This is an old version and discussion of PropertyLeft
Following based on http://www.gnu.org/copyleft [image of a Philosophical Gnu]
PropertyLeft is to PropertyRight? as CopyLeft is to CopyRight?.
PropertyLeft is a general method for making any Resource free, and requiring all modified and extended versions of the Resource be free as well, and possibly requiring the outputs of operating those Resources to be free.
When we use the word ‘free’ we are speaking of liberty, not cost.
The simplest way to share a Resource is to put it in a public place, unprotected. This allows people to share the Resource and their improvements, if they are so minded. But it also allows uncooperative people to hold the Resource proprietary. They may disallow others from ever using it, or charge rent far above costs. They may make changes, many or few, and distribute the result as a proprietary product. People who want to use the Resource or a modified form do not have the freedom that the original owner gave; the middleman has stripped it away.
The TragedyOfTheCommons and TragedyOfTheAntiCommons? are caused when unfair actions are not restricted. Unfair actions include: hoarding, SPAM, vandalism, mess, waste, pollution.
A PropertyLeft contract regulates stakeholders (owners, workers, consumers, users, operators) to make Resources available “at cost” to any qualified hacker.
Following based on http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
``Free Resources are a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ``free as in ``free speech, not as in ``free beer.
Free Resources are a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the Resource. More precisely, it refers to certain kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:
A Resource is free if users have all of these freedoms. Thus, you should be free to redistribute copies, either with or without modifications, either gratis or charging a fee for distribution, to anyone anywhere. Being free to do these things means (among other things) that you do not have to ask or pay for permission.
You should also have the freedom to make modifications and use them privately in your own work or play, without even mentioning that they exist. If you do publish your changes, you should not be required to notify anyone in particular, or in any particular way.
The freedom to use a Resource means the freedom for any kind of person or organization to use it in any way, for any kind of overall job, and without being required to communicate subsequently with the developer or any other specific entity beyond those outlined below.
The freedom to redistribute copies must include specific instances, as well as design documents, for both modified and unmodified versions.
One important way to modify a Resource is by merging in available parts and techniques. If the contract says you cannot treat this way, such as if it requires you to be the owner anything you add, then the contract is too restrictive to qualify as free.
In order for these freedoms to be real, they must be irrevocable as long as you do nothing wrong; if the owner of the Resource has the power to revoke access, without your doing anything to give cause, the Resource is not free.
``Free Resources does not mean ``non-commercial. A free Resource must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution.
When talking about free Resources, it is best to avoid using terms like ``give away or ``for free, because those terms imply that the issue is about price, not freedom. Some common terms such as ``piracy embody opinions we hope you won’t endorse.
Following based on http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
The act of operating the Resource may be restricted, and the outputs of that operation may also have be covered by this contract.
The Renter must qualify, and output must be “good for the community”?
Renters incrementally become joint owners as they cover costs, so ownership “rolls over” to those that most utilize the Resource. This is meant to keep voting ‘local’ and protect against division.
We don’t want a heavy user to hold so much vote weight that he wields it against the community…
Modifier must qualify and modifications must be “good for the community” according to the collective owners.
You may make a perfect copy and distribute that copy of the Resource, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this Lease and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Resource a copy of this Lease along with the Resource. You may charge a fee for the physical act of creating, transporting, storing the copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
“profit beyond cost (where cost includes worker compensation)” – Profit beyond cost can be justified for growth, as well, for example.
I agree that there are problems with our society, I’m not so sure that I agree with you’re analysis of what exactly is the root of those problems. (I have problems with arguments about banks and metals and what not.)
I do think, however, that we may agree on part of the solution: the Open Source economy, or the gift economy, or collectives and communes or whatever. These are things that interest me. And they are things we can do!
Knowing that you don’t have time to read this immediately, I think you might be interested in:
I’ve been meaning to write about the concept of a “SoftEconomy,” which is a market (and probably a CyberneticEconomy) where all exchanges and feedback are, by public trust / community honor, publicly visible. It can involve a mix of conventional and community currencies, and also includes commentsreputation“woofie” as currency. Charity work is considered a “market exchange,” even though there is no money that changes hand- reputation is still assigned, both towards the recipient of the aid, and the giver of the aid.
What if the (qualified) workers could build any car they could dream up?
I assume that since you don’t like usury, you are implying “without paying a fee to a third-party “owner” of capital equipment”.
Well then how do we pay for the capital equipment? In the current system, some entity invests a lot up front to buy the tools needed to produce a car, and then they pay people to make cars and sell the cars at a per-unit profit. The proft repays them for the expense of the equipment. Hopefully they come out ahead and get to take some of that profit home, too.
The profit taken home is certainly usury — but it is still serving functions.
First of all, it is compensating the investor for risk. What would have happened if they built a car factory and then no one bought the cars? They would have been out a lot of money. Therefore, in order to make the expected value of their investment in the factory not be negative, they have to have a possibility of making back more than they invest in order to balance out the possibility of making back less than they invest1.
Second of all, it is sending a “signal” to the investor to tell them what the world wants them to invest in. If the owner was exactly compensated for any kind of factory they built, no more and no less, they could choose to waste their capital on something that no one wants or needs.
A solution to #2 is a centrally planned economy (instead of an owner choosing what kind of factory to build, the government chooses, based on the decisions of a staff of economists) but humans can’t yet produce a bureaucracy intelligent enough to make those decisions as efficiently as a free market. In addition this solution is politically unwise because it concentrates a kind of power in one entity (the government) whereas in capitalism that power is diffused to either all the rich people or to all the people (depending on who you ask – but either of these is better than giving all that power to the government).
(btw my opinion on capitalism: it’s almost certainly not the best possible economic system but it’s the best one that the human race has tried so far – so let’s keep looking for alternatives, and keep trying out alternatives in subsections of the economy (like open source), but let’s use capitalism as the default system for most of the economy until we find something better)
Incidentally, the advent of FabLab?s may in fact make it economical for many of us (people in the middle class of the first world) to
…build any car they could dream up… realize the most advanced of designs… [build] video game consoles, media players, video cards, DRM, food, etc. … the way RoyalWe wanted them?
> "without paying a fee to a third-party "owner" of capital equipment".
Not at all, but the fee paid is exactly ‘cost’ and never includes owner-profit.
> centrally planned economy
This is where we are headed if we don’t regain control by agreeing to lock some Land and Capital open with a PropertyLeft agreement, maybe like a lease. This will help us decentralize power as the GPL currently does.
> FabLabs
Only if we (the lowly workers) have freedom to control those machines as we see fit. If they are used against us as almost all Land and Capital currently is, then it will change little besides lowering employment (which should be a good thing, but is not when costs are being externalized).
I don’t have the time right now, but I believe we can put a substantial portion of the idea above the “Discussion” line. Things get tricky when we talk about “hoarders.” But if we keep it positive, focus on freedom and opportunity for people, and the actual ideas about application at hand here, I think this is a stellar page, and a neat idea.
The FEC does a similar thing, I would add.
Some initial thoughts:
I’ve been talking with several friends about these sorts of ideas, and I’ve been putting them through my head for a while.
I don’t have any exactly correlating ideas, but I have some specific ideas that were inspired from this discussion, and others like it.
One idea I had recently is that we could make something like a collective housing arrangment.
In a way, we are branding a concept of “fairness,” or something like that. I don’t quite have the words for it.
I am, personally, very excited by the possibility.
I’ve often had this crazy vision of: “What if the geek scene bought the Columbia tower?”
I don’t just mean “geeks,” I mean a whole smorgass-board of people I find interesting:
In many ways, you’re describing “limited-equity housing cooperatives.” At least that’s what it seems like. Are you attempting to describe something different, or simply frame what exists in terms of FreeCulture and OrganizedCulture?
Ted:
I don’t know enough about “limited-equity housing cooperative” to understand the relationship between the ideas.
I’m just fishing around for applying CopyLeft ideas to material property, not just software.
I don’t know if it’s possible to make a widely understood agreement, like there is for the GPL, that would apply to the housing: Perhaps housing situations vary too much for a single license.
I think that the implications of OrganizedCulture for housing cooperatives go beyond a simple reframing of the idea.
Okay, so how does PropertyLeft help Columbia tower come into being as a community living situation where is couldn’t otherwise?
I don’t know if it can– it’s just an image, a dream.
I like the refactoring of this page. Excellent work!
So Lion, with regards to housing, it’s not clear if PropertyLeft is needed, yes? CommunityLandTrust? and/or HousingCooperative? might work just as well? Okay.
I also found something interesting today: http://www.opencapital.net/. They’re suggesting that property doesn’t need to ever be “sold.” Instead, investors and occupants can form an LLC whereby the occupants eventually buy out the investors (or if they need more cash, the investors buy out the occupants, temporarily). When the occupants want to leave, they sell their interest in the LLC or they simply collect rents over time and reduces their ownership stake. Maybe has nothing to do with this page, but I thought it was cool and seems somewhat relevant.
Being a budding Gerogist/Geoist/Physiocrat, this rings true to me. Thanks for the pointer.
From the Open Capital FAQ:
How would the conflict, between property, capital, owners and borrowers, between the financiers and the financed, be resolved by Open Capitalism? The owners of capital will still want their rake off. What attractions are there for them in LLPs?
Of course they would want their rake off. But they would no longer make money from money as the very nature of money changes organically to comprise revenue streams derived from productive assets in the joint ownership of occupier and financier. Change doesn’t happen overnight. But it will rapidly become apparent to current “owners” that by participating in such partnerships they will get a smaller share of a much bigger pie and hence benefit overall. It is a pre-distributive model. As Henry George said, there is no need to take away the Land, merely part of the Rental value. Most of all, it is a model which is “emerging” spontaneously in the commercial world – because those enterprises who do not use it are already beginning to find themselves at a disadvantage to those who do…
“Open” Capital – a proportionate share in an enterprise held for an indeterminate period of time – is a concept so simple that as J.K.Galbraith said of the creation of Money by private Banks: “the mind is repelled”.
“Open” Capital resolves the conflict between the financiers and the financed, to the mutual benefit of both, and thereby opens the way to a truly Co-operative Society.
And from http://www.opencapital.net/papers/ifnotglobal.htm
Moreover, the infinitely divisible proportionate “shares” which constitute ‘Open’ Capital allow stakeholder interests to grow flexibly and organically with the growth in Value of the Enterprise. In legal terms, the LLP agreement is essentially consensual and ‘pre-distributive’: it is demonstrably superior to prescriptive complex contractual relationships negotiated adversarially and subject to subsequent re-distributive legal action. Above all, the ‘Open’ Corporate Partnership is a Co-operative phenomenon which is capable, the author believes, of unleashing the “Co-operative Advantage” based upon the absence of a requirement to pay returns to “rentier” Capitalists.
Fussnoten:
1. now you may want the government to make those be exactly equal so that, on average, the investor makes nothing, but since every investor has a different estimate of the risks, it is impossible to correctly calculate the risks ahead of time with enough accuracy