Necessary freedoms for information society

Kaido KikkasAssociate Professor, Estonian IT College

Associate Professor of Social and Free Software, Tallinn University

kaido.kikkas@kakupesa.net

Document Freedom DayEuropean Parliament

Brussels, March 30, 2011

This material is published under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 3.0 Estonia license

The paradigm shift

José Luís Malaquias, “A New Economic System for the Information Era” (used to be at http://www.malaquias.net/en/joseluis/articles/ copyright.pdf, retrievable from archive.org)

„The Gods Must Be Crazy“ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080801/

The Bushmen vs the Coke bottle – a novel, desirable object that could not be replicated

WAS IT A BLESSING OR A CURSE?

You can never get enough

Resources: scarcity =>value

Example: value of water for the Vikings vs the Bedouins

Earlier: wars over resources

Later: „civilised discussion“ and agreements

Entrenchment of the „scarcity meme“

Information, the weird resource

Spreads almost exclusively by multiplication:

I have two apples. I give one to you. I have one.

I know two jokes. I tell one to you. I know... two?

Has never before been the dominating resource

Most of the legal system has only learned to follow the scarcity meme

Now what?

Yochai Benkler:

Information production is inherently more suitable for nonmarket strategies than industrial production

Rapid spread of nonmarket production, widening base

effective, large-scale cooperative efforts in peer production of information, knowledge, and culture

MORE AND MORE THINGS CAN NOT BE EXPLAINED BY MARKET ONLY

Everything you know is wrong

Mindquake – the term coined by Robert Theobald to denote a „break point“ where one's previous knowledge loses its validity. An example: people of the former Eastern bloc had to re-learn many things from economy to culture

Is a mindquake happening in the IP issues..?

Old Man Paragraph and the Internet Kid

A main problem is also the difference of the very paradigm

A good law is one which does not change

A good technology is constantly evolving

E.g. A major criticism of the US Patriot Act of 1991 was the speed of its adoption – the flashing 5 weeks after 9/11!

What happens in IT sector in 5 weeks?

How can static laws control dynamic IT...?

The topic of the day

Document freedom – a crucial ingredient

Free flow versus artificial scarcity

Closed formats as the hothouse of lawsuits:

Technical (you need program X – and don't you dare to 'pirate' it). Fine print: pirates are typically equipped with peg legs, rum and parrots (Arrrr!), not laptops

Legal (our firm owns the patent for the Meowtastic font which is deeply embedded into the document)

Don't eat or let others eat – everyone will starve (Word 2.0 documents were a good example)

Most importantly will short-circuit lots of cooperative efforts (due to requirement chain)

The four freedoms

As outlined by the GNU GPL, the dominating free software license (paraphrased):

Use and copy

Study

Modify

Develop new things under the same conditions

Result: ”you will get rich because you are the best at the job” rather than ”you will get rich because your grandfather patented the Y”

A warning example: http://webshop.ffii.org/

Necessary things

Openness that does not kill enterprise – new business models (more service than product oriented - ”don't sell software, rather sell brains behind it”)

Freedom that is hard to exploit – scenarios like ”first we eat your bread and then everyone eats his own” need to be prevented (by law if necessary: the copyleft principle is a prime tool for that)

Document freedom can help to achieve both

Some tools

EUPL

GPL license family – GPL, LGPL, AGPL

In some cases, non-copyleft licenses like BSD, MIT, X11 licenses

Creative Commons content license family

Note: compatibility remains an issue

Pekka Himanen on Europe

The Challenges of the Global Information Society by Pekka Himanen, written for the Finnish Parliament (back in 2004). According to him, Europe must choose, where to go:

The US model - „leaving the weak behind“ ends up with gated communities and high crime

The Singapore model – the „tax paradise“ needs far too cheap labour force to be usable

The Old Europe model – a welfare state turning into a „society of envy“ with total stagnation

The fourth way – the proactive society!

Conclusions

“For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air” - Fangorn (Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien)

Information (and knowledge) society implies free flow of information which is largely nonmarket

The legal system must adapt better

Business will survive (monkey business perhaps not)

Europe has to decide whether to play along

Recommended further reading

Pekka Himanen (Hacker Ethic a.o.)

Larry Lessig (Free Culture a.o.)

Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks a.o.)

Peter Barnes (Capitalism 3.0)

Robert Theobald (The Rapids of Change a.o.)

Christopher Kelty (Two Bits)

...

http://wiki.kakupesa.net/index.php/The_Playful_Cleverness_Reading_List (a collection)

Thank you

The slides will be available at http://www.slideshare.net/UncleOwl