Author: Tom
Copyright, copyleft and owning information
Key themes & my take-aways
- We questioned if the GPL and other "free culture" licenses have managed to stand up under legal challenge? Since the idea of them is to turn the institution of copyright against itself, it's a pretty crucial challenge to their effectiveness whether those institutions have actually upheld that attempted inversion.
- A few of us had encountered more "homebrew" licenses, which had good sentiment behind them, but we doubted would actually withstand legal attack. I think the exemplary "copyfarleft" license proposed in the TKM probably falls into this category!
- We came back to the question of open source software's entanglement with Big Tech a few times. I don't think we reached a conclusion, but we raised a lot of interesting questions.
- Is it better that at least some parts of these big platforms are transparent to us? Does it make sense to "voluntarily enshittify" the General Public License, so that tools like FFmpeg can be linked into proprietary code? Or does this lead to open source software being a way for big corporations to benefit from the free labour of hobbyists?
- What about all the funding for open source dev being provided by these corporations - is this proof that open source can force corporations to participate, or that open source can only exist because devs can sustain themselves materially by writing non-open code?
- Izzy made the excellent and eternally relevant point that we should always think of the material components of Big Tech dominance. Netflix isn't just dominant because IP laws let them keep their code proprietary - they're dominant because of the enormous amount of computing hardware they have to run that code and stream so much media. Even if Netflix was open source, it would be far from trivial to amass the resources needed to host a competing service at the same scale.
- I found the question of whether software is different to art/culture as an information 'commodity' very interesting. The TKM's framing is that software is a producer's good, subject to capital demand, while art and culture is a consumer's good. A lot of our discussion did imply to me that there is a boundary here; we often found ourselves reasoning about software separately from culture at large. However, the fact that all of these creators are similarly threatened by new "AI" technologies has been making me think there must be some common class interests underpinning it all.
- Ultimately, the question of whether existing copyleft systems are "good enough" seemed to come down to what we thought the end goal was. Is it enough that we have a thriving ecosystem of open source software, that means you can almost entirely do without proprietary tech? Or is it unjust that it's possible to own proprietary software at all, and that the open source ecosystem is only sustained materially by that system of ownership and profit?
The main challenge I take away from our conversation and TKM is of how to "form the structure of the new society within the shell of the old". If we want to see a collaborative, commons-based future for software, and maybe for all creative culture, how do we create a commons that can reproduce itself materially, so that it can grow independently into something that can challenge the system we have now?
Further Reading
Some links and book recommendations that I wanted to share following our discussion. I hope others can add things here, I'm sure there were interesting things mentioned that I didn't capture!
Links:
- Why you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your next library, from the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation. A reflection on the trade-offs between principle and pragmatism at play in the GPL and LGPL.
- How decentralised is BlueSky really?. I cannot claim to fully understand this one at all! This came up in our discussion of the material requirements of computing, and the limits we would still face even if Big Tech code was open source. The linked article is a very thorough exploration of the architecture of BlueSky, and the practical limits to its claims of being 'decentralised', from someone who seems deeply engaged with conversations about protocols and standards for a more distributed web.
- Molly White, We need to talk about digital ownership. An exploration of all the questions that make the idea of "owning your data" nuanced and counter-intuitive.
- Molly White, "Wait, not like that". An interesting view on the controversy about AI models being trained on public domain data such as Wikipedia, noting the slightly reactionary position that people normally critical of proprietary information end up adopting.
- The Telekommunist Manifesto (TKM in these notes), particularly the section "A contribution to the critique of free culture". The original text that made me want to discuss the topic.
Books:
- Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con. Very tight, quick read, making the case for adversial interoperability as a way to force the reclamation of information as a commons.
- Mckenzie Wark, Capital is Dead. Less closely related to our topic of discussion, but it was this book's thesis of information as the object of a new enclosure and class relation that led me to digging into the concepts around IP in the first place. I found TKM through the references of this book too.