Un-Privatizing Intellectual Property Rights

Piracy is a perennial problem of the Philippines. From the illegal downloads of the new Lady Gaga song to the photocopying of a reading from the “Great Political Thinkers”, much of the information that circulates in the country right now are “stolen” from their respective “owners”. This is the dilemma that the so-called information owners face-- before they even get a chance of selling their goods to the public, their goods are already available at a much lower price in Quiapo. But, this dilemma is created by the owners themselves-- the once free knowledge is now barricaded by different intellectual property rights that give royalties to them. In one of the lectures in Anthropology 10, Ms. Monica Santos, the lecturer, stated her stand on knowledge. She stated that knowledge should not be obstructed by copyrights. If one would look at it, intellectual property rights is the main reason why people support piracy. Open sourcing has been revolutionizing the way people look at these intellectual property rights-- copyleft over copyright, GPL licenses over patents, open source over close source. Open sourcing is offering a new view in information-- from information as resources to information as commons.

The information as a common view is not new paradigm per se. In indigenous communities, local knowledge is information that is not owned by anyone in the community. In a symposium sponsored by the UP Anthropology Society, Dr. Maria Mangahas discussed her experience on a school in Mindanao where she had been a guest speaker. She did an experiment on how much the students know about plants. She let the students wander outside to gather plants that have a medicinal value; In a span of ten minutes, each student are able to bring not just one species of plant but a wide number of medicinal plants known to their community. This exhibits the nature of information for a community, they are knowledge that are shared by the community-- a public property. These are the information that are passed orally, with or without modifications, from generation to generation. Thus the knowledge of medicinal plants are a product of a several generation. It is clear that local knowledge is a common. Commons is defined as something that is shared by a community. Commons are the source of a community’s sustenance and in this case, the knowledge of herbal medicine is very useful for a community with little medical support from the government.

Open sourcing is a very popular movement in Computer Science today. In here, the source code of the programs is open for the public. The source code is the blue print of an application or program. Open Source Software has its roots on the Free Software Foundation founded by Richard Stallman in 1984. This foundation aims to collect funds for the GNU Project. GNU (pronounced as “new”) stands for the recursive acronym, GNU Not Unix. Unix is a proprietary operating system that was widely used before. The project’s goal is to develop software that is Unix-compatible and to make this software free. Free, in a sense, is not a freedom from a price, but rather a freedom to do anything with the software-- use it, distribute it for free or with a fee, modify it or distribute the modified version so that others can benefit from your changes. Open sourcing encourages developers to do their own modifications of the program for their own use or for redistribution. Every open source project is like a huge group project with developers all around the globe collaborating to create a program that could be on par or sometimes even better with their proprietary counterparts. It is an online community of developers and users which share a piece of information, in this case the program.

One could argue that open sourcing does not live to its promise of a free software since the only people who could do the modifications are those that are knowledgeable with programming. What about those ordinary users who download and install the program but does not contribute anything in the pool? How is it still a common when the ones that could place modifications on the project are only the programmers? Not everyone in the community has equal “freedom” in a sense since one is limited by what he knows about programming. But, even on indigenous communities, some people are more knowledgeable than others. An albularyo is more adept on the different medicinal plants and their uses than some college student from the same community. It is with this that sharing and reliance to other, the two values that are of great importance on a community, take place. An albularyo shares his knowledge to the people who relies on his knowledge. Through this sharing, the albularyo ensures that the knowledge of medicinal plants is a part of the commons and not something that is left stagnant on his mind. This is analogous in the developer-user relationships; by sharing his modifications to the community, the developer ensures that the information he has would belong to the commons. Thus the developer-user relationship is a share and rely type of relationship.

So as to not discredit the users as an active participant in open sourcing, many developments that are created by the programmers came from the users. How? Through crash reporting. Crash reports helps the programmers to create bug fixes, patches or program updates to make the program more stable and less prone to crashes. This flow of information of crash reports from users and patches or updates from the developers is an example of how a common, as defined by Stephen Gudeman, is a product of past innovations and yet a template for more innovations. Every open source project, in a sense, is an unfinished project.

In a sense, what is common in an open source software is the flow of information, something that is not present in closed source softwares. Recent developments on digital formats secured the dominance of the information sector over the agricultural and industrial sectors on some countries like the United States of America. On its digital form, any information could be reproduced infinite number of times at a cost that is almost next to nothing. This feature, albeit beneficial to business, would also serve as a major disadvantage to the “owners” of the information. Roberto Verzola coined the term cyberlords to describe these owners. The cyberlords, being in business want people to buy from them, but this is threatened by end users who reproduce and redistribute these information to other people. Because of this, the propertied class asserts their claim over information in the form of intellectual property rights (IPR). IPRs are statutory monopolies i.e. monopolies granted by the government. Example of these IPRs are patents and copyrights. These statutory monopolies strengthened the power of these cyberlords, not to mention increase their profits, but in the expense of removing the freedom from the end user by blocking the flow of information.

Commons are unwritten, a contrast in the definition of information proposed by Verzola. He defined it as “anything that can be represented and stored as a series of bits (i.e., one’s and zero’s).” (Verzola, 2004) The concept of storing the information made information something that could be owned. Passing knowledge orally gives the privilege of modifying it; when a piece of information is written and stored, it becomes standardized. Thus, the freedom for modification has become very limited to those that are in control of these storages. The control of information sets the main difference between the definition of information between the western economy and community economy. While the notion of information on a western thought is a means to meet the ends, information on a community is, by its nature, the ends. Information could then be classified into two things-- information as a common and information as resources.

The notion of information as resources gave rise to these intellectual property rights. Before the dawn of ownership, everything is owned by everyone. IPR’s are the fences of information. These are granted to the cyberlords by the government to secure their claim on a piece of knowledge. Ironically, these knowledge that the cyberlords claim and guard did not originate from them. Most of these knowledge are created by a group of intellectuals who either are on contract with them or are being employed by them.

But aren’t open source softwares also written since their source codes are, well, written? This contrasts the previous definition of the commons as something that is unwritten. But, writing the pice of information nor standardizing it is not the problem per se. Standardization, in fact, ensures the updates’ back compatibility (i.e., it works on a previous version of the software). As stated above, the commons is really the flow of information. IPR’s have written the rules that governs this flow. Patents and copyrights made this supposedly free flow of knowledge into something profitable, thus something that can be seen as a resource.

The concept of intellectual property rights is also a concern for open sourcing. When is a free software still a free software? When is it still free and when is it proprietary? To protect the “commonness” of the open source softwares, the community involved in the projects decides for a license. These licenses are safeguards against people who wants to patent a code whose roots came from the project in order to gain royalties. There are many licenses available which will not be discussed in this paper. Open Source Initiative contains a list of licenses and their respective descriptions. A good example of these licenses is the GNU General Public License or GPL. The GPL has the feature is called the copyleft which is the antithesis of the copyright. Copyleft ensures that the program can be modified and distributed by anyone provided that they give those that would receive their programs directly or indirectly the same rights that was granted to them. It also states that the program can be patented provided that the license of the patent is designed in such a way that the receiver of the patent would not receive any royalties from those that received his program whether it is directly or indirectly passed; this basically means that one could patent the software without receiving the privileges of that patent. It says that the only way to satisfy the license and the royalty-giving patent license is to not distribute the program at all. If IPR served as a way to make private information as private as possible, GPL licenses and the like served as a way to keep public information as public as possible.

Perhaps, the most important factor that makes information in open sourcing a common is the community itself. This movement would not last for almost three decades without the support of a community. The members of the community downloads the program, modifies the source codes, redistributes derived programs, report bugs and crashes and even help people in trouble through online forums. The community would also be the one to check if any of the license’s provision is violated. Every guidelines set by the Open Source Initiative is maintained by this community. As Stephen Gudeman says in his article Sketches, Qualms, and Other Thoughts on Intellectual Property Rights, “Loss of the commons means dissolution of the human community”(Gudeman, 1996). Thus the common was never the information alone, the commons are the community and the flow of information from one member to another through constant interactions. An open source community, unlike the proprietary cyberlords, is all about producing the best software. It is all about helping people who are having a trouble in his software because of one’s willingness to help them and not because it is part of a deal that the customer made with him when he bought that computer-care plan. Open Source community is not profit-oriented. The software from the developers are not a means to get more profit but an end-- an end which is a better and more stable program.

Because of the orientation of the communities as a non-profit one, open sourced software (OSS) are now being used to many third-world countries. OSS provides a cheaper alternative for these countries who may find it hard to invest their money on expensive proprietary software. OSS is not only cheaper but can be actually on par or even better than those costly softwares. In the University of the Philippines alone, most of the University’s computers are on a Linux platform. Linux is an operating system that is easy on the pocket and safe from those nasty Windows viruses. Because the source codes of these softwares are available for the public, localization is also possible. Localization, from the word itself, is the modification of the softwares in order to suit the needs of a local community, a village for example. Localization is important especially on countries who doesn’t understand English or any of those supported language provided on a proprietary software. Another use of localization is on disaster management, since environmental conditions vary from place to place, modifications are imperative to suit the environmental situation of a locality.

Certainly, open sourced softwares are eating up some market share from their proprietary counterparts. Even though proprietary softwares are still the predominantly used software in the industry, open source has been gaining a lot more “converts” and the community is getting bigger. But it is not only softwares that are proprietary. These cyberlords are claiming everything-- books, music, art, genetic information almost everything that could be considered a data is being applied for intellectual property rights. A good thing with Open Sourcing is that it is not exclusively for softwares. A good example of an open sourced book community is the O’Reilly Community Press. Open Sourced Music are also available on websites such as OpenSourceMusic.com. It’s interesting that almost everything these cyberlords “own” has its open sourced counterpart. People have been resisting these capitalistic moves of the cyberlords. Piracy is one form of this resistace, but open sourcing is providing a new take in this resistance. Instead of directly violating a law in the form of the intellectual property rights, open sourcing promotes the development of an altruistic community where there is a sharing between the members. Open source is offering a shift in the paradigm, once again back to the time when knowledge is free. Open sourced Lady Gaga anyone?

References

Feller, Joseph, Fitzgerald, Brian, Hissam, Scott A., and Lakhani, Karim R., ed. 2005. Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Gudeman, Stephen. 1996. “Sketches, qualms and Other Thoughts on Intellectual Property Rights.” Valuing Local Knowledge: Indigenous People and Intellectual Property Rights. Ed. John Naughton and Anthony Rudolf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hoe, Nah Soo. 2006. “Overview: Why FOSS, for What and the Challenges Ahead” Breaking barriers : the potential of free and open source software for sustainable human development : a compilation of case studies from across the world. Bangkok : UNDP Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme.

Illich, Ivan. “Silence as a Common.” Ivan Illich: writing on the web. http://www.preservenet.com /theory/Illich/Silence.html

Open Source Initiative. http://opensource.org/.

Verzola, Roberto. 2004. “Cyberlords: Renteir Class of the Information Sector” Towards a Political Economy of Information Economy: Studies on Information Economies. Pub. Foundation for National Studies, Inc.

Wu, Ming-Wei and Li, Ying Dar. 2001. Open source software development: an overview. Computer : innovative technology for computer professionals 34 , 6: 33-38.



Notes: This is actually my final paper for English 10, I really don't know my grade for this paper but I'm kinda proud of it. Any thoughts?