We understand that there are lots of new licenses being proposed right now. The motivation behind those licenses is generally to protect a single company’s proprietary interest.

In contrast, we are creating the Cryptographic Autonomy License because we don’t believe that any existing license is written to match the structure of fully peer-to-peer cryptographic applications, which seek to uphold the interests of the users, like the ones that can be developed using the Holochain framework.

Creating a new license must be done with care and in consultation with both experts and the community. Thus, this post is the first of a number of blog posts that will lay out why we think a new license is necessary, how we propose it be structured, and how we intend to proceed throughout implementation.

Distributed Applications are Different

Most software and licenses assume a single point of execution for each software component. Each of these software components is considered an independent “work” that carries its own license. For example, many client-server applications have servers licensed differently than clients.

Distributed applications, on the other hand, are designed to be a single “work” run across many different computers. All of the different parts of the application framework must interoperate as a unified whole in order for the distributed framework to function. Maintaining uniformity is simple for proprietary software: simply create a license that forbids any changes to the code or protocol used in the distributed application. However, we believe that the underlying framework should be free and open source. The Cryptographic Autonomy License is designed to comply with the principles of the Open Source Definition while recognizing the importance of the interfaces between different parts of the distributed system. The interfaces, APIs, and performance of those APIs are recognized and protected as part of the license.

The Cryptographic Autonomy License is not just about an application framework. It is also about how the architecture of an app maximizes the autonomy of each user that participates. In a system like Holochain, the cryptographic keys that protect individual user data and allow the execution of user processes are held respectively by each user. It is a basic principle of the Holochain framework that users should by default be empowered to control their own identity, data, and processes. This is true even if parts of the system that host the data and processes are physically located on computers that they do not control.

Applications that do not respect this principle actually work against the decentralized nature of the Holochain framework. If there is a proprietary application that controls the creation and use of the cryptographic keys that allow for the processing of application user data, then that proprietary application becomes a point of centralization in the distributed autonomous system. The proprietary application doesn’t just control the user data, it also affects the functioning of the distributed system itself. Without access and real control over those keys, you, the user, do not have the “freedom to run the program as you wish for any purpose.”

We do intend to allow proprietary applications on Holochain, but we want the framework to default to empowering and respecting the freedom of individual users overall. It is in this context that we see the need for the Cryptographic Autonomy License.

How the Cryptographic Autonomy License Will Work

The next post in this series will lay out some of the specific legal structures that underlie the Cryptographic Autonomy License. At a high level, however, a few points are key:

1. The Cryptographic Autonomy License will be a strong reciprocal (“copyleft”) license so as to maintain user agency and freedom.
2. Unlike other current open source licenses, the Cryptographic Autonomy License will require software that implements a compatible API or publicly performs the API to also be open source.
3. The Cryptographic Autonomy License will strive to maximize compatibility. Despite the strong copyleft nature of the license, it will not require compatible software to itself be licensed under the Cryptographic Autonomy License; other open source licenses will also be acceptable.
4. The Cryptographic Autonomy License will also have a built-in mechanism for allowing exceptions for linked or co-compiled code, preserving a distinction between applications built on the framework itself and connected user applications.

No other open source license has this combination of elements, so once we have publicly developed the Cryptographic Autonomy License, we will be submitting it to the Open Source Initiative for recognition as an official Open Source License.

We believe that the Cryptographic Autonomy License will be of benefit beyond the Holochain community. We believe that it will also provide an answer for developers in other communities who are creating software that is framework-native but requires strong reciprocality.

We look forward to engaging in a constructive dialogue to help make that happen.

We hope the community of Holochain projects, developers, and supporters are as excited about this news as we are about sharing it. This is a big step forward, which in concert with the accomplishments that we have been sharing recently in our Holochain Dev Pulse, ensure, in quite distinctive ways, that we are prepared for the upcoming releases of Holo.

As a reminder, the milestones and releases that will be coming out are:

Promised in February

1. Holo Closed Alpha TestNet (not public, only Indiegogo Alpha/Beta backers)

Dates To Be Announced

1. HoloPorts Shipped (Indiegogo in 1st batch, HoloPort store in 2nd batch)
2. Holo Open Alpha TestNet
3. Holo Full Feature TestNet
4. Holo Beta MainNet

Again, a big thank you goes out to all our stakeholders for your continued commitment and invincible enthusiasm. We look forward to reading your thoughts and feedback regarding the Cryptographic Autonomy License in the coming weeks.

Thanks to Arthur Brock & Eric Harris-Braun for laying the groundwork, inspiration and vision, and to Van Lindberg for formulating the legal foundations. Some Rights Reserved.

— Holo Executive Director, Mary Camacho

The post Why We Need a New Open Source License appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Can FOSS stem the tide towards the commodification of agricultural knowledge?

Gabriel Ash: Acting against the grain of current economic and political structures and offering both valuable access and inspiring ideas about collaboration, the sharing of ‘the commons,’ and the future of work, these FOSS-modelled schemes are unlikely to be the last of their kind. But if they are to realize their full potential, it is essential that both the lessons of the history of FOSS, and differences in context between IT and agriculture, as well as the impact of the quarter century that separates the two moments in time, become subjects of reflection.

The reality of FOSS is significantly more complicated that the simple distinction between open and proprietary. In many products—the Android phone, for example—‘open’ and ‘closed’ elements co-exist, and tiered commercial projects with an Open Source base and proprietary additions are common. Furthermore, ‘open’ itself is a continuum, with various licensing schemes offering a range of different degrees of control. If FOSS models become widespread, forms of accommodation between open and proprietary technologies are likely to emerge in agriculture as well, which could further advance the interests of agribusiness at the expense of farmers. It matters therefore how and to what ends FOSS schemes engage and mobilize users and producers.

Blueprints for agricultural technology and machinery can be found on websites like FarmHack or Atelier Paysan (CCO)

The history of the evolution of agricultural knowledge is also more complicated than a simple binary between proprietary and public. The Green Revolution replaced the informal, tacit knowledge of farmers with formal, scientific knowledge that was nevertheless organized as public knowledge, primary through institutions of research and higher learning. This phase of development elicited resistance and criticism for both the damage to farmers and ecosystems, primarily in the Third World, and for the denigration of centuries of accumulated local knowledge. This conflict was instrumental in the emergence of agroecology as a discipline[1] as well as in a range of efforts to foster better interactions between scientists and farmers.[2]

A second process that began shifting funding, control, and eventually the ownership of knowledge from the public to the private sector occurred later. In contrast to agriculture, software development never had the equivalent of farmers, and FOSS emerged purely out of resistance to the second process. This difference implies that FOSS-inspired schemes in agriculture could be more complex and resilient, and potentially more effective alternatives. But it also opens more room for misaligned interests and internal conflicts.

The ideas of unfettered collaboration and democratic creativity that FOSS schemes invoke are not external to the development of the privatized knowledge economy and its attendant intensification of intellectual property rights. Workforce creativity, technological innovation, intellectual property rights, and economic growth are widely perceived today by policy makers as linked.[3] By advancing ideas of knowledge as common and knowledge production as free, FOSS-inspired schemes expose some of the internal contradictions of a model of economic growth premised on profiting from immaterial labour and the control and selling of knowledge. But they will not buck the trend towards privatized hi-tech agriculture alone.

Agriculture, however, may offer unique opportunities for linking FOSS-inspired schemes with other forms of engagement and mobilization on issues such as environmentalism and farmers’ and peasants’ rights, and the different ways each of the latter raises the question of the commons. Let these projects be the early shoots of a wide wave of reflection, experimentation, and mobilization around these questions.

Read part 1 of this series here.

[1] Gliessman S.R. (2015) Agroecology: the ecology of sustainable food systems, 3rd Ed., CRC Press, Taylor & Francis, New York, USA, p. 28.

[2] World Bank (2006) Global – International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) Project. Washington, DC: World Bank http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/753791468314375364/Global-International-Assessment-of-Agricultural-Science-and-Technology-for-Development-IAASTD-Project , pp. 65-68.

[3] See Barry (2008), pp. 42-43.

The post Democratising AgTech? Agriculture and the Digital Commons | Part 2 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Gabriel Ash: Recently, a number of initiatives defending free access to agricultural knowledge have emerged. FarmHack, Atelier Paysan, The Open Seeds Initiative, and Open Source Seeds advance alternatives to the proprietary knowledge model of industrial farming based on ideas drawn from Free/Open Source Software. These initiatives respond to current trends in agricultural development and raise questions about its direction; they express an emergent concern for the commons against the drive to privatize knowledge. But why now? What is Free/Open Source Software (FOSS)? How is the FOSS model applied to agriculture? Finally, what are the opportunities and pitfalls such schemes present?[1]

Why now?

Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, blockchain, cryptocurrencies—these are today’s ‘hot’ investment trends. The hi-tech ventures that seek to deploy these technologies receive the bulk of new investment in start-ups as well as media attention. The dominance of Information Technologies affects agriculture in two ways: First, an investment gold rush is building up in ‘Agritech,’ around buzzwords such as ‘smart farming’ or ‘precision agriculture,’ and a crop of companies that seek to make agriculture more efficient and profitable with information technologies such as drone and satellite imagery analysis, cloud based data collection, digital exchanges, etc. One gets a sense of the magnitude of the forces unleashed from browsing the offerings of start-up accelerators such as EIT.  Second, businesses, regulators, politicians, NGOs, and the media adopt vocabulary, goals, expectations, and ‘common sense’ derived from Information Technology, which are then applied to agriculture.[2]

The dominance of Information Technology and its tendency to shape other industries as well as law and regulation is not simply the outcome of “market forces.” Both the US and the EU have long promoted the dissemination of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and the adoption of new intellectual property rights to support it. Thus, “the 2005 Spring European Council called knowledge and innovation the engines of sustainable growth…it is essential to build a fully inclusive information society, based on the widespread use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in public services, SMEs and households.” According to António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General, “we want to ensure that big data will bring the big impact that so many people need.” It is taken for granted by policy makers that innovation and growth depend on commodified, proprietary knowledge, which in turn require reforming and unifying intellectual property rights.[3]

With the growing visibility of ICT, the policy drive for hi-tech innovation, and the push to commodify and privatise knowledge, alternative practices that first emerged within ICT—notably Free/Open Source Software—have also migrated into the mainstream, inspiring projects such the Creative Commons and Free Culture. They are also gaining a presence in agriculture.

What is Free/Open Source Software (FOSS)?

FOSS emerged in the 1980s among computer scientists and engineers who resented the way commercial constraints interfered with the norms of unfettered collaboration and exchange of information that prevail in science. In 1985, Richard Stallman created the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which launched the GNU project of free software tools. Breaking with the habits of commercial development, the software was written by volunteers in open collaboration over the internet and gave users full access to the source code as well as the right to freely share, tinker with and modify the program.

The FSF introduced a new relation between software producers and users, the General Public License (GPL), which effectively “hacks” copyright law to create the very opposite of a property right, a resource that obliges its users to place the fruits of their own labour in a shared common domain. By mandating that all derivative works must be distributed with the same license, this property of the GPL, called ‘copyleft’, prevents the appropriation and integration of free software in a proprietary product and guarantees that the code will remain free and open to users.

Although inspired initially by ideals of openness and freedom, FOSS did not evolve as a radical challenge to proprietary software. Companies large and small soon began investing important sums in open source development, creating new business models around it. In 1998, the shift toward as a more business-friendly model was formalized with the establishment of Open Source Initiative. Today the trend for new projects is towards licenses that eschew copyleft.

There is a perception that FOSS is US-centric. This is true insofar as the powerful US tech industry has shaped its major trends, but with important qualifications. Not only are there numerous European organizations promoting FOSS, but European countries, especially France and Germany, provide a surprisingly large number of participants. Furthermore, a number of Third World countries and public institutions have embraced it for political reasons.

FOSS is undoubtedly a success story. Its products, including heavyweights such as the operating system Linux and the ubiquitous PHP, MySQL, and Apache, power much of the web, and major ITC companies rely on it. It is also a realm of empowerment and meaning for the skilled programmers who contribute to it, one that implicitly invokes new forms of collective creativity, unfettered by the structures of intellectual property that support the expansion of the ‘information society’ and its attendant commodification of knowledge. Yet FOSS has not delivered on the utopian aspirations that are often invested in it. It has not subverted the dominant proprietary industrial structures, nor has it ushered a society of empowered technology users/creators. In David Barry’s words, FOSS remains “precariously balanced between the need for a common public form in which innovation and creativity can blossom and the reliance, to a large extent, on private corporations…” that push forward the commodification and enclosure of knowledge.[4]

Blueprints for agricultural technology and machinery can be found on websites like FarmHack or Atelier Paysan (CCO)

FOSS-inspired initiatives in Agriculture

Mechanized farm equipment manufacturers such as John Deer progressively moved toward digitized, software-controlled components that require authorized software access to repair, as well as restrictive contracts that forbid repairs and modifications. This inspired hackers, first in Eastern Europe, then in the US, to develop and share hacked versions of the control software, circumventing the manufacturers’ protections. In the US, farmers who used those hacked versions joined a larger movement demanding legislation to protect ‘the right to repair.’[5]

Addressing similar concerns from a different direction, FarmHack, established in 2010 and describing itself as “a worldwide community of farmers that build and modify our own tools,” draws inspiration from the hacking culture of FOSS to promote low-cost, open farm technology. Participants share designs for farm tools and license them under ‘copyleft’ licenses. FarmHack seeks to “light the spark for a collaborative, self-governing community that builds its own capacity and content, rather than following a traditional cycle of raising money to fund top-down knowledge generation.”

In France, Atelier Paysan was set up in 2011 with a similar basic concept, offering “an on-line platform for collaboratively developing methods and practices to reclaim farming skills and achieve self-sufficiency in relation to the tools and machinery used in organic farming.” Unlike FarmHack, whose off-line presence is limited to meetups, Atelier Paysan is organized as a cooperative that owns a certain amount of equipment and provides workshops to farmers. Atelier Paysan publishes its collaborators’ design under the same creative commons ‘copyleft’ license.

The enclosure and commodification of plant genome through patenting, licensing, and hybridization have spurred similar efforts. The Open Source Seed Initiative, a US organization created in 2012, describes itself as “inspired by the free and open source software movement that has provided alternatives to proprietary software,” with the goal “to free the seed – to make sure that the genes in at least some seed can never be locked away from use by intellectual property rights.” After initially trying and failing to devise a legally enforceable license, OSSI opted for a short pledge that is printed on all seed packages: “…you have the freedom to use these OSSI- Pledged seeds in any way you choose. In return, you pledge not to restrict others’ use of these seeds or their derivatives by patents or other means, and to include this Pledge with any transfer of these seeds or their derivatives.” As of today, OSSI’s list of pledged seeds numbers over 400 varieties.

Last year, a second open seeds initiative was unveiled in Germany, Open Source Seeds, which has its institutional roots in ecological agricultural development in the Third World. Unlike FOSS copyright-based licenses, OSS license was devised under German civil contract law. The license, which is copyleft and includes derivatives, aims at combating market concentration. As one can expect for an organization that operates for less than a year, only five open source varieties are listed so far, all tomatoes.

Part 2 will question whether FOSS can stem the tide towards the commodification of agricultural knowledge. 

Gabriel Ash is a translator, software developer, writer, activist, and filmmaker. He lives now in Geneva, Switzerland

[1] The account of FOSS below is highly indebted to David Berry’s excellent analysis in Berry, D. (2008) Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source, Pluto Press, London.

[2] See the European Conference on Precision Agriculture Sponsors, the European Parliament report on Precision Agriculture and the Future of Farming in Europe, the European Commission’s Communication on Future of Food and Farming .

[3] See European Commission (2005), p.4.

[4] Berry (2008), p. 144;

[5] See The Repair Association  and Nebraska’s Fair Repair Bill

The post Democratising AgTech? Agriculture and the Digital Commons | Part 1 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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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Hacktivism + crowdfunding + wide social collaboration

= the building of new commons

Each of these activities has always existed separately, of course, but it was the vision of Goteo to integrate them into a single open network that is helping commoners build a new Commons Sector in society. With more than 50,000 users and more than 2 million euros raised since 2012, Goteo has helped launch more than 400 projects that support the commons, open code and free knowledge. The projects span a rich variety of fields – education, the environment, technology, culture, entrepreneurial startups, journalism and more.¹ Among them:

The Smart Citizen kit, an open source environmental monitoring platform and hardware for citizens to open and share their own environmental data;²

Quién Manda, a collaborative mapping project that depicts political and economic power relations in Spain;³

Open source gasifier, a renewable electricity generator using residual biomass gasification in the Republic of Chad;⁴

Nodo Móvil, a replicable, travelling wifi connection unit for communities, social movements and public spaces;⁵

Spain in Flames, an open data website to allow the visualization of forest fires, their causes and solutions, enhanced with data from investigative reporting;⁶

Foldarapa, a compact, foldable 3D printer made by a community using a P2P distributed production model that helps its users expand production while sharing the profit with others;⁷ and

The Social Market, a cooperative project by the Spanish Alternative and Solidarity Network linking more than 230 companies and others committed to solidarity economy values.⁸

Goteo is more than a platform for crowdfunding. It serves as a focal point for distributed collaboration among strangers, each of whom may have something special – physical resources, expertise, infrastructure tools, personal time – to contribute to a particular project. Goteo doesn’t just engage individuals; it has become a network of local, independent communities throughout Spain. These range from one in the Spanish region of the Basque country, supported by the Basque government, to others in Andalusia and Barcelona.

The people who belong to the Goteo network tend to play different roles at various times. They may introduce a new project that needs support, contribute funds to help launch a project, or collaborate on it so that it can grow.

Goteo had its origins in the Platoniq collective⁹ – a Barcelona-based group that was a pioneer in the production and distribution of copyleft culture.¹⁰  The hackers of Platoniq (including me) were passionate about designing tools for citizen empowerment and social innovation. We mostly used open source, peer-to-peer technologies that can be easily adapted and reproduced.

Some of Platoniq’s projects became quite famous. Burn Station (2004) was a mobile, self-service system for searching, listening to and copying music and audio files with no charge – all of it legally under a Creative Commons license.¹¹This “taking the Internet to the streets” initiative gained worldwide attention. Another project, The Bank of Common Knowledge, was a series of gatherings in different cities that provided open workshops and manuals.¹² Thanks to hundreds of volunteers, people could learn how to install and use a wiki, how to repair domestic technologies, how to set up a free wifi network, how to set up a local consumer group.¹³

In these and other hackathon-like events Platoniq also served a “process medium” or “masters of ceremonies” for technology-based projects. It helped developers and entrepreneurs recruit new collaborators, clarify the problems to be solved, choose the superior body of source code for projects, and develop alliances in moving them forward.

Despite the success of Platoniq’s work, it became painfully clear after several years that there was a serious lack of resources to incubate innovative and experimental projects. This need was especially acute for projects based on open source and commons-based principles. Neither public nor private institutions are generally eager to support such projects, and certainly conventional market players see little gain in helping produce innovations that are designed to be copied and shared.

The rise of crowdfunding in 2009 as a new model of digital collaboration began to open up a new field of possibilities, however. It became evident from such early platforms like Kickstarter that distributed funding from hundreds and even thousands of people could be a feasible base of support. The standard crowdfunding process at the time consisted of a specific fundraising goal, a deadline for pledges, an “all or nothing” scheme (sufficient pledges to meet the goal or no funding), and a system of individual rewards or perks for backers.

Some of the participants in Platoniq, especially Susana Noguero and Olivier Schulbaum, decided to investigate the possibilities. They found that backers of open source projects were on average more generous than backers of other projects, and that they also contributed more regularly. Platoniq also explored the subtleties of other distributed systems for raising money online – the microcredits approach used by Kiva and platforms for lending money to entrepreneurs – as well as alliances with local organizations in smaller countries. In the end, we decided that it was time to invent a new platform for funding innovations that contribute to open knowledge and the commons.

Since we couldn’t identify any single project or tool designed to support the logic of sharing, collaborating and social impact, we decided to invent one – Goteo. From the start it was a collaborative endeavor. Before programming a single line of code, we entered into a lengthy period of codesign in which we consulted with communities of practice, cultural agitators, open source practitioners, designers, academics and others. We asked the potential users to help visualize the new crowdfunding platform and suggest features that could better meet their own needs and experiences.

Goteo was launched at the end of 2011 as the first crowdfunding platform expressly for open and commons-oriented projects. Its design embodied the following values, in order of importance:

Collective return: Aside from individual rewards for backers, the final outputs of any initiative using Goteo must contribute to the commons. For example, projects must use licenses that allow copying, sharing, modification and free use of part or the whole of each created work.

Trustworthy management model: The legal organization that manages Goteo is a nonprofit foundation, Fundación Fuentes Abiertas, which is officially recognized as a public-interest organization. This management model offers tax-deductible benefits for both cofinancers and promoters.

Fostering transparency: Each project must give specific details about where the money collected will go. Coupled with a two-round scheme of fundraising, this requirement means that even very successful campaigns disclose the actual use of money obtained, including extra money beyond the stated goal. Furthermore, Goteo and project promoters both sign a legal agreement that guarantees that the work described in the crowdfunding campaigns – products, services, activities, archives, etc. – are actually produced.

Distributed collaboration: Beyond monetary contributions to projects via Goteo, people are invited to collaborate in the development of projects by offering services, material resources and infrastructure. They can also participate in specific microtasks.

Training: Goteo has advised and trained more than 2,000 people from many domains through dozens of workshops – a commitment that both disseminates our knowledge while building Goteo’s social following and economic stability.

Community of local nodes: Goteo is not a centralized hub, but more of a community of communities – a network of local, independent nodes that serve to localize projects and give them context. The first one started in the Spanish region of the Basque country, supported by Basque government, and a second later began in Andalusia. New ones will soon be launched in Barcelona and in Nantes, France.

Public/private match-funding: Goteo is a pioneer in recruiting public/private capital investors to help develop open culture projects through a bottom-up process in a “cloudfunding capital” process: each euro a project receives from a person is matched by another euro from institutions belonging to a social investment fund.

Open source: The core software code of the Goteo website is freely available under a General Public License 3.0 via GitHub, which ensures that it can be used and improved via open source principles.

Goteo’s organizational design principles and values mean that its crowdfunding processes are more rule-based than others. It takes more work to ensure that proposed projects comply with basic criteria of openness and commons principles; that projects are actually produced as promised; and that the collective rewards are delivered and made accessible.

But with tens of thousands of users and a 70 percent rate of success for all proposed projects (the majority of crowdfunding platforms rarely reach a 40 percent), we are convinced that Goteo is headed in the right direction. Its success has validated new standards of openness in crowdfunding, and it has attracted some of the most compelling innovators in the field. Although it is difficult to measure, Goteo has also contributed significantly to projects in free culture, open source code and the commons that might otherwise never materialize.

Goteo aspires to somehow “close the circle” with its previous experiences with Platoniq by developing new forms of peer-to-peer creation, crowd incubation and development for projects in the stages before and after crowdfunding. That will have to wait for a while as we concentrate on Goteo’s first priority, to finance and consolidate the Commons Sector.

Enric Senabre Hidalgo (Spain) is currently a member of Dimmons Research Group (Internet Interdisciplinary Institute – UOC), and a visiting Fellow at the CECAN research centre (University of Surrey). He’s a researcher working on co-design methodologies and Agile frameworks for research processes and the development of digital Commons. Previously, he was member of the Platoniq collective, co-founder and project manager of the platform Goteo.org for civic crowdfunding. He is also vice president of the Observatory for CyberSociety and teaches Software Studies and the History of Digital Culture at the Open University of Catalonia, where he holds a Master’s Degree in the Information and Knowledge Society.

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.

Photo by Medialab Prado

Photo by Ars Electronica

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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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