Let me say that differently. Since past software has been centrally controlled and administered, it was assumed, that the license-holder of a database owns the data in the database, as well as controlling whatever user accounts and permissions exist for accessing it. Even the most open of organizations (like Wikipedia, who lets you download copies of their databases) can still terminate user accounts or purge spammy advertisements from their database, because it runs on their centrally controlled servers.

Think of your corporate email account. The company you work for can change your password, lock you out of your own email, and they own messages sitting on their server. They control both the identity and the data.

However, what happens when software no longer runs on a central server, but each person publishes data to their own local storage first? Then when that data is intended to be shared, gets published to a shared space (DHT) from your local store. Since Holochain is structured this way, by default each user controls their own data, and via our key management app, they control their own identity, even across any and all Holochain applications. So if a corporation wanted to run a Holochain application under centralized control, instead of generating your own app keys and revocation keys, a corporation would do that and maintain control the revocation keys, so that they could kick you off the system at any time.

On Holochain, to accomplish the old pattern of centralized control that is assumed by software licenses of the past, you essentially have to strip away each user’s control of their own cryptography by owning their keys. This seems like a very different category of USAGE of the software, than Holochain’s native design where users control their own data and identity, thus it merits a different class of license. This isn’t about whether you can copy or change the software, but about how you structure the cyrptographic relationship to users and data generated by the software.

Introducing the Human Commons License

If people run your Holochain app as network of autonomous humans, where each one manages the keys that control their data and identity, then you are operating a “human commons” and operate under that classification as Holochain apps are intended to operate.

However, If you structure the management of keys for the people running your hApp such that you can revoke their keys to the hApp or if you have required them to agree to be stripped of their ownership of data they’ve authored, then this is a commercial classification of the software (not autonomous humans, not a shared commons among them).

We’re still sorting out some of the details for each classification. For example, in the Human Commons case, the software license may be fully free and permissive (like MIT license?), where the commercial usage may be more restrictive (like GPL) such that you’re at least contributing new code back into the commons if you’re taking away people’s identity and data.

However, this classification may be more important to the apps running on top of the Holochain software, than the effect it has on your rights to Holochain. Distinguishing these different usage types at the underlying level lets apps more effectively choose how they want to charge customers. Consider an app like P2P Slack where everyone controls their own data and identity, in contrast to one where a corporation owns the data and user accounts. The builder of that hApp may want to give it freely to those operating a commons, and charge for usage in the corporate case.

New Distinctions in Licensing

Whether you agree with our explorations of increasing restriction on commercial use or not, the point of this article is to call out the importance of distinguishing the fundamentally new patterns of data ownership and identity as part of software licensing concerns for truly P2P software.

In addition to the topic of control of your own data and identity, authored by you and stored on your own device, is the matter of data shared to into a shared space (in Holochain this means published to that apps DHT). For this we look to licenses like Open Data Commons for models there.

What else should we be considering to get licensing of P2P apps right?

Thanks to Eric Harris-Braun. Some rights reserved

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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

The post Patterns of Commoning: Licenses for Commoning: The GPL, Creative Commons Licenses and CopyFair appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Patents destroy innovation

We hear about patents everywhere. They are commonly included in indexes of progress and innovation, used for the purpose of rating research institutions, universities and companies. The proponents of the patent system believe that patents are helping to stimulate innovation, by making the knowledge publicly available and by granting the inventor the right for exclusive commercial exploitation.

Unfortunately, the patent system currently is doing the opposite^[1,2,3,4] . We have patent trolls^[5], companies who buy or file patents just to stop competitors from innovating, lawyers writing patents just to make them obscure and incomprehensible, and hundreds of court cases, or “patent wars” as they are known, where companies actually try to prevent one another from engaging in the process of innovation. Another less known problem is the cost to acquire a patent, in terms of money and time. The cost for a European patent is around 30,000€^[6] making it almost impossible for start ups and SMEs to apply for and obtain a patent. As a result, knowledge and innovation remains buried in drawers. Just in the past 3 months our social co-op took part in a competition and was thinking to apply for a EU development fund, both of which had in their point system a bonus for a filed patent. The problem is, firstly that we do not have the financial resources to file a patent and most importantly we do not want to do so since we are an open-source company, although we are positive that our product could acquire a patent. Traditional institutions and organization across the world do not yet understand the benefits of open-source innovation. So, in order to follow up on the example of the GPL^[7] and the Creative Commons licenses,^[8] which hacked the copyright law, we propose to hack the patent system.

Open Patents

We suggest a simple ways to mark a patent as open in a way that is similar to the Creative Commons licenses.

• Open Patent Attribution – OP-BY
• Open Patent Attribution, Share Alike – OP-BY-SA

Following the example of business man and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, who publicly declared that anyone can use Tesla’s patents, because “[they] believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform”^[9].

So we propose that the cost of applying for a patent marked as “open” to be free or very low (i.e. under 500€), thus enabling inventors, SMEs, social innovators and even students to apply for patents which promote knowledge sharing, while allowing them to acquire the recognition they deserve and granting them the corresponding score in the indexes that take into account filed patents. Also, this can help Europe’s policy making around open source and social innovation, by suggesting that in the future all publicly funded innovation should be made publicly available through open patents. For example, it seems very unfair that  private research institutes or even universities, who do research funded by European taxpayers’ money, acquire patents on the results of that research and claiming ownership over them, thereby forcing us to pay licensing rights for access to the products that come out of the research that we funded in the first place.

This text is released into the Public Domain under the Creative Commons CC0 “no copyright reserved” license.

References

1. “A Patent Is Worth Having, Right? Well, Maybe Not”, Michael Fitzgerald, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/business/yourmoney/15proto.html
2. “The case against the patent system”, Pierre Desrochers, http://www.quebecoislibre.org/000902-3.htm
3. “Our Broken Patent System at Work: Patent Owner Insists the ‘Integers’ Do Not Include the Number One”, Vera Ranieri, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/our-broken-patent-system-work-patent-owner-insists-integer-does-not-include-number
4. “The ‘broken patent system’: how we got here and how to fix it”, Nilay Patel, http://www.theverge.com/2011/08/11/broken-patent-system
5. “Patent Troll”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll
6. “Study on the Cost of Patenting”, Roland Berger Market Research, https://effi.org/system/files?file=cost_anaylsis_2005_study_en.pdf
7. “GNU General Public License”, Free Software Foundation, https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html
8. “Creative Commons Licenses”, Creative Commons, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
9. “All our patent belong to you”, Elon Musk, https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you

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