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

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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.

“At the last Assembly of the Commons of Lille (France), a group of deputies who came especially from Paris was received. A morning walk led them to discover a lot about the commons of the of territory and they later attended as “ordinary citizens”, the monthly assembly.

Some of them have worked well with members of the assembly around the idea of a

The challenges of such a “democratic pact” declined as a license would be:

* support of citizen groups (like the assemblies of commons) and taking into account their views when they arrive at conclusions and want to propose solutions for political issues;

* the bureaucratization of the process, for a more direct collaboration between stakeholders in a territory;

* the transition to the participation and cooperation: participation in the process, the idea submitted to citizens comes from elected officials, whereas collaboration involves giving citizens a full role in designing and proposing projects;

* the inclusion of the “amateur” (as opposed to professionals such as engineers or other territorial policy experts) in decision making. This would give a place to the voice of citizens and co-construct the city and the territory around the notion of the commons.

The example of Italy

A regulation of cooperation between citizens and local governments was signed by forty Italian cities to regenerate and to sustain the commons. The first charter, that of Bologna, is available in English: http://www.comune.bologna.it/media/files/bolognaregulation.pdf

What work process to draw up the license?

The organization of time of exchanges between the assemblies and the elected representatives would allow to have a dialogue and to co-construct this license by taking into account the commoners needs and the institutions needs.

For example, during the first workshop, the following needs have been identified:

* Institutions needs

– Training of elected representatives and officials
– Establishment of a legal, procedural framework

* Commoners needs

– Compensation of commoners / common
– Social rights
– Legal stabilization

* Joint needs

– Identify the value created by the institution
– Identify the value created by the commoner

One of the major issues identified during this collaboration work would be the training of elected representatives to the logic of commons so that they can appropriate the culture. It was also evoked that it is as well by the experience that the culture will come, just like the use of an free licensed application to which we eventually contribute and appropriate the culture.

Institutions could undertake to appeal to existing communities and to guarantee the traceability of their choices.

The license would be introduced with some first proposals to be signed by the elected representatives wishing to work in this direction. It would be accompanied with numerous tools for follow-up and transparency to avoid any non compliance with the signed pact. The various commitments would be refined permanently. The text of the license would be appropriable and improvable to make it directly operational.

What this first very successful workshop has not yet allowed to establish with clarity it is the ” conditions of reciprocity ” that the elected representatives could obtain from the commoners, to make a commitment in such a transition, beyond a short-term vote-catching aim. Because to take the commons road would doubtless involve to rethink completely the place and the role of the elected representatives about whom we thus ask for a double movement of commitment to support the commons and of disengagement of certain aspects of the life of the city for the benefit of commoners…”

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