The Coronavirus pandemic raises many questions about public health, global diseases and the way we produce and distribute cures and treatments. Who pays for the corona vaccine and how? How is that innovation organised? Who profits?

Commons Network has been an advocate in this domain (‘access to medicines’) for years. In the next few months, we will publish a series of articles about the problems with the current system and the ideas and visions that exist to change this. Today, we discuss the proposal for a Covid-19 Knowledge Pool.

COVID-19 is a global health crisis that demands an immediate global response. But this crisis also lays bare many other crises in our societies. In many Western countries, the response to the virus has shown the vulnerabilities in our public health systems and other essential sectors of society. One major issue that the coronavirus exposes is the dire state of our biomedical system and the role that pharmaceutical companies play in that system.

• In The Netherlands, for instance, hospitals didn’t have enough test kits because Roche, the world’s largest biotech company, initially refused to hand over the recipe that is needed to perform these tests.
• In the United States, Trump’s ‘corona-minister’ Alex Azar released a statement saying that the government could not guarantee that a potential cure for Covid-19 would be affordable, because the innovation that is needed for that cure would only be spurred by high profits.
• The rush to create a vaccine was delayed for up to two or three years, because in most countries, pharmaceutical companies had sold their vaccine research facilities. And the companies that still had the capabilities to do the research had effectively scaled down their coronavirus research because there was no money to be made.
• Scientists were close to a coronavirus vaccine years ago, and then the money dried up.
• The vaccine market was even called ‘an oligopoly’ by Wall Street analysts at AB Bernstein. In fact, after countries abandoned infectious disease research, most companies also moved away from investing in this field, according to DNDi director Bernard Pecoul.
• In France, it was debated why a testing kit for coronavirus should cost 135 euro, eventhough the production costs are only 10 euros. The sub-optimal availability of tests was cited as a major reason for not testing in the fight against the pandemic in many European countries, leading many people to ask if this had economic reasons as well.

More and more people have now come to realise that the global race to find a cure for Covid-19 and a vaccine is slowed down considerably by the fact that the system we have now runs on market incentives and patent monopolies. Instead of shielding essential knowledge, companies could work together, share research results and new insights.

Moving away from a deficient system

The pharmaceutical industry is driven by profit and guided by shareholders. The research and innovation that is needed to come up with cures and treatments is monopolised. A system of patents and licenses is fine-tuned to produce the maximum wealth for a few multi-billion euro corporations. This is how we have organised the world of medicines today. Our system is not driven by public health needs but by profit and the only logic that counts is that of capitalism.

Our system is not driven by public health needs but by profit and the only logic that counts is that of capitalism

This model is based on the belief that the flow of biomedical knowledge should be privatized and protected through intellectual property rights in order to stimulate innovation. This monopoly model gives pharmaceutical companies the freedom to charge as much as they can get away with. It also stifles innovation where we most need it, like in the area of infectious diseases, because there is no money to be made. And finally, this system makes us, the people, pay three times: once to fund the universities and research facilities that create a lot of the knowledge needed for pharmaceutical innovation, once to pay these companies to produce and distribute, and once to our governments to fund our health care system.

It’s hard to estimate how many medicines are not invented, how much talent is wasted and how many people have to suffer because of what not is being researched and developed. This sytem limits the ability to collaborate, share knowledge and build on each other’s work. The public good of scientific medical knowledge and health related technologies has been transformed into a highly protected, privatized commodity.

The COVID-19 crisis marks a critical moment for generating the change we need. But how do we go from this neoliberal capitalist logic to something else, towards a system that is driven by the needs of the public and the health of the people?

Knowledge commons

The proposal to build  a global knowledge pool for rights on data, knowledge and technologies that was presented by Costa Rica is a great example of a step in the right direction, towards transformational change. On March 23^rd, the government of Costa Rica sent a letter to the World Health Organization, calling for a Global Covid-19 Knowledge Pool¹. In his letter to the WHO, the president of Costa Rica demands a global program to “pool rights to technologies that are useful for the detection, prevention, control and treatment of the COVID-19 pandemic.” It now also enjoys the support of the WHO as well as from the UK parliament and the Dutch government and civil society, which has announced their support the idea of a COVID-19 pool as well.

Why do we need a knowledge pool and why is it transformational?

As mentioned above, under our current system the privatization of knowledge limits the ability to collaborate, share knowledge and build on each other’s work. This really is artificial because knowledge is by nature abundant and shareable. Hence the current handling of medical technologies not only limits access to the ensuing treatments, it also limits innovation.

The Covid-19 Poll would pool relevant knowledge & data to combat Covid-19, creating a global knowledge commons². It is a proposal to create a pool of rights to tests, medicines and vaccines with free access or licensing on reasonable and affordable terms for all countries. This would allow for a collaborative endeavor, and could accelerate innovation. It would be global, open and offer non discriminatory licenses to all relevant technologies and rights. As such the pool would offer both innovation and access.

Inputs could come from governments, as well as from universities, private companies and charities. This could be done on a voluntary basis but not only. Public institutions around the world are investing massively in Covid-19 technologies and all results could be automatically shared with this pool, meaning this could be a condition attached to public financing.

So, placing knowledge in a commons does not just mean sharing data and knowledge without regard for their social use, access and preservation. It means introducing a set of democratic rules and limits to assure equitable and sustainable sharing for health-related resources. As such it allows for equitable access, collaborative innovation and democratic governance of knowledge. At the same time knowledge commons could facilitate open global research and local production adapted to local context.

Placing knowledge in a commons does not just mean sharing data and knowledge without regard for their social use, access and preservation. It means introducing a set of democratic rules and limits to assure equitable and sustainable sharing

If we consider the COVID-19 pool holistic initiative that treats the knowledge as a commons, not only to accelerate innovation but also recognizing this knowledge as a public good for humanity which should be managed in a way to ensure affordable access for all, it could be transformational. In contrast to the existing Medicines Patent Pool this pool would be global and not primarily focus on providing access to exitisting technologies, but more also on innovation: developing diagnostics, medicines and vaccines.

Transformational change

Instead of proposing tweaks it is now time to challenge the idea of handling medicines principally as a commodity or product, and to propose structural changes in order to approach health as a common good.  This means referring to our collective responsibility for – and the governance of health when reframing biomedical knowledge production. Instead of leaving it entirely to markets and monopoly based business models.

For this we should move to an approach based on knowledge sharing, cooperation, stewardship, participation and social equity – in practice, this means shifting to a public interest biomedical system based on knowledge commons and open source research, open access, alternative incentives and a greater role for the public sector. Knowledge pools are a crucial piece of the puzzle.

The current COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates how it is possible to make transformational changes overnight when acting in times of an emergency. Let us use this crisis to acknowledge the failures of today’s biomedical research model and usher in the systemic change needed. The world after Corona will require the consideration of alternative paradigms –  it is indeed, as Costa Rica, Tedros and now the Netherlands as well rightfully confirmed – time for the knowledge commons to flourish now.

For some more background about commons thinking in the field of biomedical R&D and possible alternatives to ensure access to medicines for all, read our our policy paper ‘From Lab to Commons’. See also last year’s work on ‘The People’s Prescription’ by our allies in the UK, in cooperation with professor of Economics Mariana Mazzucato.

1. The idea of a knowledge pool is to organise the governance of knowledge by pooling intellectual property, data and other knowledge. This can accelerate the development of health technologies and thus stimulate affordable access to the public. In 2010 the Medicines Patent Pool was set up as a response to the unequal access to HIV/AIDS treatments in developing countries. It has proven to be a great success and now functions as a United Nations-backed public health organisation working to increase access to medicines for HIV, Hepatis c and Tuberculosis.
2. Knowledge commons refer to the institutionalized community governance of the sharing and, in some cases, creation, of information, science, knowledge, data, and other types of intellectual and cultural resources.

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The legal right to ramble stems from the Charter of the Forest, the 1217 social compact grudgingly ratified by King John that formally recognized commoners’ rights of access to the forest. The right was part of a larger constellation of rights won by commoners after their long struggle with the Crown over who shall have access to the forest – only the King and his lords and retainers, or ordinary people, too?

Because of the right to ramble, a sprawling network of paths evolved in Great Britain over the centuries, bringing together villages, roads, farms, and natural landmarks throughout the landscape. The pathways were once regarded as vital infrastructure for commerce, social tradition, and everyday convenience. Now the pathways are mostly seen as a beloved cultural heritage and recreational commons. Millions of people roam the pathways every year. 

Like so many social limitations on private private property, however, people forget about what belongs to them – while property owners are ever-alert to the prospect of expanding their rights. Many modern-day property owners in England and Wales despise the right to ramble because it limits, however marginally, their absolute, exclusive control of the land. 

In 2000, property owners prevailed upon the British Parliament to terminate the ancient right to ramble unless a given pathway has been formally mapped and officially recognized. The Countryside and Rights of Way Act set a deadline for such mapping: January 1, 2026. (Parliament originally set a ten-year deadline.) After 2026, unmapped historic pathways will revert to private property and the public right to ramble on such lands will expire forever.

To counter this threat, the Ramblers – a long-time association of walking enthusiasts dedicated to the sense of freedom and benefits that come from being outdoors on foot” — has organized a campaign, Don’t Lose Your Way, along with a guidebook for ramblers, “Protect Where You Love to Walk.” The goal: to help a small army of volunteers map all of the pathways in England and Wales by 2026, and in so doing, keep them available to commoners.

This task is difficult because some historic pathways may not exist on any contemporary maps. Many pathways are known only through informal, customary use.Their very existence is known because one generation introduces the next generation to the joy of walking them. The official maps made by local authorities may or may not recognize the paths, and newer maps may omit older, less-used paths. Sometimes unscrupulous landowners have actually altered pathways to discourage people from using them, or to eradicate local memory of them.

The Ramblers say that identifying and verifying the existence of many pathways really requires a “systemic trawling through archives.” There is no other way to be definitive. But this task is plainly impractical. Chances are good that some pathways will be overlooked and lost to private enclosure. 

But Brits have a history of standing up for their “right to roam.” In a still-remembered episode in 1932, there was a mass trespass on the mountain area known as Kinder Scout — a deliberate act of civil disobedience by hundreds — to protest the lack of access to open countryside in England and Wales.

The mapping requirement by Parliament reminds me of other enclosures in modern life. Think how Indians (on the subcontinent) have had to document the medicinal value of hundreds of traditional plants and herbal medicines in order to keep them available to all.Without such documentation, transnational pharmaceutical companies could patent traditional medicines that have been freely used for centuries. Without affirmative evidence marshaled by commoners — the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library — Big Pharma could claim private, proprietary control over the biowealth of the commons.

I am also reminded of the way that the music industry used copyright law to privatize the commercial use of the 1858 song “Happy Birthday.” Another example of how the culture of commoning is an irresistible target for private commercialization. (Happily, a US federal court declared the copyright of “Happy Birthday” to be invalid in 2016.)

It is encouraging to know that the Ramblers and their allies are on the case. Their campaign to map English and Welsh walking trails serves as another reminder that the rights of commoners cannot be taken for granted. They must be secured through hard work and struggle.

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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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1/ The current legislation under review by the European Commission’s Digital Single Market Strategy regarding “neighboring rights”, to be voted on by the European Parliament in late March 2018, has little if anything to do with author rights

2/ All arguments about protecting revenue streams for publishers indicate that the true purpose is to fortify the rights of publishers (who have arrogated to themselves the rights of authors)

3/ The arguments from the public domain side against this legislation are equally problematic and suspect for the same reason that author rights are not part of the rationale for propping up the knowledge commons against the disputed proprietary rights of publishers

4/ The central issue, which is also hidden in plain sight, is – after all – the moral rights of authors (“Lockean natural rights”) as established in the Enlightenment and as enshrined in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886)

5/ Both the EC and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) have shown no interest in addressing this set of rights, given the inherent abstract nature of such rights and given that both are operating on behalf of industry in a global IP campaign that resembles the “weaponizing” of IP rights

6/ Given that economic data (or any empirical proof) confirming that free copying of works or appropriation by platform cultures benefits the author is impossible to produce, whether justified through the murky term “transformative use” or “discoverability”, all such arguments, as used on both sides of the debate (by publishers to e-license copyrighted works and by advocates of Open Access to justify authors giving their works away for nothing) devolve to mere speculation based on the bias of the beneficiaries

7/ Given the origin of copyright in the Venetian Renaissance, via the granting of privilegio to authors for books published in the Republic of Venice, and given the almost immediate arrogation of privilegio by printer-publishers in the Republic of Venice, the arguments associated with “neighboring rights” today merely revisit historic arguments waged then against the damage done to authors and presses through illegal copying

8/ What has not advanced, and what needs to be fully disclosed, is how mass digitalization from both sides of this battleground has forced the lion’s share of authors today into a class conveniently labeled the “precariat” by critics of capitalism for the benefit of a global “vectorial class”

9/ What is less obvious regarding this widening chasm between the precariat and the vectorial class is that almost all academic proponents of fortifying the knowledge commons through an enforced neoliberalized open-access regime for scholarly works are part of the global vectorial class by virtue of participation in the production of platform cultures that decimate author rights from the so-called non-profit side, while “Capital” takes care of the destruction of author rights on the for-profit side

Photo by Spongehoe

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The internet of things, End User License Agreements, and Digital Rights Management are increasingly being used to give electronics manufacturers control and ownership over your stuff even after you buy it. Radio Motherboard talks to Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz, authors of The End of Ownership about what we stand to lose when our songs, movies, tractors, and even our coffee makers serve another master.

From the book’s website

If you buy a book at the bookstore, you own it. You can take it home, scribble in the margins, put in on the shelf, lend it to a friend, sell it at a garage sale. But is the same thing true for the ebooks or other digital goods you buy? Retailers and copyright holders argue that you don’t own those purchases, you merely license them. That means your ebook vendor can delete the book from your device without warning or explanation—as Amazon deleted Orwell’s 1984 from the Kindles of surprised readers several years ago. These readers thought they owned their copies of 1984. Until, it turned out, they didn’t. In The End of Ownership, Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz explore how notions of ownership have shifted in the digital marketplace, and make an argument for the benefits of personal property.

Of course, and other digital goods offer users convenience and flexibility. But, Perzanowski and Schultz warn, consumers should be aware of the tradeoffs involving user constraints, permanence, and privacy. The rights of private property are clear, but few people manage to read their end user agreements. Perzanowski and Schultz argue that introducing aspects of private property and ownership into the digital marketplace would offer both legal and economic benefits. But, most important, it would affirm our sense of self-direction and autonomy. If we own our purchases, we are free to make whatever lawful use of them we please. Technology need not constrain our freedom; it can also empower us.

Read more here.

Photo by Sean MacEntee

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Traditional anti-capitalism focused on the ownership of the means of production, yet the modern capitalist doesn’t even want to own the means of production, they want to own the very right to produce. To control the ideas required to produce and simply charge rents for these ideas.

This short text by Dmytri Kleiner was originally published in his mailing list back in 2011. It’s still as relevant now as it was back then.

Dmytri Kleiner: In the meantime, I’d like to reflect a little on Evgeny Morozov’s keynote at #28c3 this morning.

The topic was Surveillance Enabling Technologies. Long story short, Telecoms, Tech Firms, and Governments are developing and deploying systems to control and monitor their citizens online communications, and even selling this technology to governments that are widely considered to be authoritarian. It’s this last bit that I want to expand upon a little.

As Evgeny mentioned, as did others asking questions from the audience, this can not be understood as a few unscrupulous firms making sinister deals with foreign powers to profit from the suppression of dissidents and activists. For this most part these firms are not designing and building surveillance technologies at the behest of the likes of Iran and Syria, but as result driven by law enforcement in western states. And what’s more, they are required by laws passed by western states to build-in the very backdoors and interception features that surveillance systems depend on. It’s hard to blame the companies for building in features that the law requires them to build in.

Expressing outrage that enemies of the US and it’s allies are using the technology being developed by the west also seems misplaced, and rests on regressive exceptionalist view that privileges western states as being somehow noble enough to be trusted with the ability to survey their citizens, but not sinister foreign powers.

Though certain firms are clearly beyond the pale in their eagerness to promote their freedom-denying technology. This overall view that these firms or some foreign powers are to blame was largely rejected by Morozov and by the commentators from the #28c3 audience. The blame for increased interception of communications and technological surveillance is best place at the feet of western governments, whose laws, law enforcement agencies and military-industrial corporate lobbies are the real movers and shakers pushing for more and more control and monitoring of civilian populations.

Promotors of such mass surveillance systems claim to be defending civilization itself, from the usual array of boogeymen, including terrorists, and child pornographers, but make no mistake, their real target is freedom itself.

These systems are part of the process of destroying peer-to-peer communications, to eliminate the mesh topologies from modern communication platforms and restructure them as star topologies, and the major reason for this is not to hunt deviants or insurgents, but rather to control the consumer, and protect Capitalist privilege and profits.

In The Telekommunist Manifesto, as well as other texts, I discuss that fact that Capitalism and Peer-to-peer systems are not compatible, that Capitalism depends on the ability of platform owners to control user data and interaction, in order to monetize it. Such control is a prerequisite of receiving financial capital from investors, who understand very well that there are no profits, or more accurately rents, to be had from free networks, and thus insist on control to ensure a return their investments.

The Internet, as it exists now, is an existential threat to capitalist regimes, not only does it allow individual users and groups to collectively share information that reveals the cosy relationship between governments and rent seeking corporate lobbies, more importantly it allows new forms of commerce that blur the distinction of producer and consumer, and allow users to produce and share in new ways, such fluidity of interactions puts downward pressure of profits as people share amongst themselves and “cut out the middleman,” as commerce becomes disintermediated.

This threat is of particular concern with regard to intellectual property, which can be digitized and sent across computer networks. This is bad news for western economies who more and more aim to make their profits by owning ideas and designs, while letting others actually make things. Traditional anti-capitalism focused on the ownership of the means of production, yet the modern capitalist doesn’t even want to own the means of production, they want to own the very right to produce. To control the ideas required to produce and simply charge rents for these ideas.

Capitalism thus depends on the elimination of peer-to-peer systems by replacing, freedom-enabling mesh topologies, with freedom-denying star topologies. Recent communication history illustrates this quite clearly, with Venture Capital funding Web 2.0s capture of all communications, replacing earlier and far more scalable p2p applications, and the military-industrial fueled enclosure of cyberspace is just another part of this.

Evgeny Morozov suggests that we act and get the media and our political representatives to take notice and lead an outcry against this rapidly increasing lock-down of our online platforms, yet this requires that our media and our politicians will rally against capitalism, since it’s not just a few rogue firms or states driving this development, but rather the requirements of our class structure.

At the bottom of it, Capitalism, as a system based on hierarchy, privilege and exploitation, can not create a free network, anymore than it can create a free society. If there is a way out this, it’s unlikely to be governments and popular news organisations that help us. Our only chance is to develop new ways of producing and sharing, and find ways to build communication platforms that do not depend on capitalist finance.

If we do not find ways to replace capitalist finance it is not only the internet as we know it that we will lose, but the chance the remake society in its image.

Photo by carious.photography

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Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens: I’d like to start with outlining the issue, the problem around the emergence of peer production within the current neoliberal capitalist form of society and economy that we have. We now have a technology which allows us to globally scale small group dynamics, and to create huge productive communities, self-organized around the collaborative production of knowledge, code, and design. But the key issue is that we are not able to live from that, right?

The situation is that we have created communities consisting of people who are sometimes paid, sometimes volunteers, and by using open licenses, we are actually creating commonses – think about Linux, Wikipedia, Arduino, those kinds of things. But what is the problem? The problem is I can only make a living by still working for capital. So, there is an accumulation of the commons on the one side, we are effectively producing a commons, but we don’t have what Marx used to call social reproduction. We cannot create our own livelihood within that sphere. The solution that I propose is related to the work of Dmytri Kleiner – Dmytri proposed some years ago to create a peer production license. I’ll give you my interpretation of it; you can only use our commons if you reciprocate to some degree. So, instead of having a totally open commons, which allows multinationals to use our commons and reinforce the system of capital, the idea is to keep the accumulation within the sphere of the commons. Imagine that you have a community of producers, and around that you have an entrepreneurial coalition of cooperative, ethical, social, solidarity enterprise.

The idea is that you would have an immaterial commons of codes and knowledge, but then the material work, the work of working for clients and making a livelihood, would be done through co-ops. The result would be a type of open cooperative-ism, a kind of synthesis or convergence between peer production and cooperative modes of production. That’s the basic idea. I think that a number of things are happening around that, like solidarity co-ops, and other new forms of cooperative-ism.

The young people, the developers in open source or free software, the people who are in co-working centers, hacker spaces, maker spaces. When they are thinking of making a living, they think startups. They have been very influenced by this neoliberal atmosphere that has been dominant in their generation. They have a kind of generic reaction, “oh, let’s do a startup”, and then they look for venture funds. But this is a very dangerous path to take. Typically, the venture capital will ask for a controlling stake, they have the right to close down your start up whenever they feel like it, when they feel that they’re not going to make enough money. They forbid you to continue to work in the same sector after your company has failed, and you have a gag order, so you don’t even have free speech to talk about your negative experience. This is a very common experience. Don’t forget that with venture capital, only 1 out of 10 companies will actually make it, and they may be very rich, but it’s a winner-take-all system.

There is a real lack of knowledge within the young generation that there are other forms of enterprise possible. I think that the other way is also true. A lot of co-ops have been neo-liberalizing, as it were, have become competitive enterprises competing against other companies but also against other co-ops, and they don’t share their knowledge. They don’t have a commons of design or code, they privatize and patent, just like private competitive enterprise, their knowledge. They’re also not aware that there’s a new way of becoming more competitive through increased cooperation of open knowledge commons. This is the human side of it, and we need to work on the knowledge and mutual experience of these two sectors. Both are growing at the same time; after the crisis of 2008, we’ve had an explosion of the sharing economy and the peer production economy on the one side, but also a revitalization of the cooperative sector.

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Even if it’s true that Roundup is safe if used to company specifications, as Monsanto claims, when is it ever so used? Given the gross power imbalances in the agribusiness industry, nobody’s going to hold giant plantation farmers to account for cutting corners when it comes to their workers’ exposure to toxic chemicals. Back in the 80s, I witnessed the large-scale use of Roundup to “eradicate weeds” on the lawn outside Old Main at the University of Arkansas. In fact it also eradicated the grass and killed some of the oak trees as well. And even as the physical plant workers themselves applied the Roundup in getups that looked like space suits, groups of students clad in shorts and tank tops casually strolled through the clouds of toxic chemicals.

I would also add that it’s disingenuous to give Roundup a pass based entirely on its danger or non-danger to consumers. The effects of Roundup — and the system of large-scale monoculture plantation farming it’s a part of — on farm workers and the ecosystem are also important.

No doubt libertarians will object to labelling requirements at all, including active ingredients. But libertarians also tend to favor a vigorous civil law of torts — or should so favor, if they’re not hypocrites — as a substitute for the regulatory state. And part of tort law is the ability to subpoena evidence relevant to an alleged harm. In a libertarian legal order (stipulating for the moment the unlikely possibility that anything resembling corporate agribusiness could ever have arisen in a free market in the first place), given the prevalence of cancer like non-Hodgkin lymphoma among agricultural workers exposed to Roundup, there would long ago have been lawsuits in which Monsanto was compelled to disclose the full list of ingredients in Roundup. And in any case “trade secrets” guaranteed by law, or enforced by any means other than the actual secrecy of the company itself and non-binding on third parties, would not exist at all.

So the existence of legally protected trade secrets is a weapon against the health and welfare of the public, depriving them of any knowledge of the nature of toxic chemicals they may be exposed to.

This is nothing new. We’ve already seen it in regard to the cocktail of ingredients used in hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which is also kept secret from the potentially affected public by “intellectual property.”

And, in addition to the deaths caused by “intellectual  property” itself, the state doesn’t mind, when necessary, inflicting large-scale death in its enforcement of “intellectual property” — as indicated by leaked diplomatic letters from the Colombian embassy (“Leaks Show Senate Aide Threatened Colombia Over Cheap Cancer Drug,” The Intercept, May 14). Colombia has been taking steps towards approving a cheaper generic form of the patented cancer drug imatinib, which costs $15,000 for a year’s supply. An aide to Sen. Orrin Hatch — an intimate friend of the pharmaceutical industry and an ultra-hawk on all “intellectual  property” issues — expressed “concern” to Colombian diplomats that if Novartis’s “intellectual  property” rights were violated the drug industry might “become very vocal and interfere with other interests that Colombia could have in the United States.” In particular, “this case could jeopardize the approval of the financing of the new initiative ‘Peace Colombia.’” Peace Colombia is an attempt at a negotiated peace settlement between the government and guerrillas, and includes funding for the cleanup of land mines.

So basically Pharma’s Congressional hitmen are willing not only to cause death by denying affordable life-saving medicine. They’re also willing to obstruct (“Nice peace plan you got there…”) an end to a civil war that has killed thousands, and the deactivation of land mines in a country with the second-highest rate of land mine casualties in the world.

“Intellectual property” isn’t just theft. It’s terrorism.

Photo by Artist in doing nothing.

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The whole point of proprietary software and other forms of proprietary information, coupled with the DMCA’s restrictions on circumvention technology, is that you never actually own anything you buy. In fact directly accessing the source code is a crime. That’s bad enough — an injustice and an inconvenience — when it comes to your computer operating system or a song you paid for. But when it involves the software running a device inside your own body, that you depend on to keep your heart beating, it’s a lot more serious. As Doctorow says:

“However you feel about copyright law, everyone should be able to agree that copyright shouldn’t get in the way of testing the software in your hearing aid, pacemaker, insulin pump, or prosthetic limb to look for safety risks (or privacy risks, for that matter).”

Of course this is nothing new. So-called “intellectual property” has been a threat to human safety and survival ever since neoliberal “Free Trade Agreements” started imposing draconian increases in copyright and patent protections about 25 years ago. Big Pharma has been one of the most strident lobbyists — and biggest beneficiaries — for imposing U.S. patent law on a global scale. So countries that previously allowed the production of generic forms of patented life-saving drugs, or had compulsory licensing requirements, now fall afoul of the “intellectual property” provisions of those “Free Trade Agreements.” That translates into the deaths of potentially millions of real-life human beings.

In the United States, the chemical cocktail injected into the ground in the hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) process is also proprietary. That means the public, whose ground water is potentially threatened by these chemicals, has no legal right to know what’s being pumped into the ground by fossil fuels companies.

So the nature of “intellectual property” isn’t just a theoretical debate. “Property” claims on the right to use or duplicate information, or to copy techniques, are not only spurious in principle. They’re a threat to human life in the real world. It’s time to abolish them.

Photo by Horia Varlan

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The “big problem,” it seems, “isn’t inequality —  it’s poverty.” Freund breaks the global list of billionaires down into two categories: “Those who inherited their wealth, and those who made it themselves.” In the latter category, she argues, company founders and executives like Bill Gates of Microsoft or Jack Ma of Alibaba “have helped create the most jobs and economic growth for those further down the income ladder.” The self-made billionaires who got rich from finance and real estate are more questionable, although some of them are innovators as well. Those in the “made” category who make money off privatization deals and natural resources are the least productive.

Today, Freund says, the majority of developing world billionaires are of the “made” kind, and of them company founders and executives are the single biggest segment.

First, I should give Freund credit for acknowledging the problematic nature of wealth acquired by natural resource extraction and crony capitalist privatization, both of which have close historical associations either with colonial conquest, robbery, enslavement and genocide, or  with neoliberal “Disaster Capitalism.”

So what are the problems? Just off the bat, distinguishing between billionaires located in the global North and South confuses the issue. It’s a global economy, and a major share of the wealth that made U.S., European or Japanese billionaires what they are was extracted by TNCs operating in the Third World.

Beyond that, Freund’s argument (at least as summarized by Swanson) is neither very original nor very significant. First of all, the argument that it’s not inequality that’s the problem, but absolute levels of poverty — and inequality does no harm so long as those at the bottom have a minimum acceptable standard of living and the wealthy didn’t get rich in a zero zum game — has long been  boilerplate at mainstream right-libertarian periodicals and think tanks and conservative institutions like Heritage and AEI. It’s the theme of about three hundred Thomas Sowell columns, for crying out loud.

Second, and more importantly, Freund seems to argue by definition. Made billionaires who are company founders or executives are entrepreneurs, and by definition therefore job and wealth creators.

But founding a company or managing one isn’t inherently productive — the majority of wealth going to company founders and executives arguably comes, not from their productive activity, but from the surrounding structure of privileges, monopolies, artificial property rights and artificial scarcities that enable the company to extract rents on the services they perform.

It’s helpful in this regard to look at what French liberal economist called “the unseen.” We see the companies, we see the services they perform, and we see the number of people they employ. But what’s the proper baseline to compare them to? Even when new companies are doing something useful and productive, that doesn’t tell us whether it’s the most efficient way of arriving at that good. What we don’t see is other, more efficient ways of providing the same good, that may have been crowded out by the companies we do see performing the function.

And in fact actually inventing or producing things is at best the path to small-time wealth. The really big fortunes — the billionaire kind — instead come from controlling the circumstances under which other people are allowed to produce things. Henry George Jr. called it getting rich by “controlling access to natural opportunities.” Thorstein Veblen called it “capitalized disserviceability” —  charging for the “productive service” of not obstructing production by others.

Microsoft is a classic illustration of this. Bill Gates didn’t get to be a billionaire because the Windows operating system has a nice user interface. He’s a billionaire because his copyrights and patents on the software prevent anyone else from copying it and selling it cheaper, or giving it away free. The overwhelming majority of Gates’ fortune comes from a state-enforced monopoly.

And Gates has tended to spend his personal fortune in ways that either directly profit him or promote his vision of the ideal world in which people like him can keep extracting billions. The Gates Foundation’s main “charitable” activities are all things like pushing proprietary GMO seeds and increasing corporate agribusiness’s control of the global food chain, giving away Microsoft software to the public schools (and thereby locking them into a legacy system whose upgrades won’t be free in the future), and lobbying behind closed doors to charterize public schools, insulate them from public control, and incorporate them into the supply chains serving corporate HR departments.

Alibaba isn’t as bad as Microsoft. It isn’t even as bad as Amazon:  rather than charging a commission on transactions made through its marketplace, it makes all its money off advertising. But it is a proprietary platform — something it has in common with all the other “New Economy” ventures like Uber, Lyft and AirBNB that have made people billionaires.

Such platforms basically preempt the venues for a particular type of cooperative behavior, and then rely on a combination of first-mover advantage, path dependency and “intellectual property” to crowd out other — and less socially pathological — ways of doing things.

As for manufacturing in the Third World, much of it is for the supply chains of global corporations like Nike and Apple that use “intellectual property” to retain a monopoly on disposal of the product, so they can simultaneously pay the companies that produce them almost nothing and mark up the sales price thousands of percent in global retail chains.

So here “the unseen” is open-source software, sharing apps that are not only open-source and genuinely peer-to-peer but cooperatively controlled by providers and users rather than a corporation, and open-source garage micromanufacturing cooperatively controlled by its workers and producing affordable goods for the local market.

Finally, “wealth” and “jobs” are by no means self-evident goods. GDP simply measures the sum total of everything that anybody gets paid for. So the more inefficiently stuff is produced, the more it costs in labor and material inputs to produce it, the more quickly it has to be replaced because of planned obsolescence, the more costly it is to repair because of bad design and proprietary parts, and the higher the embedded monopoly rents in the price, the more it adds to GDP. And the more stuff people are forced to do in the cash nexus, that they were previously able to do for themselves through direct production for use or in the social economy without corporate intermediation, the higher GDP.

And if direct production for use or production in the social economy is replaced by working for wages to buy the same goods previously acquired outside the cash nexus — against the will of those subject to the change — then that “job” isn’t a good thing.

In the case of food alone, the mass enclosures of land and evictions of tens of millions of peasants who were previously feeding themselves off their own land, coupled with the influx of evicted peasants into the cities to work in sweatshops to earn the money to buy cash crops produced on the stolen land, has no doubt swelled both the amount of monetized GDP and the number of “jobs.” That’s not a good thing.

So in response to the claim that most billionaires are “made,” all I can say is: So was Don Corleone.

Photo by quinn.anya

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