The open source software community uses "copyleft" licensing to ensure that any code remains open and freely available to users even if private corporations decide to use it in their offerings.
thanks for this reminder Matthew. To make one of my assumptions explicit, I'm assuming that we are dealing with information that is essentially open to all who need it or who are interested. We're probably dealing here with a good application of Creative Commons licences. Many open wikis and other knowledge sources use CC BY; one could also use CC NC.
Hey, look: the above comment tries to explain to you that what many wikis and other sources do, is bad for the commons. In lack of copyleft (ShareAlike SA clause for Creative Commons licenses), there's the risk that some actors may make a derived version, and for lack of copyleft/SA are legally allowed/invited to publish and distribute that under restrictive licensing. Therefore they unilaterally benefit from the commons resource, but in reverse lock out, restrict and exclude the original creators themselves as well as not passing on the rights + access for the part that was otherwise granted and intended by commoners who therefore, to prevent such unilateral and hostile hijacking and siloing, protect the commons resources by copyleft/ShareAlike clause, to make it a properly protected commons, including downstream derivative works.
Also, NC NonCommercial clause of Creative Commons licenses, are non-libre/non-commons, because they also exclude all commoners and downstream recipients from commercial use, be it at-cost/non-profit, for-profit (non-exclusive), or within a commercial operation that's something entirely different, but just so happens to have a commons resource involved somewhere in a different business activity.
Thanks for these comments — I am aware of all this but others may not be. Wondering also if you are aware of the work on other variations on open licencing, under the names "copyfair" or "copyfarleft"?
You replied above, some knowledge sources use CC BY (no copyleft/SA). Isn't that a terrible idea? For any contributor, isn't this demanding and inviting the risk that some downstream derived works and recipients of such might get deprived of the legal rights and technical access that should otherwise be granted and protected by/for a digital commons? Especially so if the originally commons resource, which in downstream versions got relicensed into a restrictive/proprietary license, becomes for whatever reason more popular, or even replaces the libre-free commons original entirely. For example per Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish tactics by an active hostile actor, or per ignorance by people who don't really care whether the commons remain intact or get captured/enclosed/siloed/hijacked into exclusive control by certain parties at exclusion of the other commoners and peers. Luckily, your personal wiki doesn't have this legal pitfall by using the ShareAlike = coplyleft clause.
Then on the other hand, you wrote above, NC could be used, which you do use on your personal wiki. legal incompatibility with, for example, the Wikipedia as a knowledge commons, as well as, for example, WikiMedia (the organization) which might be a commercially operating entity (of sorts, idk if this is strictly legally correct for taking donations, employing people for salary, buying and likely also selling some things). Or classically for example printed (and be it print-on-demand) versions at cost or some profit (or loss), or printing on a CD that's sold for shipping costs, and what not, or including it in an anthology that's sold, or putting it on a website that runs advertisements, and so on.
I didn't know about the "copyfarleft", this too seems to be another NC NonCommercial confusion. No idea how many more times the phrase "free as in freedom, not as in free beer" needs to be repeated, to indicate the concept that the digital commons is more about universal user rights and non-exclusivity, than if or how some party may or may not earn some money. In fact, commercial use, be it by the original author or contributors or any downstream peer, is invited, to allow, enable and invite some commons-based business and services thereupon. What is not gratis, is of course the production of the resource, and there's many ways to arrange income from that, but this has no effect on the resource's state/status of being part of the digital commons. For contrast, consider, there's Freeware (gratis but proprietary), which is either legally or technically or both restricted in a way that it's not part of the commons, as some users/recipients get denied and excluded from things they naturally could do or would otherwise be able to do (some party is making an effort to exclude some from access to the commons, despite these are not depleting on redistribution or use or adaption).
Similarly I didn't know about "copyfair" (and why should I), which too is about another similar confusion that tries to arrange for some kind of payment and compensation, which naturally is independent and separate from a resource being offered as a common/commons resource. Here it seems some party wants to introduce and impose some payment condition, and if not observed and complied with by an recipient, user, beneficiary, or co-contributor, access to or permission for use of the the supposed "commons" resource is denied as a means of enforcement and creating artificial scarcity, which is no different from what every other proprietary actor does.
Consider, in practice: often a work is published under a non-libre-free Creative Commons license with NonCommercial clause, but the original creator also later engages in dual-licensing the same work for proprietary use with a conspiring commercial exploitation party. This is not great for any later contributors, because if any, what's their cut for their contributions/parts for the separate commercial and proprietary use? If they contributed to the CC NC work, maybe the proprietary and commercial exploitation might not be legally possible, because the contributors can reject and deny it for their parts. Or consider, how the Wikipedia could work at all, if some contributors or WikiMedia would have some non-commercial veto against each other and any other parties.
"Copyfarleft" and "copyfair" are not real concepts/mechanisms for the actual digital commons (which can't have these, or would cease to be a commons). Some people tend to come up and invent new terms, licenses and what not, because they're after some very different arrangements and goals.
The compensation confusion is analogous to the physical commons of, say, a fishing ground or a city forest - it's precisely and intentionally kept and maintained to allow and enable anyone from taking whatever they may want or need, and even far more than other parties who may not have the need at the time, for as long as there's a surplus and covered by the carrying capacity, and is ensured that this doesn't destroy the regenerative capacity to keep this resource around for any futures (at a quota or from surplus). The opposite is to think about this resource as an subject for maximal exploitation, for ensuring or maximizing profits from the available supply. These constraints don't apply to resources that are immaterial/infinite and never need to be short in supply and don't degrade or deplete, including not so under non-exclusive commercial use (as this does not restrict or limit anybody else's equal right and ability to engage in non-exclusive commercial use as well). This is not a bug, it's an intentional feature and benefit. One of the goals here is to get compensated for producing into the public commons and improving these, versus doing the same but into proprietary/restrictive property. As well as enabling and allowing many vendors to provide services, versus just a single party or particular closed group, no matter if they do it well or others could do it better, and without the risk that any of these setups goes out of business leaving the user with no vendor at all (and the resource abandoned, scrapped, stuck). etc.
I don't know if "copyfair" and "copyfarleft" is from the P2P Foundation wiki pages, but there's where I found them, for a quick look. Word of caution, it seems what's on there may not necessarily be "knowledge" or useful, but garbage or "pollution". If this is the reference/source, the P2P Foundation or Michel Bauwens too appear to have this issue that they're not much about or into the digital/immaterial commons, and they're trying instead to address collectives that work on/with resources in the material world that are inherently scarce. For a large part, they seem to be unaware or not much interested in the big digital commons projects, and instead in their corner speculate wildly how these may relate to operations that are otherwise tied to the physical world. By this I mean, the P2P Foundation is not the first place to ask if it's about data, information, knowledge. They may even ultimately be opposed to the concept of what's digital peerness.
In general, regarding the digital commons, this is not an "anything goes", especially for the warning of just arbitrary terms that sound aligned. "Open Source" may mean as little as code transparency/inspectability, "open" may mean as little as an office having opening hours, in academia/research "Open Access" may primarily refer to just access (so you can look at it but that's it) and too even distinguishing those into Green and Gold and why not dirt-Brown as well, or the mess Creative Commons created by also launching a number of licenses that are non-libre free proprietary ones and not commons, or CC0 like Public Domain along the lines that copyfraud for cultural/commons resources is supposed to be fine. Can't maintain a commons this way, as everything may end up gated/walled/fenced off, with some gatekeeper that poses arbitrary demands for unilateral benefit at expense and exclusion of other equal peers.
Just a brief follow-up, as IPR is not the focus of my post here. When Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess had a go at covering knowledge commons, their resulting collection e.g. https://www.academia.edu/8012416/Understanding_Knowledge_as_a_Commons_From_Theory_to_Practice_edited_by focused mainly on IPR issues, copyright and licencing. I found this disappointing, as to me the IPR issues are only a relatively small part of the overall picture of knowledge commons. Hence the focus of my post here.
Most of all, the publication "Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice" is released under restrictive copyright (all rights reserved), so these people evidently obviously clearly oppose and reject to contribute to the digital commons in practice, so why should anyone care about their theories, claims and speculations? They're not digital commoners, in practice, but opposed to such.
Fair enough. I'm mostly trying to point out that for the immaterial commons, or more specifically the digital commons (as the former might be "virtual" and just in people's collective head, while the former is knowledge representations in particular expressions that are distributable verbatim currently at almost zero-unit-cost and can be modifyable/adaptable, with the help of almost ubiquitous equipment), there is a conceptual & practical baseline of what constitutes and protects these commons. For practically, they're most at risk getting actively captured/enclosed/destroyed by bad actors or passively lost, usually by 1. imposing legal copyright restrictions, 2. technical restrictions or degradation (consider obfuscation, lossy/destructive format conversions, DRM, etc.), 3. social demands (like a group membership, administrative controls/exclusion).
So these are about establishing a baseline for how the digital commons are maintained and protected. Obviously, the threads and risks are less pressing, destructive, lossy for commons works of art and entertainment, and somewhat more for data/information/knowledge, and worse for software (could be considered "knowledge" in the sense that this is solutions and algorithms = calculations like math formulas known to be proven or tested to be correct, for how to handle data, except this knowledge in addition is automatically executable - so here enclosure/exclusion or loss not only means that this knowledge is lost and has to be reproduced/rediscovered again for the commons, it's also the loss of the benefit that comes from its use/execution, independent/individual or collective improvement/maintainability as well).
I can't afford to read "Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice" right now (and why or what for would I?), but my guess would be that Ostrom and maybe Bollier too (?) might look at digital commons through their lens of the physically scarce commons (after all, that's what Ostrom got the Nobel prize for, not for innovation in the area of restrictive copyright threatening/endangering the digital commons or technical degradation/restrictions, or too the social demands like membership to some group granted or denied by some arbiter you're advocating for). Digital commons practice was well established before they wrote this book for probably adding some more theories and speculation from their physical materiality angle/perspective. You may indicate that my guess is not correct here and that I'm mistaken, and then how theirs overlap or diverts from the sources I cited (which are earlier and specifically and dedicatedly about the digital commons in particular).
The bottom line here is, regarding Ostrom's popular #1 design principle of "1. Clearly defined boundaries: Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resource units from the CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself", such design/principle is defined to be anybody could "withdraw" and copy as much as they want, while actually it's the inverse/opposite, that every recipient may become another distribution source, for any number of downstream individuals, households and organizations. Primarily, the notion of locality of the singular place/location of a physical resource falls entirely flat on a global network and many copies all over the place, subsequently Ostrom's points about the physical world are defined differently for the information/signal world (pushing whole atoms around vs. just have easily reproducable/replicatable wave patterns/arrangements of electrons or light, or for example speech if you want, hopping along). Too, the boundary is defined that with any "withdrawal" = redistribution, legal rights and technical access must be supplied along with it, so the withdrawability/supply does not get restricted, diminished, exterminated over the course of potentially many independent "withdrawal" = redistribution processes. A person looking up Ostrom might get all confused about hers being about physically scarce resources, and no hint about how these principles are defined when it comes to the commons under mechanisms of the immaterial economy. This is very much for the very different kind/type of resource, of very different properties and therefore unit/supply economics, such commons are dealing with, subsequently leading to different rules/policies of what the boundaries need to be in order to protect these. While not citing the Four Essential Freedoms from the Free Software Definition by the Free Software Foundation as principles that also apply to other immaterial works like data, knowledge, artwork, and so on, beyond just software as a particular type of immaterial good.
The open source software community uses "copyleft" licensing to ensure that any code remains open and freely available to users even if private corporations decide to use it in their offerings.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html
thanks for this reminder Matthew. To make one of my assumptions explicit, I'm assuming that we are dealing with information that is essentially open to all who need it or who are interested. We're probably dealing here with a good application of Creative Commons licences. Many open wikis and other knowledge sources use CC BY; one could also use CC NC.
Hey, look: the above comment tries to explain to you that what many wikis and other sources do, is bad for the commons. In lack of copyleft (ShareAlike SA clause for Creative Commons licenses), there's the risk that some actors may make a derived version, and for lack of copyleft/SA are legally allowed/invited to publish and distribute that under restrictive licensing. Therefore they unilaterally benefit from the commons resource, but in reverse lock out, restrict and exclude the original creators themselves as well as not passing on the rights + access for the part that was otherwise granted and intended by commoners who therefore, to prevent such unilateral and hostile hijacking and siloing, protect the commons resources by copyleft/ShareAlike clause, to make it a properly protected commons, including downstream derivative works.
Also, NC NonCommercial clause of Creative Commons licenses, are non-libre/non-commons, because they also exclude all commoners and downstream recipients from commercial use, be it at-cost/non-profit, for-profit (non-exclusive), or within a commercial operation that's something entirely different, but just so happens to have a commons resource involved somewhere in a different business activity.
Thanks for these comments — I am aware of all this but others may not be. Wondering also if you are aware of the work on other variations on open licencing, under the names "copyfair" or "copyfarleft"?
You replied above, some knowledge sources use CC BY (no copyleft/SA). Isn't that a terrible idea? For any contributor, isn't this demanding and inviting the risk that some downstream derived works and recipients of such might get deprived of the legal rights and technical access that should otherwise be granted and protected by/for a digital commons? Especially so if the originally commons resource, which in downstream versions got relicensed into a restrictive/proprietary license, becomes for whatever reason more popular, or even replaces the libre-free commons original entirely. For example per Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish tactics by an active hostile actor, or per ignorance by people who don't really care whether the commons remain intact or get captured/enclosed/siloed/hijacked into exclusive control by certain parties at exclusion of the other commoners and peers. Luckily, your personal wiki doesn't have this legal pitfall by using the ShareAlike = coplyleft clause.
Then on the other hand, you wrote above, NC could be used, which you do use on your personal wiki. legal incompatibility with, for example, the Wikipedia as a knowledge commons, as well as, for example, WikiMedia (the organization) which might be a commercially operating entity (of sorts, idk if this is strictly legally correct for taking donations, employing people for salary, buying and likely also selling some things). Or classically for example printed (and be it print-on-demand) versions at cost or some profit (or loss), or printing on a CD that's sold for shipping costs, and what not, or including it in an anthology that's sold, or putting it on a website that runs advertisements, and so on.
I didn't know about the "copyfarleft", this too seems to be another NC NonCommercial confusion. No idea how many more times the phrase "free as in freedom, not as in free beer" needs to be repeated, to indicate the concept that the digital commons is more about universal user rights and non-exclusivity, than if or how some party may or may not earn some money. In fact, commercial use, be it by the original author or contributors or any downstream peer, is invited, to allow, enable and invite some commons-based business and services thereupon. What is not gratis, is of course the production of the resource, and there's many ways to arrange income from that, but this has no effect on the resource's state/status of being part of the digital commons. For contrast, consider, there's Freeware (gratis but proprietary), which is either legally or technically or both restricted in a way that it's not part of the commons, as some users/recipients get denied and excluded from things they naturally could do or would otherwise be able to do (some party is making an effort to exclude some from access to the commons, despite these are not depleting on redistribution or use or adaption).
Similarly I didn't know about "copyfair" (and why should I), which too is about another similar confusion that tries to arrange for some kind of payment and compensation, which naturally is independent and separate from a resource being offered as a common/commons resource. Here it seems some party wants to introduce and impose some payment condition, and if not observed and complied with by an recipient, user, beneficiary, or co-contributor, access to or permission for use of the the supposed "commons" resource is denied as a means of enforcement and creating artificial scarcity, which is no different from what every other proprietary actor does.
Consider, in practice: often a work is published under a non-libre-free Creative Commons license with NonCommercial clause, but the original creator also later engages in dual-licensing the same work for proprietary use with a conspiring commercial exploitation party. This is not great for any later contributors, because if any, what's their cut for their contributions/parts for the separate commercial and proprietary use? If they contributed to the CC NC work, maybe the proprietary and commercial exploitation might not be legally possible, because the contributors can reject and deny it for their parts. Or consider, how the Wikipedia could work at all, if some contributors or WikiMedia would have some non-commercial veto against each other and any other parties.
"Copyfarleft" and "copyfair" are not real concepts/mechanisms for the actual digital commons (which can't have these, or would cease to be a commons). Some people tend to come up and invent new terms, licenses and what not, because they're after some very different arrangements and goals.
The compensation confusion is analogous to the physical commons of, say, a fishing ground or a city forest - it's precisely and intentionally kept and maintained to allow and enable anyone from taking whatever they may want or need, and even far more than other parties who may not have the need at the time, for as long as there's a surplus and covered by the carrying capacity, and is ensured that this doesn't destroy the regenerative capacity to keep this resource around for any futures (at a quota or from surplus). The opposite is to think about this resource as an subject for maximal exploitation, for ensuring or maximizing profits from the available supply. These constraints don't apply to resources that are immaterial/infinite and never need to be short in supply and don't degrade or deplete, including not so under non-exclusive commercial use (as this does not restrict or limit anybody else's equal right and ability to engage in non-exclusive commercial use as well). This is not a bug, it's an intentional feature and benefit. One of the goals here is to get compensated for producing into the public commons and improving these, versus doing the same but into proprietary/restrictive property. As well as enabling and allowing many vendors to provide services, versus just a single party or particular closed group, no matter if they do it well or others could do it better, and without the risk that any of these setups goes out of business leaving the user with no vendor at all (and the resource abandoned, scrapped, stuck). etc.
I don't know if "copyfair" and "copyfarleft" is from the P2P Foundation wiki pages, but there's where I found them, for a quick look. Word of caution, it seems what's on there may not necessarily be "knowledge" or useful, but garbage or "pollution". If this is the reference/source, the P2P Foundation or Michel Bauwens too appear to have this issue that they're not much about or into the digital/immaterial commons, and they're trying instead to address collectives that work on/with resources in the material world that are inherently scarce. For a large part, they seem to be unaware or not much interested in the big digital commons projects, and instead in their corner speculate wildly how these may relate to operations that are otherwise tied to the physical world. By this I mean, the P2P Foundation is not the first place to ask if it's about data, information, knowledge. They may even ultimately be opposed to the concept of what's digital peerness.
In general, regarding the digital commons, this is not an "anything goes", especially for the warning of just arbitrary terms that sound aligned. "Open Source" may mean as little as code transparency/inspectability, "open" may mean as little as an office having opening hours, in academia/research "Open Access" may primarily refer to just access (so you can look at it but that's it) and too even distinguishing those into Green and Gold and why not dirt-Brown as well, or the mess Creative Commons created by also launching a number of licenses that are non-libre free proprietary ones and not commons, or CC0 like Public Domain along the lines that copyfraud for cultural/commons resources is supposed to be fine. Can't maintain a commons this way, as everything may end up gated/walled/fenced off, with some gatekeeper that poses arbitrary demands for unilateral benefit at expense and exclusion of other equal peers.
Just a brief follow-up, as IPR is not the focus of my post here. When Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess had a go at covering knowledge commons, their resulting collection e.g. https://www.academia.edu/8012416/Understanding_Knowledge_as_a_Commons_From_Theory_to_Practice_edited_by focused mainly on IPR issues, copyright and licencing. I found this disappointing, as to me the IPR issues are only a relatively small part of the overall picture of knowledge commons. Hence the focus of my post here.
Most of all, the publication "Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice" is released under restrictive copyright (all rights reserved), so these people evidently obviously clearly oppose and reject to contribute to the digital commons in practice, so why should anyone care about their theories, claims and speculations? They're not digital commoners, in practice, but opposed to such.
Fair enough. I'm mostly trying to point out that for the immaterial commons, or more specifically the digital commons (as the former might be "virtual" and just in people's collective head, while the former is knowledge representations in particular expressions that are distributable verbatim currently at almost zero-unit-cost and can be modifyable/adaptable, with the help of almost ubiquitous equipment), there is a conceptual & practical baseline of what constitutes and protects these commons. For practically, they're most at risk getting actively captured/enclosed/destroyed by bad actors or passively lost, usually by 1. imposing legal copyright restrictions, 2. technical restrictions or degradation (consider obfuscation, lossy/destructive format conversions, DRM, etc.), 3. social demands (like a group membership, administrative controls/exclusion).
So these are about establishing a baseline for how the digital commons are maintained and protected. Obviously, the threads and risks are less pressing, destructive, lossy for commons works of art and entertainment, and somewhat more for data/information/knowledge, and worse for software (could be considered "knowledge" in the sense that this is solutions and algorithms = calculations like math formulas known to be proven or tested to be correct, for how to handle data, except this knowledge in addition is automatically executable - so here enclosure/exclusion or loss not only means that this knowledge is lost and has to be reproduced/rediscovered again for the commons, it's also the loss of the benefit that comes from its use/execution, independent/individual or collective improvement/maintainability as well).
I can't afford to read "Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice" right now (and why or what for would I?), but my guess would be that Ostrom and maybe Bollier too (?) might look at digital commons through their lens of the physically scarce commons (after all, that's what Ostrom got the Nobel prize for, not for innovation in the area of restrictive copyright threatening/endangering the digital commons or technical degradation/restrictions, or too the social demands like membership to some group granted or denied by some arbiter you're advocating for). Digital commons practice was well established before they wrote this book for probably adding some more theories and speculation from their physical materiality angle/perspective. You may indicate that my guess is not correct here and that I'm mistaken, and then how theirs overlap or diverts from the sources I cited (which are earlier and specifically and dedicatedly about the digital commons in particular).
The bottom line here is, regarding Ostrom's popular #1 design principle of "1. Clearly defined boundaries: Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resource units from the CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself", such design/principle is defined to be anybody could "withdraw" and copy as much as they want, while actually it's the inverse/opposite, that every recipient may become another distribution source, for any number of downstream individuals, households and organizations. Primarily, the notion of locality of the singular place/location of a physical resource falls entirely flat on a global network and many copies all over the place, subsequently Ostrom's points about the physical world are defined differently for the information/signal world (pushing whole atoms around vs. just have easily reproducable/replicatable wave patterns/arrangements of electrons or light, or for example speech if you want, hopping along). Too, the boundary is defined that with any "withdrawal" = redistribution, legal rights and technical access must be supplied along with it, so the withdrawability/supply does not get restricted, diminished, exterminated over the course of potentially many independent "withdrawal" = redistribution processes. A person looking up Ostrom might get all confused about hers being about physically scarce resources, and no hint about how these principles are defined when it comes to the commons under mechanisms of the immaterial economy. This is very much for the very different kind/type of resource, of very different properties and therefore unit/supply economics, such commons are dealing with, subsequently leading to different rules/policies of what the boundaries need to be in order to protect these. While not citing the Four Essential Freedoms from the Free Software Definition by the Free Software Foundation as principles that also apply to other immaterial works like data, knowledge, artwork, and so on, beyond just software as a particular type of immaterial good.