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.

For freedom is an ambiguous word. It can be seen as freedom from something or freedom for something; freedom for action or freedom for inaction; freedom to own and freedom to share; freedom for people and freedom from people.

Free trade and the global political economy

A large part of the modern global construct of institutions is justified on one particular interpretation of freedom: freedom of trade. From the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, to the institutions of Washington Consensus (IMF, World Bank and the US Treasury Department) and the EU common market and the Eurozone; to the controversies of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership, a large volume of the world-wide struggle and conflict concerns the regulation of international trade and the related financial flows.

And this is something more than a certain political choice of the time. The exchange of commodities is a practice that is hard-wired into the very core of the industrial production and capitalism. From the very beginnings of the industrial revolution the protrusion of exchange as a social practice has been recognised. Adam Smith in the first chapters of the Wealth of Nations unveils this trade-off in early industrial society, which is traced back to the division of labour, a central aspect in the development of industrial production. In a society with developed division of labour individuals produce only a small fraction of the goods or services that are necessary to satisfy their needs. Therefore, they have to exchange the products of their own labour to those of other people’s labour. Labour, in turn, becomes itself a commodity, valued and exchanged like any other, rationalising human exploitation in economic affairs.

Admittedly, Smith’s era was not the first time when the practice of exchange appeared in human societies. Trade has been around for much of the documented human history. But in the industrial society it was the first time that a certain level of technology and the organisation of the production rationalised trade as a crucial function for societies. In turn, the price system institutionalised markets as the determinants of the value of things.

Subsequently, the pursuit of freedom become institutionalised through the promotion of free trade. The idea of free trade as an emancipatory force for nations also has its roots back to the classical political economy and the theory of David Ricardo. The main concept justifying the Ricardian theory of free trade is the comparative advantage. Ricardo suggested that when a nation concentrates its productive resources to that sector where there is an advantage in terms of the cost of production in comparison to other nations, it can become more competitive and dominate the international markets in this sector.

However, what Ricardo widely dismissed is that there are qualitative differences between different economic activities. It is easy to understand how a nation producing agricultural products and raw materials cannot compete with a nation producing high value-added manufactures and technological products. For the first one, becoming competitive is a race to the bottom, constantly pushing wages and prices down, as well as its national income, while for the second one, competitiveness comes from technological innovation and higher productivity. Moreover, similarly to individuals, when nations produce only a fraction of the goods they need, based on their comparative advantage, they cannot abstain from importing the rest of them. The declining terms of trade against nations with lower levels of technology will eventually lead to the explosion of their trade deficits and international debt. Thus the only comparative advantage they are developing is one in becoming and remaining poor.

The rich and technologically advanced nations have widely exploited this function of global trade. They feed their manufactures to the countries that are practically deprived of the ability to industrialise and offer huge amounts of money in the form of loans, purported to help developing nations service their external debts. In return they force further liberalisation of trade and finance, so that indebted countries can keep buying their products, while they take advantage of the deregulation to take control of their resources, leading to devastating results for the developing economies. Seven decades of development aid programmes and other three of fiscal consolidation programmes for indebted countries testify to this direction. The neo-liberal fallacy has led to a new form of colonial expansion of rich nations against poor ones.

Joseph A. Schumpeter graphically summarises the Ricardian theory of free trade in one sentence: “It is a perfect theory that can never be refuted and lacks nothing but sense”. The divorce of the theory from reality is as vast as the inequality it has caused in the world. And all that global  institutions seem to be doing is feeding their disillusions, with policies that further strengthen the forces generating this inequality in the first place.

“Free as in freedom”: why free tech matters

Richard Stallman in 1983 initiated the free software movement and the pursuit of an alternative interpretation of freedom: the freedom of people to use, study, share and improve the technological means of computation. A different approach of people’s capacity to create and relate to each other. While the free software movement is focusing this effort on computers, it is in fact a struggle that concerns technology in general. It refers to the freedom of humans to control the fundamental means of their subsistence; the freedom to pursue their own meaning of freedom.

What would have happened if the international institutions were promoting free technology instead of free trade? What if TTIP stood for “Transatlantic Technology and Innovation Partnership” setting down the rules for the diffusion of knowledge and technology?

There is indeed one historical moment that illustrates the potential outcome of such an effort within the current global structure. President Harry S. Truman in his 1949 inaugural address announced the famous “Point Four” foreign aid program. With the Cold War pressure intensifying, Truman called for this “bold new program” as essential for combating  the appeal of communism to the impoverished nations. Instead of the provision of financial aid, point four consisted in the provision of technical assistance and foreign investment to developing nations. Even though a total of 400 million USD had been invested until 1954, including on-spot visits of technical experts to developing nations and the education of their students in the US, it is no surprise that in absence of predefined trade agreements and guarantees US business was reluctant to provide support. Simultaneously, like the Marshall plan, point four was directed by the US and never got adopted on UN level, while the plan has been harshly criticised by neo-liberal advocates.

Nevertheless, Point Four has arguably created a viable survival strategy for developing nations within the Cold War insanity, while it contributed to the emergence of the “non-aligned movement”, a group of states following their own political objectives without formally committing to either power bloc. Indeed, the free flow of technology and know-how can create unique opportunities for societies to prosper. Technological diffusion, in contrast to comparative advantage reinforces variety within the economy and generates the conditions for the development of synergies and balanced development.

Technological advance defines the boundaries of the sphere of the feasible. It is a fundamental force that pushes the ever-moving frontier of the human knowledge forward. Whereas freedom of trade merely relates to the maximisation of individual gain, freedom of technology means the freedom for humanity to improve as a whole. An this implies an emancipation of technology from capitalism; a new global political economy where technology enables and enhances people, societies and nature.

A global political economy based on the freedom of technology relates to the freedom of nations to choose how they mobilise and allocate their resources and the freedom of people to relate to each other. It doesn’t necessarily mean that all nations would reach the same level of technology and would stop competing with each other. Technological advance is a systemic and context-specific process, while cultural and territorial proximity matters. But it could instead allow for a fairer type of competition, one that is subsumed under cooperation and participation on equal footing. Individual and collective success would then be more genuine, rather than a result of exploiting the less advantaged. It could eventually lead to freer nations or to an international order beyond the nation-state.

It is obvious that free tech is not a much desired outcome from the supporters of free trade. They will not easily give up their own comparative advantage in being rich, even though it is becoming more and more obvious that the continuous deterioration of global inequality is feeding back to the rich economies as well. International trade is a zero-sum game: someone must lose in order for someone else to win; and right now it seems we are running out of “losers”. Likewise, technological advance can only create a positive-sum result, when coupled with freedom: the freedom for people to pursue the edge of their own capabilities.  

Free tech is indeed a better objective for the global political economy and most probably a more viable one. And it is surely one for societies to start fighting for.

Lead image by Wicker Paradise. Additional image by TODO

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