Two property regimes for software development may be distinguished. Within corporations, on the one hand, a Private Regime obtains which excludes all outsiders from access to a firm's software assets. It is shown how the protective instruments of secrecy and both copyright and patent have been strengthened considerably during the last two decades. On the other, a Public Regime among hackers may be distinguished, initiated by individuals, organizations or firms, in which source code is freely exchanged. It is argued that (...) copyright is put to novel use here: claiming their rights, authors write `open source licenses' that allow public usage of the code, while at the same time regulating the inclusion of users. A `regulated commons' is created. The analysis focuses successively on the most important open source licenses to emerge, the problem of possible incompatibility between them (especially as far as the dominant General Public License is concerned), and the fragmentation into several user communities that may result. (shrink)

Le Foss ou logiciel libre, est un mouvement de fond qui valorise le partage de l'effort collectif dans la production logicielle et lutte ainsi contre l'appropriation intellectuelle de toute création humaine que les grandes industries de l'information cherchent à imposer. Le gouvernement brésilien a choisit de favoriser le Foss dans toute la société brésilienne.The Foss , or free software, is a fundamental movement that promotes the sharing of effort in software production and fight against and intellectual ownership of any human (...) creation that major information industries seek to impose. The Brazilian government has chosen to promote the Foss throughout Brazilian society. (shrink)

Like the ownership of physical property, the issues computer software ownership raises can be understood as concerns over how various rights and duties over software are shared between owners and users. The powers of software owners are defined in software licenses, the legal agreements defining what users can and cannot do with a particular program. To help clarify how these licenses permit and restrict users’ actions, here I present a conceptual framework of software rights and duties that is inspired by (...) the terms of various proprietary, open source, and free software licenses. To clarify the relationships defined by these rights and duties, this framework distinguishes between software creators (the original developer), custodians (those who can control its use), and users (those who utilise the software). I define the various rights and duties that can be shared between these parties and how these rights and duties relate to each other. I conclude with a brief example of how this framework can be used by defining the concepts of free software and copyleft in terms of rights and duties. (shrink)

This discussion takes up the politics of gestational labour and uterine productivity in connection with genetic self-reproduction and the family in the oeuvre of Paul B. Preciado. In his autotheoretical treatise Testo Junkie, Preciado dispensed with the standard Marxist-feminist term ‘sexual division of labour’, positing instead a ‘technogestational division of labour’ to describe the mechanism by which capitalism segments people’s bodies and constructs the capacity to make babies. Taking up that coinage, with enthusiasm for the political horizon it illuminates, I (...) nevertheless read Preciado against Preciado. I identify moments (including in An Apartment on Uranus) of oscillation away from the earlier work’s posit of always already non-sovereign ‘politically assisted procreation’; moments which break faith with the ‘copyleft’ spirit of collective gestational anti-authorship insofar as they call for trans and queer individuals’ equal access to ‘genetic speech’ and for our reappropriation of parental property rights qua ‘confiscated patrimony’. (shrink)

Software is much more than sequences of instructions for a computing machine: it can be an enabler (or disabler) of political imperatives and policies. Hence, it is subject to the same assessment in a normative dimension as other political and social phenomena. The core distinction between free software and its proprietary counterpart is that free software makes available to its user the knowledge and innovation contributed by the creator(s) of the software, in the form of the created source code. From (...) an ethical perspective, one of the most pressing questions raised by this form of collaboration is the question of the rights, and the restrictions on them, that are passed on to users and collaborators by the creators of programs. That is, what freedoms do software users deserve, and how can they best be protected? In this study we analyze free software licensing schemes in order to determine which most effectively protects such freedoms. We conclude that so-called copyleft licensing schemes are the morally superior alternative. (shrink)

The fact that sociology was born during the period of the Industrial Revolution does not authorize us to consider its discourse as lacking in philosophical elements that are rooted in a previous age. Neither can we consider as fully accomplished its role for modernity, nonetheless today, in an after-modern climate (in the sense of Donati 2009), sociology is trying to escape the prejudice of modern ethics to go beyond the clichés of postmodernity (Ardigò 1989). Filled with self-reflexivity and reductionist dichotomies, (...) the twenty-first-century sociologist feels the need to ?own factual reality again? and to rediscover ?a new metaphysics of the social world? (Donati 1993). If self-consciousness is in the world, sociology, perhaps, has to go beyond science and turn into ?globology? (Arnason 1990), or into a sociology on a global scale, which looks at how world unification has occurred. In order to accomplish this, it has to be careful about what it was able to do best in the past: ?to foresee and to enhance sustainable change,? to be aware of the ?relational connections,? which no mathematics will ever be able to show, to build new ?memes,? and to decide to accelerate or to go against the phenomena it encounters in its observation. Society in the twenty-first century will go beyond postmodern stagnation and turn into something new (After-modernity? Hyper-modernity? Trans-modernity?) if it is to be helped by the interpretations of sociology. Notwithstanding the endeavors to change, most Westernized countries are trapped in the lib-lab model, while China argues for a complete reconfiguration of the concepts of public and private, states and market, freedom and controls, copyright and copyleft. What is going to happen in the future? Are we going to fall into a technocratic and authoritarian form of neo-modernization? Are we going to rediscover the system of exchanging gifts? Are we going to create a fully ?relational? society, going beyond the Hegelian categories of right and left? It will be the role of a ?strong and relational? sociology to identify all the ?viable? scenarios and to prepare its advent in symbolic terms. (shrink)

Ce texte traite de piratage en ligne à travers la pratique du peer-to-peer au Québec, c’est-à-dire une forme d’échange non autorisé de produits culturels sur Internet (pratique appelée « piratage culturel »). Une approche strictement juridique de la pratique y voit un simple détournement de copyright, tandis que d’autres approches (mouvement Copyleft, Parti pirate, etc.) postulent qu’un gain social est généré par une telle circulation de l’information à grande échelle. Peu de recherches empiriques ont documenté toutefois les contenus circulant (...) réellement dans ces réseaux de piratage culturel. Une première étude canadienne utilisant l’observation directe amène donc un éclairage nouveau. L’étude montre que le peer-to-peer est régulièrement utilisé au Québec pour transmettre des œuvres du patrimoine national (musique, films, livres, émissions de télévision, etc.), dont plusieurs sont non disponibles autrement. Cela suggère que le piratage culturel ne se limite pas à l’acquisition gratuite ou au « vol » de produits culturels (plusieurs produits n’existent pas en magasin), ni ne dessert en soi la diversité culturelle (des produits québécois y sont largement échangés). La réflexion éthique sur le phénomène se situe dès lors sur deux plans : au plan individuel (avec l’ethos des « pirates ») et au plan collectif (avec le rôle du piratage culturel dans la circulation du patrimoine québécois). Enfin, la pratique pourrait contribuer à la constitution et à la circulation d’archives nationales accessibles sur Internet, dans le contexte d’une migration généralisée des produits culturels du format physique au format numérique. (shrink)

The basic risk for culture in conditions of globalization consists in full submission of its existence to economic (market) rules. The masscult deprived a variety - a product of such submission. But a source of creative development was and there is a cultural variety. Domination of a masscult leads to decrease in creative potential of the person and a society. Becoming of metaculture as culture of gift of a modern society represents alternative as to principles of a masscult, and ideas (...) of multiculturalism and tolerance. The principle of tolerance is a recognition of powerlessness to involve cultures in productive dialogue, de-facto it is recognition of the established cultural barriers. The culture of gift (metaculture) is based on following principles: 1) reflexivity, 2) ethicness, 3) positive role ofOtherness, 4) the sacrifice of an autonomy to (accept of gift), 5) new cultural-historical type of rationality is focused not on things, but on events, 6) more easy approach to products of cultural creativity and in this direction - alternative to deadlocks of protection to intellectual property (copyright). Development of metaculture corresponds to principles of a symbolical exchange and «copyleft». (shrink)

During the two last decades, speeded up by the development of the Internet, several types of commons have been opened up for intellectual resources. In this article their variety is being explored as to the kind of resources and the type of regulation involved. The open source software movement initiated the phenomenon, by creating a copyright-based commons of source code that can be labelled `dynamic': allowing both use and modification of resources. Additionally, such a commons may be either protected from (...) appropriation (by `copyleft' licensing), or unprotected. Around the year 2000, this approach was generalized by the Creative Commons initiative. In the process they added a `static' commons, in which only use of resources is allowed. This mould was applied to the sciences and the humanities in particular, and various Open Access initiatives unfolded. A final aspect of copyright-based commons is the distinction between active and passive commons: while the latter is only a site for obtaining resources, the former is also a site for production of new resources by communities of volunteers (`peer production'). Finally, several patent commons are discussed, which mainly aim at preventing patents blocking the further development of science. Throughout, attention is drawn to interrelationships between the various commons. (shrink)

In this paper I analyse the ethical implications of the two main competing methodologies in genomic research. I do not aim to provide another contribution from the mainstream legal and public policy perspective; rather I offer a novel approach in which I analyse and describe the patent-and-publish regime (the proprietary regime) led by biologist J. Craig Venter and the 'open-source' methodologies led by biotechnology Nobel laureate John Sulston. The 'open-source methodologies' arose in biotechnology as an alternative to the patent-and-publish regime (...) in the wake of the explosion in computer technology. Indeed, the tremendous increase in computer technology has generated a corresponding increase in the pace of genomics research. I conclude this paper by arguing that while the patent-and-publish method is a transactional method based on the exchange of extrinsic goods (patents in exchange for research funds), the free and open-source methodology (FLOSS) 1 is a transformational method based on a visionary ideal of science, which leads to prioritizing intrinsic goods in scientific research over extrinsic goods. (shrink)