should these contributions be quantified and evaluated and if so, how? In their proposal, Miguel Said Viera and Primavera de Filippi suggest using BlockChain for resolving these difficulties, but personally, I am suspicious of this convenient Deus Ex Machina that constitutes the BlockChain currently. In this view the link between reciprocity licensing and SSE is removed, even if it has the merit of introducing the interesting concept of “reciprocity in action”.

A third source of inspiration has been the FairShares project supported by the association of the same name, developing a vision of reciprocity that could be called “institutional”. In their proposal, there is no need to invent a new licence, as their system works as a “switch” between two Creative Commons licences. The resources produced are available under licence CC-BY-SA (therefore with possibility of commercial use) for the members of the association who participate in its activity. For “outside” persons and entities, resources are licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND and commercial use is subject to royalties. The interesting point, here, is first of all the economy of means and the possibility to link up to Creative Commons, which are the best-known licences in the World. There is also a dimension of “internal reciprocity” implemented within the same productive community. But once again we lose the link with ESS, which was the strength of the Peer Production Licence.

There are interesting aspects in all of these proposals, but none seemed really satisfactory. Thus, to elaborate the Coopyright, the idea has been to integrate the different aspects of reciprocity found in all those licences, each one presenting an interest: organic reciprocity / reciprocity in act / institutional reciprocity / internal-external reciprocity.

Organizing internal reciprocity around two Creative Commons licences

The first need for La Coop des Communs was to determine the status of its own productions, knowing that the association is organized in working groups dedicated to given themes. In a first way, to give effect to the idea of reciprocity, it was decided that participants in the working groups could benefit from the productions of these groups under CC-BY-SA licence (thus, with the possibility of modification and commercial use and a share alike obligation), while these same productions would be opened to third parties under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

This solution is based on the idea of the FairShares project, building on the proven Creative Commons licences, to avoid increasing the “proliferation of licences”. Personally, I have further doubts about the possibility for a new licence to break into a landscape already saturated with proposals, in which certain tools, such as Creative Commons, have become “standards”. It’s better to use existing licences to build a “reciprocity system” than to start from scratch.

Otherwise, this vision enhances the link between “reciprocity in action” and “institutional reciprocity” and, I think, it’s the only sure way to proceed. It’s too difficult to define abstractly what is a “contribution to the Commons”, because Commons themselves are too different from one another. Only individually, each Common can appreciate what could be a significant contribution to its functioning. As for La Coop des Communs, a person, who wants to strongly benefit from resources produced within the association, has to contribute to its operation by participating in one of its working groups. Maybe other Commons would have another way of defining “reciprocity in action”, but it seems to me that we could never escape an “institutional” definition of the contribution, for each Common.

Bridging the gap with SSE through “limited profit” criterion

By default, La Coop des Communs’ resources are made available under CC-BY-NC-ND licence, but it was decided that outside entities will be exempt from prior authorisation and royalties if they have non-profit or limited-profit activity.

The concept of limited profit is part of the SSE’s rich legal legacy, and, as a criterion, has several interests. It already allows to overcome some of the limits of the NC (non-commercial use) criterion of the Creative Commons. The latter, on which there is endless debate in the Open Source Software communities, is often accused of being too vague. But in reality, it’s not: it is rather extremely broad, since it is triggered when a resource leads to monetary compensation or the search for a “commercial advantage”. Therefore, it’s only a criterion of “commerciality”, excluding the purpose of the use and its context, which means that administrations or associations may be subject to it.

From this point of view, the advantage of the non-profit or limited-profit criterion is to reintroduce an “organic” logic into the assessment of the use. Indeed, legally, these are entities that will be recognized as for profit or limited profit. However, the sphere of limited-profit also overlaps with SSE: it applies, for example, to associations working in the Social economy or companies such as SCOP, SCIC and ESUS companies.

In addition, entities know with a good level of confidence if, whether or not, they are in the limited-profit sphere. Indeed, originally used by the tax authorities, this criterion enable to grant tax deductions and the associations know whether they are in limited profit compared to the tax system applicable to them. It’s even easier for entities such as SCOPs, SCICs and ESUS companies, because they are intrinsically considered to be in the sphere of limited-profit, because of their operating principles (this is particularly clear in the ESS definition adopted in the Hamon law). And we can add that this criterion also has an international dimension, because although the definition of limited-profit may vary from country to country, it can be found in most legislation. The result is therefore comparable to copyright in Creative Commons licences: certain “pivot” concepts on which licences are built (originality, reproduction, representation, moral rights, collective management, etc.) may vary from country to country, but this simply affects the interpretation of licences and not their validity
The use of non-profit or limited-profit criterion seems to me very interesting to test, because it is perhaps a way to overcome the excessive rigidity showed by the Peer Production Licence. Perhaps it could be a way to make a legal link between Communes and SSE, which will enable “Open Cooperativism” to take shape.

Still some limitations, but a potential to explore

Coopyright may not be a perfect proposal, but in my view, it has the potential to reopen the debate on reciprocal licences on a better basis than it has been engaged to date. And, in my opinion, it is urgent to resume this debate. More and more actors of the SSE and the Commons are meeting on the major question of “reinforced reciprocity”, but, for now, they don’t have effective legal tools to implement it.
Coopyright can probably contribute to this process and will be currently tested by La Coop des Communs, especially within its project “Plateformes en Communs” (a set of cooperative platforms which recognize themselves in the notion of Commons and includes a working group on legal issues which I am in charge of leading). Please, also note that the text of the Coopyright proposal has been posted on GitLab for comments.

For now, the main limit of Coopyright will probably lie in the field of objects where it could be applied. Built on a combination of Creative Commons licences, it is not suitable, for example, for software because Creative Commons licences were designed for intellectual works, such as music, movies, text, photos, etc. and the Creative Commons Foundation itself recommends not to use them for software. Moreover, it should not be difficult to adapt dedicated software licences to implement the same principles, but this work remains to be done. Otherwise, Creative Commons licences also have limitations when applied to hardware objects (I already mentioned this on this blog) and Coopyright itself does not allow exceeding this limit.

For now, another restriction is that Coopyright has been developed to meet the specific needs of Coop des Communs and this directly reflects on how “internal reciprocity” is expressed in the text (extended rights in return for participation in its working groups). But it would be quite simple, for entities that would like to use this tool, to modify the basic text to express otherwise what they consider to be a “significant contribution to their activity”, opening the benefit to more re-use rights than the default license. Coopyright text itself is under CC-BY-SA licence and, therefore, everyone could adapt it, according to its needs.

Finally, I think we could add a layer so that “reciprocity in action” could be recognised within a network of entities that have the same values. For now, this “reciprocity in act” is assessed in relation to the contribution to a Common (in this case, La Coop des Communs). Imagine a group of entities decide to use Coopyright for their resources: they could then want to “form a coalition” and, in a spirit of solidarity, consider that the contribution to one of the members of the network would open user rights on the resources of the other members. This would lead to the creation of a “common pot” of resources, with a “networked” appreciation of what “reciprocity in action” would be, on the basis of cross-institutional assessments.

In short, there are probably many things to imagine from these first ideas and feel free to share yours under this post or go do it on GitLab.

PS: one last thing, which is not completely insignificant. A license needs a logo to get visibility. If someone is able to imagine a logo that would express Coopyright’s values and operating principles in a graphic form, do not hesitate to leave a comment!

Photo by Jonathan Lidbeck

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Liam Murphy: This piece is part of a weekly series of articles curated by Voluntary Arts and authored by cultural thinkers and doers. The series will be published between November 2017 and March 2018. It is being shaped in response to the emerging practice of cultural commoning and as a way of articulating ideas that have arisen in conversations about Our Cultural Commons over the past two years across the UK and Republic of Ireland.

Our intention is that the series will help make visible the cultural commons in action and will encourage new approaches to sustaining creative cultural activity in local places. And we hope that the articles and the conversation they stimulate will contribute to the forming of ever more enabling cultural policy.

In a cultural sector which diverges massively around ownership – or simply ignores it – it is interesting that ‘the commons’ is increasingly in the vanguard of conversation. Before you can share though, you have to understand what’s yours and what’s not. My focus in this article is on Digital Cultural Commons. For simplicity, I’m referring here only to artistic production made, stored, distributed or represented digitally.

The objective of (digital) commoning is that content should to be available to all equally – exploitable, but non-exclusive. Starting from a position of giving it all away is not going to lead to a common stock of anything and neither is centralising ownership. Thinking about cultural products as common resources to build from – extensions of the knowledge-based commons – sends some hard-working artists into a miasmic fit of income loss induced panic. So first a few observations about how much we do and don’t own in terms of intellectual property (IP) and what the opportunities are for our digital commons in particular.

The IP system often claims to respect the ‘rights of authors’ but in fact, little protection or monetisation is possible until the rights we have as authors have been offered up to, usually, a publisher. Twitter, Facebook, Unsplash, etc., like most content management sites, have absolute waivers when it comes to remuneration for, or control of original work. Basically, they assume all rights and insist that authors relinquish them. Even where Creative Commons licenses are used for sharing (e.g., Flickr), commercial sales are not permitted – though links to websites are. Currently, open licences invite capitalistic exploitation without protection. Copyright is arguably a charter for the protection of publishers and owners of rights – rather than for the protection of content creators. But, as creators, we do have power – if we choose to exercise it.

The perception of copyright as a corporate or publishers’ tool for profit also creates a resistance among artists who do not view their original works as appropriate for reproduction, sharing or ‘trade’ worthiness. This reasonable antipathy also bolsters the ‘anti-copyright’ movement, which has found expression in alternative licenses. Not being ‘defined’ by market value alone is important for the arts. At the same time, it’s clear that cultural creativity cannot be separated from the market. At the nub of it, who can afford NOT to profit? At some level, the arts are always reliant on the market for their existence. And yet they fail collectively to retain much of the value they create, resulting in centralisation – and globalisation – of resources. The arts have human value, aesthetically, morally and spiritually. They also create monetary value. Re-connecting the two functions is a goal for digital commoning.

‘ CultureBanking’ in the UK, is a response to this need for a re-connection of the moral, spiritual and material imperatives for art and culture. It is also a movement to retain IP and re-connect the market with the commons, ‘banking’ our communal digital rights to re-fund cultural activity in localities and grow capital for future cultural investment. There are parallel initiatives bearing the same name around the world, all of which acknowledge that the way we fund local growth in arts and culture is flawed. In the USA Culturebank aims to create “a new paradigm in financing the arts by re-defining returns on investment”. At Culturebank in Sydney the model is equally re-distributive but uses crowdfunding methods, more akin to the SOUP model, like a modern potlatch system. , channelling investment and income back to a real place with real benefits: Essentially, a Commons Collecting Society. Currently there are few media or market platforms performing this function. By taking control of the assets you create, you’re saying: “We’re here – these are our terms, take them or leave them”. It’s an important message – especially for young people whose ‘digital footprints have farthest to go.

Whilst Creative Commons, CopyLeft, General Public Licenses, CopyFarLeft, Human Commons Licenses and user generated ‘culturebanked®’ commercial peer production licenses all represent attempts to revise the licensing of IP assets in order to create some kind of commons of digital ownership, what we need alongside these is enabling technology in order to put it to use. The development of smart contracts based on distributed digital ledgers such as Blockchain and distributed peer-to-peer initiatives such as Holochain are the beginnings of a decentralised approach that can support a more equitable system – offering artists, arts organisations, creative citizens and corporate rights-holders the possibility of ‘holding common ground’.

As Arthur Brock of Holochain puts it: “An equitable economy requires a composable grammar of the commons”. In addition, by developing processes and creating easily adoptable solutions for artists and arts organisations to take a commons-based approach to their IP, we can regenerate commons-based access to markets.

As we make these changes, there is undoubtedly an ecosystem to protect. The everyday creative things that people do together, the publicly funded arts and the creative industries are what make up the ‘cultural sector’. Upsetting one may upset the whole ecology. But just because we shouldn’t upset something doesn’t mean it is working well. Indeed the ecosystem of cultural creativity is already upset in a few ways. For example, the Creative Industries Federation (CIF) recently quoted a value on the UK cultural sector of £92 Billion (for scale, the amount by which Facebook has grown in a year!). If we compare this to Arts Council England’s planned annual budget for 2018-22 of £622 million and imagined a tax relationship between the two, it would show that the private arts and cultural sector is re-financing its public-sector counterpart at a rate of little more than half a percent (excluding gifts, trusts and endowments)! This leaves over 18% of that £92 billion to find to match the contribution expected of all of UK companies in tax (19%). Something in the region of £17 billion annually, therefore, is ‘missing’. Arguably, this is the current size of an annually accruing debt of the cultural ‘sector’ to its cultural ‘commons’.

Some handling of IP by the BBC also illustrates the extent to which there is, as yet, any substantial move towards supporting cultural commons for creators. Consider, for example, ‘The Voice’, which has broadly followed precisely the same format as purely commercial channels and sold out its right to ITV in 2015. A good indication of a ‘commons-led approach’ is whether or not ‘contestants’ create, own and disseminate their own intellectual property. Universally, in these shows, they do not. The IP remains with the show – not the acts – despite the ‘public broadcasting’ remit. A commons-led challenge for the BBC (and other cultural producers) is to commission programmes and platforms featuring new artists who compete to make new IP (the BBC would still own the format) using peer production licences. In this way, the BBC would be helping to create a genuinely diverse cultural economy of new, accessible work and empowering creative markets and communities with real diversity and growth potential.

Empowering culturally creative people to control their assets and re-financing the infrastructure that helped produce them is the cultural commons which many are looking for. What digital cultural commons have too little of are payment gateways to enable this two way relationship between civic roles and voluntary action (production) to happen. By hypothecating the financing of local creative economies using smart contracts and peer-to-peer micropayments to create a commons of digital assets, we can encourage fairer ‘ownership’ and participation in cultural life.

The problems of ‘grass roots’ funding, co-production, local collaboration and inter-sectoral working begin to look more like opportunities too:

At Olympia’s Brand Licensing Fair last year, a stand simply titled; ‘Spain’ was busy promoting its cultural wares. There’s no reason any village, town or city in the UK couldn’t perform the same function – for private gain and for civic benefit. The beauty of digital though, is that this can be done with just a time-stamp, a hash and a license.

Liam Murphy,
CultureBanked®

Liam Murphy is a Civic Entrepreneur and Writer who has worked as a gardener, picture framer, artist, book seller – and run an art gallery in Great Yarmouth! He’s currently transferring his LTD company into a shared art and framing workshop using common stock and facilities and writing a book about the cultural industries. He’s also involved in various local and national cultural initiatives, including What Next? Cultural Education Partnerships and the Gulbenkian Enquiry Into The Civic Role Of Arts Organisations.

CultureBanking provides ‘plug-in’ help for user-led Collective Rights Management to creative communities.
To learn more about or get involved with the project go to the CultureBanking Meetup group.

Photo by snakegirl productions

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This monopoly right is supposedly necessary to incentivize authors to create new works, whether they be software code, recorded music, books or photographs. The assumption is that people won’t create without copyright protection and that all creative works must be bought and sold in the marketplace.

But what if a creator wants her work to be freely copied, shared and re-used?

Copyright law makes no express provisions for allowing such nonmarket uses. This fact that became painfully evident when the Internet became a mass medium in the 1990s and people suddenly wanted to share things online for free.

Richard Stallman, a legendary hacker, was one of the first to devise an ingenious solution to the limitations of copyright law. Stallman wanted his fellow software programmers to help improve the code he was writing and to be able to share the results widely. Stallman also wanted to make sure that no one could take software programs private by claiming a copyright in them.

His pioneering solution in 1989 was a “legal hack” known as the General Public License, or GPL, often known as “copyleft.” A work licensed under the GPL permits users to run any program, copy it, modify it, and distribute it in any modified form – without obtaining advance permission or making a payment. In practice, the GPL provides legally enforceable protections to works developed by large communities of coders.

The only limitation imposed by the GPL – and it is key – is that any derivative work must also be licensed under the GPL. This means that the terms of the GPL – the rights to copy, share, modify and reuse – automatically apply to any derivative work, and to any derivative of a derivative, and so on. This was a brilliant legal hack because it inverted the automatic privatization of content under copyright law, instead requiring automatic sharing. The more that a program is shared, the larger the commons of programmers and users!

The GPL has proven hugely significant over the past twenty-six years because it ensures that the value created by a given group of commoners will stay within the commons. People can contribute to a software program such as GNU Linux, the famous computer operating system, with full confidence that no one will be allowed to “take it private.”

The success of the GPL in the 1990s and early 2000s inspired law professor Lawrence Lessig and a band of fellow law scholars, activists, techies and artists to extend the idea of the GPL to other types of copyrighted content. Once again, the goal was to promote the legal sharing of content. But in this case, the focus was on texts, music, photography, videos, and anything else that can be copyrighted.

In 2002, a new organization, Creative Commons, launched a suite of six standard licenses to facilitate the sharing of such content. Creators were invited to choose what types of copying and sharing they wish to authorize for their works. The “Attribution” license (known by the abbreviation “BY”) allows copying so long as the author is given proper credit for the work. The NonCommercial license (NC) authorizes free reuse so long as the new work is used only for noncommercial purposes. The ShareAlike license (SA) authorizes free reuse so long as the new work also uses the same SA license (that is, derivative works must also be freely useable – similar to the terms of the GPL). A NoDerivatives (ND) license authorizes free reuse so long as the new work does not alter the original work. Any of these licenses can be mixed with others, creating new licenses such as an Attribution-NonCommercial license.

The CC licenses have been wildly successful in helping unleash the power of copying, imitation and sharing. Thousands of open access scientific journals now use CC licenses to make their contents available to anyone for free in perpetuity.¹ Music remix and video mashup communities have flourished. Countless websites and blogs make their content freely accessible, which in turn encourages people to contribute their own talents. According to a report released by Creative Commons in February 2015,² the number of CC-licensed works worldwide in 2014 was 882 million – up from an estimated 50 million works in 2006 and 400 million works in 2010. Nine million websites now use CC licenses, including major sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, Public Library of Science, Scribd and Jamendo.

In recent years, there has been mounting frustration with the limits of the GPL and Creative Commons licenses in promoting the creation and protection of commons. Paradoxically, the more shareable the content under these licenses, the more capitalist enterprises are likely to use the “free” content for their profit-making purposes. The classic example of this was the widespread embrace of GNU Linux and other open source software programs by IBM and dozens of other major tech companies. While hackers are pleased that no one can “take private” the code they have worked on, companies are pleased they can use high-quality bodies of software code available at no cost.

This situation is certainly an advance over conventional proprietary software, which does allow any sharing or modification. Yet it still falls short of creating a commons in which the contributors are able capture the value of the work (whether monetary or otherwise) and to protect the integrity of their social commons over time.

To address the limitations of the GPL and CC licenses, Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation, working with hacktivist Dmytri Kleiner, developed the idea of commons-based reciprocity licenses, generically known as CCRLs or “CopyFair.” These licenses are specifically designed to strike a middle ground between the full-sharing copyleft licenses (such as the GPL and the Creative Commons Non-Commercial license) and conventional copyright law, which make creative works and knowledge strictly private.

The idea is to replace licenses that do not demand direct reciprocity from users, with licenses requiring a basic reciprocity among users in a commercial context. Bauwens and his colleagues are in the process of developing a Peer Production License that would explicitly allow commercialization of a creative work or body of information, but only if the creators, as copyright holders, are able to share in the gains. Bauwens envisions the PPL as a reciprocity license that would serve worker-owned co-operatives and online communities of creators. An early version of the PPL is currently being used experimentally by Guerrilla Translation, a Madrid-based activist/translation project, and the PPL is being discussed in various places, especially among French open agricultural machining and design communities.

As Bauwens explains, “The PPL is designed to enable and empower a counter-hegemonic reciprocal economy that combines commons that are open to all who contribute, while charging a license fee to the for-profit companies who want to use without contributing to the commons. Not that much changes for the multinationals. In practice, they can still use the code as IBM does with Linux, if they contribute. And for those who don’t contribute, they would pay a license fee, a practice they are used to.”

The practical effect of the PPL, says Bauwens would be “to direct a stream of income from capital to the commons, but its main effect would be ideological, or, if you like, value-driven.”

The PPL should not be confused with the Creative Commons NonCommercial license, which is used by creators who do not want their work used for commercial purposes. That license halts economic development based on open, shareable knowledge and keeps it in nonprofit spheres. But the PPL is intended to allow the commercialization of works developed on open platforms of shared knowledge so long as creators are compensated. The PPL would encourage communities to contribute to a common pool of knowledge, code or creativity, knowing that any resulting profit would help sustain their own cooperative entities; profit would be subsumed to the social goal of sustaining the commons and the commoners.

By using the PPL, Bauwens argues, “peer production would be able to move from a proto-mode of production, unable to perpetuate itself on its own outside capitalism, to an autonomous and real mode of production. It would create a counter-economy that can be the basis for reconstituting a ‘counter-hegemony’ with a for-benefit circulation of value allied to pro-commons social movements. This could be the basis of the political and social transformation of the political economy.” Instead of our being locked into a “communism of capital” in which large companies can amass more capital by appropriating the fruits of sharing on open platforms, peer production mode could self-reproduce itself, socially and financially.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

David Bollier is an author, activist, blogger and scholar of the commons.  He is cofounder of Commons Strategies Group and author of Think Like a Commoner and co-editor of The Wealth of the Commons, among other books.

Photo by eekim

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Are there alternatives to the profit-driven models of translating, publishing and distributing books? “Information wants to be free”, a famous dictum reads; and the following article demonstrates, through a case study of Guerrilla Translation’s “Think Global, Print Local” initiative, how this could happen:

“To bolster commoning as challenge to the standard practices of economics, alternative relations and structures of production are needed. In this context, the starting points of this article are a problem and a nascent opportunity. The problem is the need to share a knowledge artifact, such as a book, with people and communities elsewhere, but in a language into which the artifact has not yet been translated. The opportunity is the convergence of decentralized online and offline ways of sharing knowledge, from the Ιnternet and book printers to commons-oriented copyright licenses and crowdfunding platforms.

This article discusses a case study that synthesizes the aforementioned dynamics and tools and, therefore, presents a new commons-based publishing model codified as “think global, print local”. The uniqueness of the case rests in its goal to pioneer a commons-based model of artisanal, decentralized text translation and international book distribution and publishing. By using the digital knowledge commons as well as distributed nodes of printing hardware, this case study tries to avoid centralized production and environmentally harmful international shipping in an economically viable way for its contributors.

The question we address is the following: Can this experiment serve as a template or an example that could strengthen commons-based practices in the field of writing, translating and publishing? This article focuses on two interrelated aspects that may allow us to further the understanding of institutions for the use and management of shared resources. First, we describe an emerging techno-economic model of value creation and distribution in relation to the knowledge commons. Second, we discuss the dynamics of the chosen commons-oriented copyright license, named the Peer Production License.”

Read the full article here.

The post “Think global, print local”: A case study on a commons-based publishing and distribution model appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Michel Bauwens is a theorist in the emerging field of P2P theory and director and founder of the P2P Foundation, a global organisation of researchers collaborating in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. He has authored a number of essays, including his seminal thesis, The Political Economy of Peer Production.

In the run up to the Open 2017 – Platform Co-ops conference in London, Oliver Sylvester-Bradley, from The Open Co-op explores some of Michel’s ideas.

Avoiding the exploitation of the commons and open source peer production

OSB: At The Open Co-op we believe that open source software is an essential component of the Platform co-op / solidarity economy. However, some of the developers I speak to are now less inclined to publish their code openly, since they have seen large corporations incorporate their code and go on to build multi million pound businesses… This makes me wonder if there is a need to move on from simply “open source” by creating a new licensing system, similar to the Creative Commons for artistic works, in order to ensure that developers can stipulate the ways in which their code may be used, and by whom, in order to ensure the commercial world does not exploit open source.

MB: This is of course a very valid concern. But we have to ask a few questions. First, we have to recognise that people have to make a living and free software developers, like others, can be paid for their work as employees or freelancers, independent of the ‘open’ nature of the code. 75% of Linux Core developers are paid for example, and the Fair Use Economy report calculated that one sixth of GDP and 17 million workers are making a living around shared knowledge economies. That’s not trivial.

My point is that work is a rival good, and has a price, but that knowledge is naturally abundant and thus privatising it is inherently problematic.

Which is why we propose a novel solution, one which combines both a full commitment to share knowledge, and a demand for reciprocity towards the commons in the case of commercialisation. This is what we call the ‘copyfair’ principle, and it avoids the reality of free software, which is that, ‘the more free the license, the more private the economy around it’.

To my mind, we thus continue to write shared code, but we create ethical business coalitions around it, and we re-introduce reciprocity into the private market mechanisms.  Examples of this are the practice of the FairShares Association, which has one CC non-commercial license for everyone, and a commercial license for those who pay a membership fee (this is their ‘reciprocity’ requirement).

The Peer Production License used by some publishers is another. I take this as an ethical requirement: while we all have to make a living, and I respect the freedom of everyone to use moderate IP protection as a free choice, I believe that withholding vital productive knowledge for humanity is not the right thing to do.

OSB: OK, some people get paid to write open code – others do not, but I believe for open code to flourish we need to actively encourage developers to publish openly and that is not going to continue to happen if their work gets blatantly exploited for financial gain by others.

Having read more about the PPL now I understand its structure and objectives and admire the way it aims to encourage reciprocation if a conventional capitalist business reaps financial dividends from the open source work. I also understand the valid objections to limiting the flow of ‘free knowledge’ and information.

However, I personally feel we are in a kind of battle here, to either fix, out-evolve or supersede the ‘extractive’ economy asap, if we do not want humanity to become extinct. And I do not see the elites that wield power today giving up on their vested interests any time soon so, to me it seems, we would be wise to place limits on how, and where, and in exchange for what, our work can be used.

As Nathan Schneider put it to me in a recent email:
“as long as there have been commoners, they have had to protect their commons from the greedy hands of the lords.”

We need to organise ourselves so that the ‘value’ of our work can be re-invested in our livelihoods, communities and resources. 

MB: We have to be defensive, but I think more importantly we need to organise ourselves so that the ‘value’ of our work can be re-invested in our livelihoods, communities and resources. This is why it can never be a purely defensive game, or even trying to get more of the piece of the pie, but it requires a reorganisation of our modes of production and exchange.

Our proposal at the P2P Foundation is threefold at the micro-economic stage: first, we need to build productive communities around our commons, and declare our value sovereignty; this means deciding to distribute value differently, ‘generatively’; this requires a second step, creating generative entrepreneurial coalitions, so that we are commoners adding to the commons, but also cooperators making a living. And this requires also of course building meta-networks, between them.

Obviously, this takes time, and it took capital 400 years to consolidate itself with all the institutions it needed. The problem of course, is: we don’t have that time, but perhaps, because of the acceleration of learning through mutual networks, we can achieve it in 40.

It’s clear from this, given the urgencies of climate change and ecological destruction, that we can never wait for these prefigurative processes to go on on their own. This is why we also need to ally the prefigurative forces with social movements and emancipatory political forces, and we need to infuse them with the models of the commons, and ‘liberate’ them from their exclusive reliance on private vs state.

By building such an alliance we can then also politically transform social and economic institutions and have them evolve in the direction of the prefigurative society that we are building. Free knowledge is hugely important in this context, because under capitalism, we treat rare resources as if they were infinite, and we treat abundant resources, as if they were scarce. So we destroy the planet, but withhold the knowledge necessary to solve the problems thus created.

Think of how patenting of solar and electric cars led to a 30 year stagnation of their necessary development. This is why we have to square the circle, continue to share code, but create vehicles for livelihood creation around it. We must also transform the institutions so that we can have a ‘partner state’ which can ’empower and enable personal and social autonomy’, just as the FLOSS Foundations are doing that at the micro-level. We need commons-based, commonified public institutions. Nobody said it would be easy.

Under capitalism, we treat rare resources as if they were infinite, and we treat abundant resources, as if they were scarce. So we destroy the planet, but withhold the knowledge necessary to solve the problems thus created. 

Can Co-ops create increased value?

OSB: I was inspired to hear you talk about the increased value that can be generated by co-ops and platform co-ops when members are all owners and value is not syphoned off, and away from the organisation, by third parties such as external investors. To me this is one of the main benefits of platform co-ops which I feel has not been adequately explained. Do you know of any real-world examples that prove this to be the case?

MB: Yes, I fully agree with that basic premise that we need platform cooperatives that are generative towards their community and commons and the resources they draw from. Cooperatives of course have a long history of proving they work and employ more people worldwide than the multinational enterprises, and we also know from studies that cooperative startups do a lot better than venture-based startups (who, for each unicorn they produce, destroy 99 other companies). This being said, platform cooperatives are very new and so it is still difficult to say with confidence how they will work. But Nathan Schneider’s Internet of Ownership site identifies more than 250 of them, and, to take just one of them,  Stocksy, a platform co-owned by professional photographers, seems to do quite well.

So, it needs to happen, and the established cooperatives and ethical and solidarity finance absolutely needs to wake up to the necessity of playing a vital supportive role. I stress another condition though, which is the concept of ‘open cooperatives’. My critique is that traditional coops end up working for their members in the competitive capitalist economy, and tend to slowly take over the practices of corporations, up to the point of being demutualised sometimes.

An open cooperative in contrast, would be multi-stakeholder, which means that a ride-hailing coop might be co-owned and governed not just by the drivers, but also by the users and other stakeholders; that it actively (through its own statutes and rules) is engaged in producing common goods (not just the platform itself, but say a commitment to open source code for example); and that it has an outlook and structure committed to achieving some social or environmental purpose.

Marjorie Kelly, in her book on the ‘Emerging Ownership Revolution’ has outlined five major characteristics of ‘generative enterprise’ that I think we should be heeding.

She writes that:

“In ownership design, there are five essential patterns that work together to create either extractive or generative design: purpose, membership, governance, capital, and networks.

• Extractive ownership has a Financial Purpose: maximizing profits. Generative ownership has a Living Purpose: creating the conditions for life.
• While corporations today have Absentee Membership, with owners disconnected from the life of enterprise, generative ownership has Rooted Membership, with ownership held in human hands.
• While extractive ownership involves Governance by Markets, with control by capital markets on autopilot, generative designs have Mission-Controlled Governance, with control by those focused on social mission.
• While extractive investments involve Casino Finance, alternative approaches involve Stakeholder Finance, where capital becomes a friend rather than a master.
• Instead of Commodity Networks, where goods are traded based solely on price, generative economic relations are supported by Ethical Networks, which offer collective support for social and ecological norms.”

I think that is an excellent summary of where we need to be heading.

Inter Co-op cooperation and decentralised, distributed currencies

OSB: Principle 6, co-operation between co-ops, seems to provide huge scope for recycling the value that is generated within the co-op community, but doesn’t seem to have been particularly effective to date. Do you have any thoughts on why that might be and how co-ops could improve inter-co-op cooperation?

Relatedly, in a recent article for oD I suggested that “Decentralised distributed currencies will change the way our economy works by re-routing flows of capital. For example, if I could earn “co-op coins” in one co-op and spend them in the next, as a co-op member I would be incentivised to do so, since I also receive a share of the profits.”

How practical do you think that idea is? And what role do you see for decentralised distributed currencies in a new, generative economy?

MB: Cooperatives that compete, with each other and other private companies, and for the benefit of their own members, have historically adapted to capitalist practices, and they had to, given that capitalist competition drives down the cost and prices of the products they need; this has made inter-cooperative cooperation difficult to achieve, with some exceptions. I don’t think it can improve in the same context. But making cooperation ‘commons-centric’ changes the logic, since such commons increase the productive capacity of participating cooperatives. This is why capital has moved massively to the platform models and why it has been such a historical mistake of the cooperative movement to have missed the boat in this shift.

I also believe distributed currencies may play a role in this shift. The way I see it is the following: cooperative commons coalitions need to declare their ‘value sovereignty’; this means that, even as they may be dependent on external capital logics, internally, they can change the mode of distribution of value according to their own value logics, using contributory accounting mechanisms. And within this context, they can express their own new value logics, using new types of currencies, like for example backfeed.cc aims to do. I recommend your readers to check out our latest report on ‘Value in the Commons’ which analyses developments in open and contributory value accounting, based on 3 in-depth case studies.

OSB: The terminology you use here is a little new to me. If I understand you correctly, you are saying that, even though a co-op may generate income in GBP, for example, they can derive their own methods of distributing value (above and beyond just the GBP) to their members and other stakeholders, using their own distributed currencies. Is that what you are saying?

MB: I am saying two things. First, coops indeed need sovereign currencies as income, which they can distribute not just as wages, but also as contributive income, according to their own rules. Second, and complementarily, they can also recognise other value than what is recognised as ‘commodity’ or market value by the external market, and create other tokens for that, which can be used in inter-cooperative networks. These tokens are similar to complementary currencies that are used locally, but in this case, we are speaking of ‘territories of value circulation’, that are not geographically determined, but exist through the network of value exchanges over the network.

OSB: I read with interest how Open value Networks present a viable model for profit sharing in which a ‘value accounting system’ computes equity in proportion to contributions automatically, removing the pain from the profit sharing process. Could that be another example of “declaring value sovereignty” you describe above?

MB: Sensorica is indeed an example of value sovereignty, and there can be other forms, and of course, that is the point of value sovereignty, that it can be diverse. Sensoria’s aim is to create a much more direct linkage between commons contribution and market income. My own preference though is to create cooperatives around the commons, as an intermediary institution.

Is the blockchain really the holy grail for distributed organisations and currencies?

OSB: backfeed.cc seems interesting, and especially powerful if it can be understood and deployed as intended, but I am not convinced that the blockchain is either required, or the best underlying infrastructure, for new forms of distributed currency. For example, the block chain goes to great lengths to anonymise transactions, so that trade made may be conducted anonymously but, as we have seen so clearly in our modern economy (and as the Prisoners’ Dilemma illustrates so well), people do not behave so well in one-time, anonymous transactions.

On the contrary, when transactions are with real people, that we grow to know, people tend to behave more co-operatively and even develop deeper, more valuable ties based on mutual aid and solidarity. Reputation seems like the key ingredient here, as opposed to anonymity. What do you think about the current obsession with basing all these types of new, distributed, organisations and systems on the blockchain? And what do you think about the idea of an alternative system, based on open identity and reputation being more suited (and potentially more valuable to) the p2p / collaborative economy?

MB: I agree with your critique. The blockchain, let’s not forget, comes from the design of the Bitcoin currency, which is an anarcho-capitalist, “austrian economics” inspired design. It represents ‘ultracapitalism’ if you will, the urge to commodify everything. It presumes atomised and isolated individuals that contract out with each other, and dislikes any collective governance. So, while I think the blockchain can be inserted in other designs that do not make these limiting assumptions about human nature and motivations, it is not absolutely necessary.

My own beef with backfeed is that it assumes human work needs incentives, but the key assumption I make is the opposite, i.e. that commons work is driven ‘intrinsically’, and so there is a danger, that incentivising may actually ‘crowd out’ commoning behaviour to replace it with competition for scarce tokens. But of course we need to experiment, and backfeed is versatile enough to allow for very different designs adapted to various communities.

Ownership is directly related to the real value of an organisation

OSB: I developed the diagram (below) during discussions with Douglas Rushkoff, which attempts to illustrate the direct relationship between ownership and “real” value of an organisation to society. How true do you think this illustration is?

MB: The graphic is fine for me, in my own language, which comes from Marjorie Kelly’s ‘Emerging Ownership Revolution’, which we discussed above, I distinguish ‘extractive’ from ‘generative’ approaches; this could be added to the graphic. For example, the VC model extracts value from human communities and natural resources, for the benefit of a minority of shareholders (example, Uber destroys the potential of ride-sharing to diminish the numbers of cars, by making drivers compete for customers); while cooperative models attempt to add value to the communities and resources they work with.

What is democracy and how can we make improve on the present, undemocratic system

OSB: You seem to be a fan of democracy, as am I, however, I’m not sure I have ever experienced it. What do you think real democracy is?

MB: I think there are two competing visions of democracy, one which is rule by the people directly, as in the Athenian model (though it was restricted to male citizens), the other is through a set of institutions which have the contrary aim of actually restraining such direct power, as documented in the book by Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, “Athens on Trial: the Anti-Democratic tradition in Western thought “.

My focus is on the first model. The problem is that after 200 years of the second model, the primary areas of our life, like school and work, are not democratic, and so the basic problem is that we expect democratic behaviour from people (citizens / residents) who have basically never exercised it. This is one reason I favour the commons model, because it is based on self-governing communities, so it is a training school for democracy like no other.

OSB: When you say ‘the commons model’ what exactly do you mean? Where can we see a commons model acting as “a training ground for democracy like no other”?

MB: I follow the traditional definition of the commons, i.e. a shared resource, managed by a community according to its own norms. There are plenty of physical commons in the Global South, i.e. 85% of Africans still depend on them, less so in the West, but there are in fact more than we think. In Galicia, Spain, one third of the land is still commons and run by commons associations. But today, we see the explosion of digital commons (shared knowledge resources are the basis of one sixth of GDP in the US economy), and urban commons. There has been a tenfold increase of citizen initiatives in Flanders in the last ten years, and a similar exponential explosion in the Netherlands, and many of these initiatives involve creating commons as part of their practice. Guy Standing’s book on the precariat, has documented the deep linkage of precarious workers with networks characterised by commons.

I do not believe a complex society can solely run on direct democracy, and it is not realistic to demand of people to be involved with everything.

The innovation of peer production moreover, which is now actively pursued in the Italian model promoted by LabGovand LabSus, is the realisation that not everybody has to decide on everything, we simply have no time to be involved in everything at the personal level, but to give privileged space to the already engaged citizens, with the appropriate control mechanisms by other stakeholders, including ‘society’ as a whole.

OSB: So do you favour liquid democracy, or any kind of delegative democracy?

MB: I favour a mixture, which needs to be experimented with. I do not believe a complex society can solely run on direct democracy, and it is not realistic to demand of people to be involved with everything. Thus we need to build new layers of deliberative democracy and participation, on top of improved representative democracies, which can also include new lottery systems for such presentation, as for example presented in Melenchon’s proposal for a newConstituent Assembly and 6th Republic in France.

Right now, we (the human race) are at the cusp of combining the old representative model, which is no longer functioning for different reasons, and an added layer of experimental more direct democratic models. See also what is happening in Voralberg, the Austrian region, with civic councils for examples; or the Bologna Regulation in Italian cities, which gives citizens direct policy power to instantiate commons governance projects.

I think the essence is now experimentation, and different regions/countries/cities might opt for different contextual mixes of collective decision-making. Of course, I am also very aware of potential counter-tendencies with an authoritarian capitalism under the leadership of right-wing radicals such as the Trump-ian forces. It’s going to be a context between the two models, while we know the status-quo is no longer functioning.

OSB: Since members of co-ops and platform co-ops get to vote on everything and anything by which they are affected, a society populated by a multitude of co-ops might provide an alternative system of governance.

A co-op of co-ops could perform organisational duties at any scale whilst ensuring democratic governance by pushing decisions down to the lowest possible levels. What do you think about the possibility of a completely new system of democracy, like the above, superseding the existing system?

MB: I think we should be wary of uniform systems, since, if anything goes wrong with it, there is no backup. This was the argument of Rosa Luxemburg against the abolition in Russia of the parliament (during the Russian Revolution), she realised that if anything went wrong with the worker councils, there would be no other power able to create a balance, and she was proven right. The model you describe is being experimented in Rojava I believe.

But the cooperative model has its limits in my view, in that it easily functions as private property or ‘worker capitalism’, in relation to the rest of society. This is why I stress the model of open cooperatives, in which coops are also directly aligned with the production of common good, in the form of ‘commons’, through their own statutory obligations. In general, I favour a pluri-form model of democracy, in which cooperative democracy has its place, along with others, to make sure there is institutional diversity.

OSB: So, would I be right in saying you think that the most practical way to expand democracy is for citizens to propose solutions and organise around areas of shared interest (or physical or digital commons), to make their voices known and to influence our existing ‘representative democracies’ in the hopes that our representatives make better decisions?

Democracy has to be first of all a practice that is integrated in our lives, not something just like an election, which is like electing which elite is going to govern us.

MB: No that is not entirely correct. On the one hand, democracy has to be first of all a practice that is integrated in our lives, not something just like an election, which is like electing which elite is going to govern us (election = elite, both words have the same roots, and the greeks saw elections as the aristocratic principle and the lottery as the democratic principle); the commons, defined as shared resources that are governed by communities according to their own rules and norms, are a good way to achieve this, i.e. as we learn and work, we practice democracy.

Representative democracy needs to exist to cover wider territorial and functional units, but we are at the threshold where mere representation is no longer enough, and so this is the time to augment it with new techniques, to be experimented with, and this may involve participatory, deliberative, liquid feedback type, lotteries etc.

 John Heron explains well what chance of change I believe we can achieve, he once wrote:

“There seem to be at least four degrees of cultural development, rooted in degrees of moral insight:

1. autocratic cultures which define rights in a limited and oppressive way and there are no rights of political participation;
2. narrow democratic cultures which practice political participation through representation, but have no or very limited participation of people in decision-making in all other realms, such as research, religion, education, industry etc.;
3. wider democratic cultures which practice both political participation and varying degrees of wider kinds of participation;
4. commons p2p cultures in a libertarian and abundance-oriented global network with equipotential rights of participation of everyone in every field of human endeavour.”

Heron adds that “These four degrees could be stated in terms of the relations between hierarchy, co-operation and autonomy.

1. Hierarchy defines, controls and constrains co-operation and autonomy;
2. Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere only;
3. Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere and in varying degrees in other spheres;
4. The sole role of hierarchy is in its spontaneous emergence in the initiation and continuous flowering of autonomy-in-co-operation in all spheres of human endeavour”

Visions of the future

OSB: Finally, I’d like to ask about your vision. We are often exposed to the vision of a world full of hate and extremism and scarcity but rarely hear about a positive alternative. If you were in charge, what changes would you make to help speed up the transition to a collaborative, generative, sustainable, economy?

MB: I have a rather tragic vision for change, i.e. change happens when we must. At this stage where we have a world civilisation which is based on extraction, where social inequalities lead to authoritarian right wing populism and the planet is endangered in all kinds of ways, humanity will do what it has always done, i.e. create popular and spiritual movements that aim to limit extraction and discipline the extractors.  Mark Whitaker, who has done a 3,000 year comparative review of how civilisations react to meltdowns shows a pattern. This means going to a system that stabilises social unrest. This is where peer to peer dynamics come in today, and that needs massive mutualisation ( = pooling, = commons) of physical and knowledge resources.

Thus any successor system will need to comprise revived commons as a way to drastically reduce the material footprint.

If the medieval monks mutualised knowledge and infrastructure through monasteries and feudalism re-localised production, so today we have free software / open design, the sharing / access based economy to mutualise idle resources and recycle / upcycle and distribute local manufacturing based on demand, to relocalise.

You know the analogy of imaginal cells in the caterpillar; the cells who identify with the caterpillar are in panic, because the system is dying, but the cells who identify with the butterfly and carry its DNA know that it is a transition. Similarly today, we see seed forms emerging to solve the systemic crises, and the P2P Foundation is dedicated to observing them, analysing them and to think through where this can lead us, and be a catalyst for that change.

OSB: That’s a great analogy. The Open Co-op has similar objectives and we will be discussing all of the above themes at Open 2017 in London In February. Thank you for your time and all your thoughts Michel, you are an inspiration and the P2P Foundation is an amazing resource for the anyone interested in the transition to a more equitable, sustainable society.

This post was originally published on OpenDemocracy.net. 

The post Representation is no longer enough – A Q&A with Michel Bauwens appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Written by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis:

Two prominent social progressive movements are faced with a few contradictions and a paradox.

On the one side, we observe a re-emergence of the co-operative movement and worker-owned enterprises that, however, suffer from certain structural weaknesses. They have loose connections with each other and thus fail to form a global counter-power capable of confronting transnational capital.

On the other, we have an emergent field of commons-based peer production initiatives, such as the free and open-source software projects, that create digital commons of knowledge, software, culture and design for the whole of humanity. Nevertheless, such initiatives are often dominated by venture-capital-funded start-ups and large multinational enterprises that exploit the same commons.

Thus we have a paradox: the more “communist” the sharing license used in the peer production of digital commons (that is, few or no restrictions on sharing), the more capitalist the practice (that is, multinationals can use it for free). Take for example the GNU/Linux commons that has become a “corporate commons” as well, enriching for-profit corporations such as IBM. It is obvious that this works in a certain way and seems acceptable to many free software developers. But is this the optimal way?

Our argument focuses on the social logic that the licenses used for sharing the digital commons often enable. They allow anybody to contribute, and they allow anybody to use. In fact this relational dynamic is technically a form of “communism”: from each according to his/her abilities, to each according to his/her needs. This paradoxically allows, for example, multinational corporations to use the free software code for profit maximization. At the same time, the majority of the contributors participate on a voluntary basis, and those who have an income, make a living either through wage-labor or alliances with capital-driven entities.

What is to be done?

We suggest a two-step strategy to tackle this “communist” paradox.

First, we argue for commons-based reciprocity licensing, which has been called copyfair as a play on copyright and copyleft. Copyfair allows commons-contributing entities to use the common material for free, but non-contributory capitalist entities have to pay for a license for the right to commercialize that material. In this approach, the free sharing of knowledge is preserved, i.e. the universal availability of digital commons, but commercialization is made conditional on reciprocity. The Peer Production License exemplifies this line of argument.  So, reciprocity is created between the sphere of the capitalist market and the sphere of the commons. This simultaneously allows the entities participating into the ecosystems of commons-oriented entrepreneurial coalitions to pool and mutualize their digital resources and benefit in tandem.

Second, we argue for a synergy between the commons-based peer production movement and elements of the cooperative movements. We propose the model of an “open cooperative”, i.e. an entity that would be legally and statutorily bound to creating commons and shared resources. Open cooperatives would internalize negative externalities; adopt multi-stakeholder governance models; contribute to the creation of digital and material commons; and be socially and politically organized around global concerns, even if they produce locally.

Perhaps a good way to understand this twofold proposal is to look at the functioning of the medieval guild system. Externally they were selling their goods on the marketplace, but internally they were fraternities and solidarity systems. This is a historical analogy to understand the double logic of the new entities connected to the commons. In a commons-centric economy, this could be achieved through open participatory systems that would connect producers and consumer/user communities, through mutual solidarity, as we know for example from the model of consumer-supported agriculture. Open cooperatives would thus intertwine contributors with various roles in a solidarity ecosystem.

Sensorica’s New Economy

Building counter-power

The only way to achieve systemic change at the planetary level is to build counter-power, i.e. alternative global governance. The transnational capitalist class must feel that its power is also curtailed by transnational forces representing the global commoners and their livelihood organizations. We therefore favor commons-oriented entrepreneurial coalitions that strengthen commons and their contributory communities and create an economy for them.

Examples of such translocal and transnationally operating coalitions already exist. Amongst the best known are Enspiral (originally based in New Zealand); Sensorica (originally based in Montreal, Canada); Las Indias (mostly based in Spain but with many hispanic members from Latin America); and Ethos VO(based in the UK). We believe this new type of translocal organization is the seed form of future global coalitions of a commons-oriented cooperative ecosystem.

• This essay was based on Bauwens, M., & Kostakis, V. (2014). From the Communism of Capital to Capital for the Commons: Towards an Open Co-operativism. tripleC, 12(1), 356-361.
• Cross-posted from OpenDemocracy
• Lead image by Usman Malik

The post From the communism of capital to capital for the commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

On Patents, Open Source Design and Reciprocity

I previously blogged on open source and IP here and I wanted to revisit this in a more concise way to focus in on the limitations of open source and commons approaches in the context of patents.

The Benefits of Open Source Design

Developing a product or technology in an open source way offers advantages to society and also the development team. For the core team they have the many eyes of the community on the key development issues, a form of giant, distributed R&D department. Building a strong network of collaborators and a vibrant community which will contribute to varying degrees also acts to build a market and a brand for the core team (whether they be a company, charity or foundation). For society, commonly held knowledge resources are created which has a great value both as an educational resource and making technologies available to communities around the world. It adds resilience and sustainability to our communities by allowing technologies to be re-purposed appropriately and also more easily maintained to minimise waste.

The Open Source Ecology project is a great example of this resilient commons based approach that is strictly open source in its approach. Their values statement encapsulates this:

“The end point of our practical development is Distributive Enterprise – an open, collaborative enterprise that publishes all of its strategic, business, organizational, enterprise information – so that others could learn and thereby truly accelerate innovation by annihilating all forms of competitive waste. We see this as the only way to solve wicked problems faster than they are created – a struggle worth the effort. In the age where companies spend more on patent protectionism than on research and development – we feel that unleashing the power of collaborative innovation is an idea whose time has come.”

The funding model for OS Ecology seems to be based around two main sources, crowdfunding/donations and charging for educational workshops teaching others to build and use the machines they have designed.

The Limits of Open Source Design & the Need for Reciprocity

Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation however emphasizes the need for reciprocity, suggesting, “the more communistic the licence, the more capitalistic the outcomes”. Making the case here that with open source projects eg. Linux, a profit maximising company can come in and make massive profits using the commons resource of the stable body of code at the centre of the Linux project.

This means that the value of the commons provided by free labour is being exploited by private companies and that they are not then obliged to give back to the commons to sustain it financially.

To this end, Dmytri Kleiner, has proposed the Peer Production License (PPL) whereby free use is granted to non-profits and coop entities, but commercial entities which make no contribution have to pay a license fee. Michel Bauwens has termed this an example of a Commons-Based Reciprocity License (CBRL), which has been further developed into Copyfair. These proposals suggest a means to create a self-sustaining commons of knowledge that accepts wider community contributions and at the same time provides for funds to enhance and grow a core team of curators for the project.

 The nature of IP – Copyright and Patents Are Very Different

Importantly, however, for the discussion of the application of open source in physical designs, a CBRL/copyfair licence would be based on copyright, as with creative commons or copyleft style arrangements. Now, copyright is an automatic right in most countries, so in adopting a copyleft, copyfair or other licences you are then disposing of a recognition of ownership that you already have.

Patents, on the other hand, are territorially based and ownership is granted by the relevant state authorities following a relatively lengthy procedure with very real financial costs. This is largely incompatible with distributed open innovation particularly as secrecy (non-disclosure) must be maintained up until a patent is filed.

This means that an open source physical design could have the schematics and drawings of a design’s implementation covered by a CBRL but in terms of fundamental principles which would be patentable, the commons could not be protected in this way.

In fact, when we look around at the more popular open source design and open source hardware projects, such as the Ultimaker,  the (original)Makerbot or Reprap, they are all based on expired, existing patents. They do not, in general, propose new technologies that would be patentable, though interestingly, when Makerbot was bought out by stratasys, it then filed a patent and released a range of closed-source models to the market. This eventually led to conflict with the original supportive community that had grown around the original open source Makerbot. Makerbot were accused by the community of stealing ideas and attempting to patent them, an enclosure of the commons. The community reacted with the hashtag #takerbot on social media.

 Pragmatic Conclusions

Reliance on copyright and copyleft in a classic Open Source project leaves collaboratively produced product innovations in the paradox highlighted by Michel Bauwens: that the more communal the license, the more commercial interests can exploit them without contributing to sustaining the innovation process that generated them.

If an open source project were conducted in secret, however, it would not be able to leverage the network benefits of the distributed development resource of the online community and would be forced back into the standard model of investment, patent acquisition and defence.

Conversely, if a development is carried out in a truly open model with disregard for how patents work, the open community could find its work enclosed at a later date by a proprietary patent as seen with the Makerbot community.

As a practising designer and engineer I am looking to launch a technology project and I want to embed the values of open source communities in its development. In particular, I want to ensure that the technology is not used for military applications.

I have come to the conclusion that a patent is needed to establish a “property” which I can then licence at a lower fee to non-profits in a way that reflects the goals and spirit of the CBRL. The core technology will then be a basis for an open source community platform around which developments and applications grow. Any licensing fees to larger profit-maximising companies will then feed directly back into sustaining this platform. The challenge then is to reach the stage of obtaining patents in key territories without requiring external investors who do not share these goals.

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The platform cooperativism movement, which brings about the best societal effects of the so called ‘sharing economy’, is on the rise. Nonetheless, it is far from being popular and nothing indicates that it will. In this paper we investigate the economic mechanisms through which dominant platforms remain dominant and hinder the development of alternative platform cooperatives. We conclude that a crucial factor is the fact that the property over the data created in sharing economy platforms is private and exclusive. We then propose a policy that has three goals: curtailing dominant platforms’ dominance, fostering platform cooperativism and maximizing the beneficial societal effects that can be derived from exploiting the data generated in platforms. The policy is based on making the data generated in sharing economy platforms a common to which reciprocity licenses would apply.

Carballa Smichowski Bruno (2016) – Data as a Common in the Sharing Economy a General Policy Proposal (CEPN… by P2P Foundation on Scribd

Photo by marcinignac

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The following 10 ideas for action are the result of 10 years of research at the P2P Foundation on the emerging practices of new productive communities and those ethical entrepreneurial coalitions that can create livelihoods on top of shared resources. Together, they emphasize the emerging practices that can bolster the resilience of a new ethical economy. Our goal is to encourage the creation of new entities that overstep the traditional corporate form and its extractive profit-maximizing practices. What we need, instead of extractive forms of capital, is generative ideas that co-create value with and for commoners.

These 10 ideas already exist in some form, but need to be used more widely and integrated. We present them below in three sections addressing each concern (free, fair and sustainable). Each recommendation is followed by links to related resources.

I. OPEN AND FREE

1. Practice open business models based on shared knowledge.

Traditional closed business models are based on artificial scarcity. In contrast, open business models are market strategies based on both the recognition of natural abundance and the refusal to generate income and profits by making it artificially scarce.

Knowledge is a non- or anti-rival good which gains in use value the more it is shared. Although it can be shared easily and, when in digital form, at very low marginal cost, many extractive firms still use artificial scarcity to extract rents from the creation or use of digitized knowledge.

Through legal repression or technological sabotage, naturally shareable goods are made artificially scarce so that extra profits can be generated. This is particularly grievous for life-saving or planet-regenerating technological knowledge.

The first action is, therefore, an ethical one, with three elements: share what can be shared; only create market value from resources that are scarce; create added value on top or alongside of these commons.

• For P2P Foundation documentation on Open Business models see the sections on Business Models, Open Company Formats, Open Knowledge, and post-corporate enterprises.

• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on Open Content, Open Models, Copyright/IP, and P2P Business Models

II. FAIR

2. Practice Open Cooperativism

Many new ethical, generative forms are being created that are better aligned with the contributory commons. The key is to choose post-corporate forms that can generate livelihoods for contributing commoners. Cooperatives are one of the potential forms that commons-friendly market entities could take.

Open cooperatives are cooperatives with the following characteristics:

1) Mission-oriented, with a social goal related to creating shared resources.

2) Multi-stakeholder governed, including those affected by or contributing to the particular activity.

3) Constitutionally committed by their own rules to co-creating commons with the productive communities.

4) Along with other cooperatives, global in organisational scope, in order to create counter-power to extractive multinational corporations.

We see the emergence of more open forms, including “neo-tribes” (eg. the Ouishare community), or more tightly organized “neo-builds” (eg., Enspiral.org, Las Indias or the Ethos Foundation).

Even more open is the network form chosen by the open scientific hardware community Sensorica, which allows all micro-task contributions to be accounted in the reward system through open value or contributory accounting (more below), thus more tightly coupling those contributions with generated income.

• Commons Transition: Open Cooperativism Definition, Stories on Open Cooperativism. See also David Bollier’s and Pat Conaty’s Open Coops report
• For P2P Foundation documentation on Open and Platform cooperativism, see our Cooperatives Section and dedicated sections on Open and Platform Cooperativism and Open Company Formats
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on Open Cooperativism and Sustainable Livelihoods

3. Practice open value or contributory accounting

Peer production is based on an open, community-driven, collaborative infrastructure, with freely contributed, distributed tasks.

The most appropriate way to reward those contributing to such a process may not be the traditional salary, and so open value accounting (or contributory accounting) have emerged.

Sensorica, mentioned above, practices this in the following way. Any contributor may add their contributions (tasks performed) into the system, logged by project number. The contributor is then assigned “karma points” after a peer evaluation. Income is then flowed to these contributions which have been accounted-for and weighted (valued), so every contributor is fairly rewarded.

Contributory accounting and similar solutions avoid situations where only a few contributors — those more closely related to the market — capture the value co-created by the much larger community. Open book accounting also insures that the (re)distribution of value is transparent for all contributors.

• For P2P Foundation documentation on open value accounting and streams, see our section on P2P Accounting

4. Insure fair distribution and benefit-sharing through CopyFair licensing

Copyleft licenses allow anyone to re-use the knowledge commons they require, on the condition that changes and improvements are added back to that commons. This is a great advance, but should not be abstracted from the need for fairness.

In physical production, which involves finding resources, raw materials and payments to contributors, extractive models benefit from the unfettered commercial exploitation of these commons.

Therefore, while knowledge sharing should always be maintained we should also demand reciprocity for the commercial exploitation of the commons. This would create a level playing field for the ethical economic entities that presently internalize social and environmental costs.

CopyFair licenses, which allow knowledge sharing while requesting reciprocity in exchange for the right of commercialization, would facilitate achieving this.

• Commons Transition: An introduction to Commons-Based Reciprocity Licenses
• For P2P Foundation documentation on licenses see Licensing
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on CopyFair licenses.

5. Practice solidarity and mitigate the risks of work and life through “commonfare” practices

The power of nation-states has gradually weakened as one result of financial and neoliberal globalization. We are seeing a strong, integrated effort to dismantle the vital solidarity mechanisms that were once embedded in the welfare state models.

While we may yet not have the power to prevent this destruction, it is imperative that we reconstruct distributed solidarity mechanisms, a practice which we call commonfare.

Examples all over the world, such as the Broodfonds (NL), Friendsurance (Germany), and the health sharing ministries (U.S.), or cooperative entities such Coopaname in France, demonstrate new forms of distributed solidarity which can be developed to allay risks to life and work. We are particularly happy about the emergence of labour mutuals like the European cooperative SMart-eu, which represents the missing link between the precariat and salaried workers by offering a mutual guarantee fund and “virtual salariat” (i.e. insertion into social protections) for autonomous workers.

• For P2P Foundation documentation, see our P2P Solidarity Section
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on P2P Healthcare

III. SUSTAINABLE

6. Use open and sustainable designs for an open source circular economy

The practice of planned obsolescence — a feature, not a bug, for profit-maximizing corporations — is alien to people operating in a context of shared, abundant resources. Open productive communities insure maximum participation through modularity and granularity.

Using open and sustainable designs for producing sustainable good and services is highly recommended for ethical-entrepreneurial entities.

• For P2P Foundation documentation, see our Design Section
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on the Open Source Circular Economy

7. Move toward mutual coordination of production through open supply chains and open book accounting

What decision-making is for planning, and pricing is for the market, mutual coordination is for the commons.

In a circular economy, the output of one production process is used as an input for another. Closed value chains won’t help us achieve a sustainable circular economy; neither will non-transparent negotiations for any form of cooperation.

But through open supply chains, entrepreneurial coalitions that are interdependent with a collaborative commons can create ecosystems of collaboration. Here, production processes become transparent, and every participant can adapt his or her behaviour based on the knowledge openly available in the network.

There is no need for overproduction when the network’s actual production realities become common knowledge.

• For P2P Foundation documentation on Mutual Coordination

8. Practice cosmo-localization

“What is light is global, and what is heavy is local.” This is the new principle animating commons-based peer production, in which knowledge is globally shared and production can take place on demand — based on real needs — through a network of distributed coworking spaces and microfactories.

Studies have shown that up to two-thirds of matter and energy goes not to production, but to transport. Clearly, this is unsustainable. A return to localized production is sine qua non for the transition towards sustainable production.

• More information: Cosmo-localism and the futures of material production
• Read our P2P Lab articles on the topic here:

1. Article 1 [2015] “Design global, manufacture local: Exploring the contours of an emerging productive model”. text
2. Article 2 [2015] “Towards a political ecology of the digital economy: Socio-environmental implications of two competing value models”. text

• For P2P Foundation documentation on sustainable manufacturing, see our section on Sustainable_Manufacturing.

9. Mutualize physical infrastructures

The misnamed sharing economy, from AirBnB to Uber, has shown the potential of matching idle, under- or unused resources, but in the right context of co-ownership and co-governance, a real sharing economy can achieve dramatic advances in reducing resource use.

Our means of production, including machines, can be mutualized and self-owned by all those that create value. Platform cooperatives, data cooperatives and “fairshares” forms of distributed ownership are tools to help us co-own our infrastructures of production.

Co-working, skills-sharing, ridesharing are just a few examples of the many ways we can re-use and share resources to dramatically augment the thermo-dynamic efficiencies of our consumption.

• For P2P Foundation documentation on sustainable manufacturing, see our section on Sharing
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on Sharing

10. Mutualize generative capital

The 38 percent financial tax owed on all goods and services should be abolished; we must transform our monetary system, and substantively augment the use of mutual credit systems. Generative forms of capital cannot rely on an extractive money supply based on compound interest payable to extractive banks.

• Commons Transition: See features on Capital for the Commons and the Commons Strategies Group report of the same name.
• For P2P Foundation documentation on generative capital see Peerfunding and the Democratic Money Initiative
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on P2P Money

In conclusion: What the world, humanity and the environment that sustains us needs is an economic system driven by free, fair and sustainable practices. It is our belief that the holistic adoption of the recommendations and practices above will accelerate this change. We can’t afford to wait any longer, so let’s get to work!

• Cross-posted from Shareable
• Lead image by Josef Stuefer, “Open” image by Open Knowledge, “Fair” image by OpenSource.com, “Sustainable” image by USAID Nepal

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Luis Enríquez:

THE COPYRIGHT OF THE COMMONS HAS TO BECOME DYNAMIC! This is a very challenging affirmation, and I will explain why.

The law is supposed to regulate all human activities, or at least that is what we learn in law school. Despite our legal tradition (common law, or roman law), we always try to fit new human actions into our predefined rules.

A good example is copyright law. The holy grail of Copyright law is still the Bern Convention from 1886, and revised in 1970. Of course, we didn’t have computers or Internet in 1886. However, in 1996 the WIPO copyright treaty assigned the same protection of literary works to software and databases

In my opinion, this was a wrong and lazy choice. Software should not be protected as literary works, because its environmental nature is totally different. Just think about the time of protection of 70 years after the death of the creator. This time of protection may be suitable for a song, or a film. But it is ridiculous for software.

The copyright license has become the way out. The rise of generic purpose public licenses (such as the GPL, MPL, MIT, BSD licenses) happened because they provide the possibility of establishing permissions and obligations for the users, out of the boundaries of the “all rights reserved” copyright law tradition.

Nevertheless, Generic purpose public licenses are still STATIC, reproducing the static nature of copyright law. Software industry adopted the same copyright version methodology of literary works. So you could have the first version of a software released in 2000; the second version released in 2003, and so on.

This version methodology freezes (or hides to the public) development for a period of time, and it is suitable for closed source software, specially when the production and distribution of software is controlled by an enterprise, but not for community projects.

Let’s take a look of what is going on in open source software community projects today. Open source software projects are hosted in open repositories such as GitHub or Bitbucket. Many freelance developers will join the project, making new commits, adding new code, fixing bugs, building libraries, and so on. Users can download the source of the software at any time, as it is always available to download.

This dynamic model of software production brings new legal paradigms such as:

1. Who are the copyright holders? New copyright holders may appear at any time, without a hiring relationship with the former ones.

2. Lack of legal personality. Many Open source software projects don’t own a legal personality. Therefore, in the light of most copyright laws, each contributor still owns his source code contribution.

3. Lack of flexibility. As production is always under development, certain conditions can change, and not be compatible with the original license terms. E.g. New source code license terms are not compatible with the project’s license.

4. How to split retributions, or donations among copyright holders? As there is not hiring relationship, it is FAIR that each contributor receives a part of the global retribution.

A few months ago, I cooperated with an open source developer and bitcoin enthusiast named Dawid Ci??arkiewicz. He helped me to understand the problems of software community projects, today. We worked together on a project named CopyFair Corp, and as a result, we got the CopyFair Software License (CFSL). The first license draft can be read here:

THE COPYFAIR SOFTWARE LICENSE V.0

Our challenge was to create a Retribution based license, for dynamic software production. The CFSL follows the Commons Based Reciprocity guidelines developed by Michael Bauwens, and other well known commoners. However, In the process of writing the CFSL, we got a promising idea, SMART COPYRIGHT LICENSES. The polymorphic nature of the CopyFair, and the CFSL definitely goes in that direction.

A smart Copyright license should automatically resolve the problems of software community projects. It will be updated every time a new commit is made at the software repository. It can operate and be stored in the blockchain, just like smart contracts in Ethereum.

These are some advantages:

1. Polymorphic features. A license can adapt itself to different situations. It could apply some terms for commercial uses and noncommercial uses, while detecting how the software is being exploited. The license is integrated within the source code.

2. Flexibility. If some parameters of the software change, the license will also change. E.g. A new copyright holder contributes 2% of the source code. The license will immediately get an update, adding him as a contributor, and mapping his percentage of retribution.

3. Customization. Developers could adapt the license conditions to bypass environmental restrictions. E.g. Retribution is set in BTC in the countries that BTC is legal, and only if a BTC is => than $200. Otherwise retribution could be paid in Ethers or dollars.

As we can see, it is a very challenging idea. However, the commons transition requires dynamic legal tools in order to adapt the old fashion copyright laws to distributed systems. At this point, it seems very difficult to update copyright law, and that is why we must take the best out of the only legal tool that we have left, THE LICENSE.

Photo by Erik

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