Common Property: A license for the gift economy

The Internet has changed the way we treat property. The old copyright was often criticized and due to file-sharing systems de facto not enforceable. That's why new licenses like the Creative-Commons licenses appeared.
When you create a work (e.g. a text, a video, a soundfile,...), you can license it under a CC-licence and others can also use the work. With the license you can define the kind of usage you want to grant.

Let's look at examples:



The CC by-nc license lets other people remix your work, copy it, display it, print it, give it away for free, and build own works based on this one. Everyone can do so, if they tell your name as source (by) and as long as they use it for non-commercial purposes only (nc).
This is a very effective way to distribute your work, without loosing your rights.



Another example is our project www.skriptenforum.net.
We built an online based community to exchange lecture notes. Students can upload their notes or write them online, and other students can download and use them for themselfs. The license we have chosen is the CC by-sa license, which means that you have to name the source and have to publish the derived work under the same license (sa).
This way we have created one of the biggest open educational resources-pool in Austria and many students have benefited from the work of their colleagues.

The gift economy and Creative-Commons:
Many people speak in this context about the gift economy. In a gift economy you give something away without explicitly wanting anything back. There is often the will to give, because you know that society will profit as a whole.

When I heard about the gift economy I immediately thought: Why not combine the license idea of Creative-Commons with a real world economy? Because the problem is the following: CC-licenses are always for content. So when I buy an item like a book and put an CC-license on it, people would think the content was licensed. So the question was: Is there such a license for items? I tweeted about it without response. I looked on the internet for such a license, without success.

That is why I had the idea to create one on my own, introducing:

Common Property - a license for the gift economy

Draft for a common property licence

Attention!
This is only a draft of the license, an idea! The juridical background is not set! Use it at your own risk!

Idea:
The idea is the following: When owning an item, I can do whatever I want with it. I could even destroy it. But I can also give it away for free. I could stick the license on the item. The idea of my license is, that the next owner can either use my item, or he can also give it away for free. But he can not sell it! The item is taken out of the traditional economy and put into gift-economy circulation.

As I wrote, the juridical question stays. One simple way to handle it would be the following:
You stay the owner of the product or the item, but you grant the permission to give it away for free. So the next user can use it, but when he wants to sell it, he is not allowed because he is not the owner. Of course, like with CC, this would be difficult to enforce, but possible.

Developing and using the Common-Property license could be the next stept to a gift economy and could give it a new boost, not only on the internet, but also in real-world!

Kommentare

  1. Dieser Kommentar wurde vom Autor entfernt.

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  2. Seh nicht ganz den Sinn des CP, wenn ich z.B. ein Buch schenke, im Sinne der gift economy, dann darf es mir egal sein, was nachher mit dem Buch passiert. Wenn es der Empfänger verkaufen möchte, um z.B. das Geld an Bedürftige zu spenden, oder dafür etwas Anderes zu erwerben, dann ist das in Ordnung, auch aus Sicht der gift economy. Freies Geben bedeutet wirklich vom Geschenk loslassen.

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  3. Danke Hans, für deinen Kommentar!

    Ich gebe dir Recht, dass pures Schenken auch loslassen bedeutet.
    Die Lizenz stellt jedoch eine Möglichkeit dar, der Geschenkökonomie in einem weiteren Sinn einen Anstoß zu geben.

    Ich spreche hier ja auch von einer Ökonomie, also von einer Wirtschaftsform, die auf dem Schenken aufbaut und nicht von einzelnen Schenkakten. Bei diesen gebe ich dir Recht bezüglich des Loslassens.
    Die CP-Lizenz soll jedoch einen Gegenstand der derzeitigen vorherrschenden Geldgierökonomie entziehen und einem tauschökonomischen Wirtschaftskreislauf zuführen.

    Wenn dies schon nicht rechtlich möglich ist, so würde die Lizenz den Geschenkten eventuell zum Nachdenken anregen, ob er den Gegenstand wirklich weiterverkaufen muss oder ob es nicht sinnvoller wäre, ihn weiterzuschenken...
    Um das System zu verändern, müssen wir und unser Denken uns verändern!
    lg

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  4. Hello and good day,
    Allow me to present a $80 million business idea that will be of great benefit to both of us. Please e-mail info.johnmanebiz@gmail.com,
    for more information.
    Regards,
    John Mane
    Alexandria Minerals Corporation

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