The philosophy of intellectual
property and free culture
Tom Chance
Speaker on Intellectual Property, Green Party
Open Source City, Liverpool, 20th June 2008

What's it all about?
Property
Licenses Working spaces
Working practices
Aesthetic, political or functional goals

It's mostly about... property
Private – 'I own x, it's mine'
Communal – 'we use x to achieve y'
Common - 'x belongs to us all / nobody'

Private property
Family of rights might include right to:
•
Possess
•
Use
•
Manage
•
Derive income
•
Gain capital value
•
Security from expropriation
•
Transmission
•
Lack of term on rights
•
Positive duties

Collective property

Common property
Negative – free for expropriation
Positive – belonging to the entire
community

Copyright is...
Private property with collectivist exceptions

Fair use / dealing

Various other goal-oriented exceptions

Limited terms leading to a commons

Copyleft is...
Positive intellectual common enforced by
subverting private property rights

Kant's categorical imperative
”Act only according to that maxim whereby
you can at the same time will that it
should become a universal law.”
- Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals

Stallman's categorical
imperative
”copyleft is the rule that when
redistributing the program, you cannot
add restrictions to deny other people the
central freedoms [to use, study, share
and modify software]”
- Richard Stallman, The Free Software Definition

Myers' categorical imperative
”Creators who reserve a right of creative
fiat may see that same right exercised
against them, and they will appreciate it
much less in those circumstances. This is
a permission culture, not a free culture.”
- Rob Myers, Why the NC permission culture simply doesn't work

The Big Licensing Debate
Copyleft: GNU GPL, CC BY-SA, etc.
Libertarian: BSD, CC BY, etc.
Permission culture: CC BY-NC-SA, etc.
Teleological: Hacktivismo Enhanced-Source
Software License Agreement

Locke – a necessary right?
”Labour is the unquestionable property of
the labourer”
and
”the common is of no use... there must of
necessity be a means to appropriate
them some way or anothr before they
can be of any use”
- John Locke, Two Treatises of Government

Locke – a personality right?
”every man has Property in his own
Person. Thus no Body has any Right but
himself.”
and
We have ”the utmost property” in that
which we create
- John Locke, Two Treatises of Government

Locke – a fair or just right?
”God gave the world to the use of the
industrious and rational, (and labour was
to be his title to it;) not to the fancy or
covetousness of the quarrelsome and
contentious”
- John Locke, Two Treatises of Government

Locke – beneficial use
”the end of Law is not to abolish or
restrain, but to preserve and enlarge
Freedom”
- John Locke, Two Treatises of Government

Eric Raymond – beneficial use
”Lockean property customs arise only
where the expected return from the
resource exceeds the expected cost of
defending it”
- Eric Raymond, Homesteading the Noosphere

Marx – labour and alienation
”The object produced by labour now stands
opposed to it as an alien being, as a
power independent of the producer”
- Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts

Feenberg – labour and
alienation
”The worker becomes a mere appendage to
an already existing material condition of
production... [and] suffers a knowledge
deficit [as well as a] solidarity deficit”
- Andrew Feenberg, Critical theory of technology

Berry – labour and alienation
”Free software is not directly linked to
necessity, and is in many ways similar to
the creation of an artist... to create free
culture is to contribute toward culture
rather than consume (i.e. destroy it)”
- David Berry, Free as in “free speech” or free as in “free labour”?

Copyleft is...
Positive intellectual common enforced by
subverting private property rights to

Defend our right to a public good, or

Maximise benefits to society, or

Promote unalienated labour and better
social relations

Ta
Slides, text, my thesis, short paper etc.
http://tom.acrewoods.net