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Re: IANG license translation draft

Hello Dmytri and all,

Dmytri Kleiner a écrit :

On Sun, 05 Aug 2007 23:41:56 +0200, Patrick Godeau <pogo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


However, I believe that after we sort
out the misunderstandings and unclear parts of IANG, we'll realize that
there's not so much work to do.


I agree, I think we have a very compatible approach.
I think we have at least the same goal, to extend the commons from immaterial creation to material economy, and to preserve these commons from appropriation. However our approaches may differ on some aspects. There is surely room for improvement in IANG and I hope we can make a better IANG 2.0, but for changing important rules, you may need to convince me first, of course ;-) Interestingly, when I started to think about this project (around 2000) my approach was much similar to yours. But as the project matured, I've come to think that the economy of copyleft should not be managed only by producers, but also by consumers. I'll try to explain why I think it's a better approach in the sense of freedom, equity, solidarity, in short, copyleft. 


In venture communism I promote the concept that all who apply their labour
to property are entitled to be among the mutual owners of that property,
perhaps something like that can be a clause.
This is a fair remark, I should probably add something like this in IANG 2.0. However the most important thing is not who owns, but who decides, and the license already states that decisions about the work belong to all who contribute to this work. Also, the material work is not the creative work, and I don't see why for example the printing press operator should have a say in the story of the book, except if s-he is admitted in the creative project. But I agree that this operator should have a say in the economic project. 




The rationale behind these definitions is that the economy of public
works should be public, and managed by all those who contribute to it,
including customers through their purchases and subscriptions. These are
not exchanges in the sense of market economy but rather contributions to
a gift economy. Of course, the IANG items will be sold on the market,
but seller and buyers will not conflict but share the same economic
entity, like in mutual societies, cooperatives, associations.


In my mind the distinct characteristic of a Maussian "Gift Economy" is that
value is placed on relationships, and not on individual transactions.

[...]

Further, as the information covered by a peer-production license is
common-stock, there would be no direct purchases or subscriptions, rather
the commons is a common input to production of goods and services.

As such, it is import that we insist that the exchange value captured by
deriving goods and services from common-stock is captured by it's "work
contributors" and not owners of rent-capturing property.
My view is that exchange value should not be captured at all, by no one, not even by work contributors. One could call this "ecopyleft", which is to economy what copyleft is to information, a guarantee against privatization. This is why I wrote about "gift" economy, because everyone can give to the commons, but no one can take from. I didn't intend to refer to Mauss or potlatch, it would be more like an ordinary association, where associates contribute what they will, without a necessary reciprocation. 



So, while a recording artist can not capture exchange value directly from a
recording, a night club or radio station owner can. The trick is how to
make sure this exchange value is equitably shared among all the work
contributors, and not appropriated by property owners.

This is why the possibility of "economic contributors" is extremely
limited, basically outright donors and perhaps interest free lenders can
really be considered "contributors," and even these two are problematic,
because the donation and/or interest-free loan must benefit the commons as
a whole, not simply the "original creator," in order to directly be a
contribution to the commons.
Your "commons as a whole" is only the producers, while for me the commons should include producers and consumers, the latter being presumably more numerous than the former, thereby making sure that exchange value is not inequitably shared or appropriated.
Also note that a private investor contributing to a IANG economic project, as a legal entity, has only one vote, so a multinational company equals a single customer. And finally, as stated in article 6.2, there is no obligation to admit a contributor. 


I still do not see customers qua customers as contributors, Workers are
already covered under "work contributors" so "economic contributors," imo,
should be limited to donors and possibly interest-free lenders.
Customers are however the most important economic contributors, because without them, the economic project couldn't exist (except if the producers only produce for themselves, which would be of limited public interest).
Also, one should note that the Creative Project is different from the Economic Project. Participation rules are designed so that contributors should decide about what they contribute. So creative contributors decide about artistic orientations, while economic contributors decide about prices and payments. 


On the contrary, opening economic participation to the public will make
it really public and driven by public interest, since if the creation
has some use value, users will form a majority, even if probably only a
minority of them desire to participate.


My view is that this public interest will in most case be manifested in
work contributions by individuals and groups joining the project and
contributing to it directly.
This is not necessarily true. For example, free software hackers have an interest in technical skills and programming tricks, that is opposed to most users interest in simplicity. Even if some recent Linux distributions have become more or less useable, there is still a strong resistance towards user friendliness. 


The fact that producers own their working tools does not change anything
regarding the relation with public.


The "public" is nothing more that the extended community of producers.
A user is rarely a producer in the sense of creation. I doubt that all the listeners of Jamendo compose music, or that the millions of Firefox users all contribute code. (In fact there are about 1000 developers for 100 millions users, a rather low ratio.) But no one knows better than the public what are the needs, what should be developed, what investments would be necessary, etc. 




Cooperatives (I happen to work in
one) operate in a market economy, their interest are in conflict with
customers about price, and they compete against other companies, even
other cooperatives.


They also share public goods, and the amount of common-property the employ
in there production could be greatly increased. I do not think that
competition and markets cause problems so much as private property and
economic rent.
I think that the market, which values competition and profit, is by nature opposed to copyleft, which values cooperation and giving. If we want to transpose copyleft into economy, I think we should be careful with the market. As you noticed, reproducible information cannot have direct exchange value of its own, so in this game, authors will always lose. 


Purchasing a work that is available for free is already a committed act.
We should have a model that encourages this act, not restrain it.


Sure, it is not donations that I think we should restrain but rather the
ability of property owners to extract rent.



Fortunately, this is not possible for a public to capture surplus value
from themselves. This is why the public should not only have financial
information, but also drive the economy of copyleft.


It is possible, as in my example with a radio station or a night club being
able to capture surplus value from a recording, even without having any
copyright on it.
Whether the recording is ecopyleft or copyright, if authors want to distribute it to private broadcasters, they must deal with them, possibly through the collection society. If this society is managed by both music producers and consumers, the broadcasters will be more obligated to stick to their role of intermediaries, and not abuse their position. On the contrary, if producers handle collecting on their own, they will be faced at the same time with the broadcasters, with their public (market relation of obligatory reciprocation), and with themselves (conflict for distribution of income). 



I think one key topic I would like to emphasize is that the "public" is a
collection of producers, and that in a property-based society, a portion of
the total goods produced by these producers is appropriated by
non-producing property owners, and that this reduces the amount of wealth
the producers can share and exchange with each other.
For me, the public is mostly comprised of users, who rarely contributes to the production. For example, the majority of people who have heard about free software think it's just software that is free (as in free beer). However, some contribute, either to copyleft creations, or to their financing (the latest Wikipedia donation campaign raised $1 million in 2 months). The question is, how to make sure that these contributions are not appropriated. The IANG approach is somehow to apply the copyleft principle to economy. That is to say, economic contributions can be given, but not taken away. To guarantee this, all economic contributors should not only have access to accounting, but also have control of it, just like free software contributors can not only access the source code, but also change it. So if a capitalist company wants to sell ecopyleft works, it must let its customers control its capital.
I think that a big problem with the economy in general is that consumers have no control on it. Multinational companies rule the roost and reign over customers. For example, Stallman was motivated to create the GNU project because a printer manufacturer refused to give the source code of a driver. 25 years later, free drivers may exist for some printers, but the situation has not really improved, free software developers are often obliged to reverse-engineer printer protocols, and customers are forced to buy printers that break down just after the guarantee and can't be repaired, ink cartridges more expensive than the printer, etc.
Even if the knowledge is copylefted, it is of no help for users as long as means of production are controlled by producers seeking profit. Suppose for example that the patent system is abolished and all pharmaceutical companies are under workers' control. What would happen? Since we're in a market economy, these compagnies will probably continue to invest in the most profitable medicine at the expense of billions of people having unprofitable diseases, will continue to spend twice more on advertising than on research, etc.
When working on a license, I think we should always keep in mind the copyleft values of freedom and solidarity. If an economic project is ruled by producers, there won't be freedom for users to determine its orientation, their only option being to choose a competitor project on the market. The solidarity between producers and consumers is a central value of copyleft, and a raison d'être of IANG is to defend this solidarity also on the economic level. This kind of partnership between consumers and producers is also emerging nowadays for example through fair trade, the Seikatsu cooperatives, etc. But I think that creative works are special because the public is more inclined to donate to artists. Involvement of the public even starts to happen in movie production, as for example with korean netizen funds or Blender open movies. If a 100% open economy will be harder to reach than 100% open source (even open source software sometimes uses closed source drivers) and some intermediaries may be necessary, I think it's important that users have a control, in conjunction with producers, so that they can counteract these intermediaries, and make progress towards a more free society. 

Regards :-)

--
Patrick
http://iang.info/