Own Nothing, Have Everything

- original Napster slogan

For social change, "ownership design is the most foundational".

- David Korten [1]

"Peer production, peer governance, peer property",

Excerpt of Article by Michel Bauwens - link : http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=87

Introduction

"Peer to peer social processes are bottom-up processes whereby agents in a distributed network can freely engage in common pursuits, without external coercion. It is important to realize that distributed systems differ from decentralized systems, essentially because in the latter, the hubs are obligatory, while in the former, they are the result of voluntary choices. Distributed networks do have constraints, internal coercion, that are the conditions for the group to operate, and they may be embedded in the technical infrastructure, the social norms, or legal rules.

P2P social processes more precisely engender:

1) Peer Production: wherever a group of peers decided to engage in the production of a common resource [2]

2) Peer Governance: the means they choose to govern themselves while they engage in such pursuit [3]]

3) Peer Property: the institutional and legal framework they choose to guard against the private appropriation of this common work; this usually takes the form of non-exclusionary forms of universal common property"

See also: Common ; Commons ; Commons - Typology

Typology

= a clear distinction is to be made between resources owned in common (common property) and resources for which no property rights have been defined (open access).

G.G. Stevenson compares these three forms in terms of group limitation and extraction limitation. [4]

Typology of Commons Regulation

things	Access	Regulation
Res nullius	all	non-regulated
Res privatae	owner	market-regulated
Res publicae	public	state-regulated
Res communes	community	peer-regulated

Source: The Commons: Year One of the Global Commons Movement by Silke Helfrich (29. Januar 2011)

The 3 Property Institutions:

Open Access Property:

- Limited: members only, unlimited extraction - Unlimited: open to anyone, unlimited extraction

Common Property: members only, extraction limited by rules

Private Property: one, extraction limited by individual decision

Stefan Meretz has produced, with his daughter, a very useful and clear taxonomy of common goods, according to five criteria. Pauline Schwarze and Franco Iacomella provided translation support, from the original German to English.

Graphic at http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/wp-content/uploads/taxonomy-of-goods.png

See the graphic from Wolfgang Hoechsele: Choosing the Right Form of Common Property‎

Typology of Generative Ownership Forms

Marjorie Kelly on THE FAMILY OF GENERATIVE OWNERSHIP DESIGN:

Commons and government ownership:

Assets like the ocean, a forest, land, a park, or a municipal power plant are held or governed indivisibly by a community. This category includes, but is not limited to, government ownership.

Stakeholder ownership:

Ownership by people with a human stake in a private enterprise – including cooperatives, partnerships, credit unions, mutual insurance companies, employee-owned firms, and family-owned companies – where the central purpose is a life-serving one.

Nonprofit and social enterprise ownership:

Organizations with a primary social or environmental mission, which rely either on charity (nonprofits) or use business methods (social enterprise). This category, which includes hospitals, universities and non-governmental organizations, embraces nonprofits, subsidiaries of nonprofits, and certain private businesses.

Mission-controlled corporations:

Corporations with a strong social purpose that are owned in conventional ways (often with publicly traded shares), yet keep governing control in mission-oriented hands. These can include family-controlled firms, and the large foundation-controlled companies common across northern Europe." (http://www.gtinitiative.org/documents/IssuePerspectives/GTI-Perspectives-Architecture_of_Enterprise.pdf)

Introductory Articles

Copyright Monopoly Stands in Direct Opposition to Property Rights. By Rick Falkvinge.
Matt Cropp: P2P-Driven Decline in Transaction Costs and the Coming Micro-Ownership Revolution
An Ideological History of the Urge to Own. An excerpt from chapter four of Charles Eisenstein's book on Sacred Economics.
Introduction to Private and Common Property: Achim Lerch, The Tragedy of the Tragedy of the Commons. [5]
Martin Pedersen: 1) Property as a Social Relation‎ ; Free Software as Property
In a special issue of the Cornell Law Review, Vol. 94:743, four noted professors of property law wrote a brief series of propositions they identified as “A Statement of Progressive Property. [6]

Key Resources

Key Articles

The Role of the Commons and Common Property in an Economy of Abundance. Wolfgang Hoeschele. [8]

Carol M. Rose, 1) The Several Futures of Property: Of Cyberspace and Folk Tales, Emission Trades and Ecosystems, 83 MINN. L. REV. 129 (1998) ; 2) PROPERTY AND PERSUASION: ESSAYS ON THE HISTORY,

THEORY, AND RHETORIC OF OWNERSHIP (1994);

Key Books

Pat Conaty and Mike Lewis, the Resilience Imperative.

Chapter 11 focused directly upon your question about Ownership transfer mechanisms and what these look like including the roots of the idea in the 1820s with the insights of Thomas Spence the ingenious proponent of working land trusts (see chapter 4), the brilliant French Swiss political economist, Sismondi and working up from there through the Chartists, Ruskin, other co-operative commonwealth visionaries and practitioners through to Gandhi's trusteeship concepts, CLTs, Democratic ESOPs, the Co-operative Land Bank etc ... "

Majorie Kelly. Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution. Journeys to a Generative Economy. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2012 [9]

Ulrich Duchrow. Property for People, Not for Profit. ZED Books, 2004: history of extractive property, and its alternatives.

The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy. Berrett-Koehler, 2001. [10]. Key thesis: the corporation is a feudal structure ; one of those mind-opening books that deserves to be read by a large audience

Property Outlaws: How Squatters, Pirates and Protesters Improve the Law of Ownership. By Sonia Katyal and Eduardo Penalver. Yale University Press, 2010

"On Immaterial Property"

Common Cause. Information Between Commons and Property. Philippe Aigrain. [11] Unpubished, select version of: Cause Commune.
Code. Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Commons: Rishab Aiyer Ghosh (Ed). MIT Press, 2005.: essays on 'immaterial' property

Key Property Modalities

Fair Shares: this model of cooperative property makes a lot of sense

Short Citations

1.

The difference between open access and defined property rights (private or common property), by contrast, is the difference between an unregulated and a regulated condition. The difference is fundamental.

- Achim Lerch [12]

2.

For Stevenson, a “private property, common property, open access trichotomy” ultimately exists. He compares these three forms in terms of group limitation and extraction limitation. Characteristic of the common property form is that both the group and the extent of resource use are limited by the individual members.

- [13]

Source: STEVENSON, G.G: Common Property Economics. A General Theory and Land Use Applications. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.1991, p.58

Long Citations

"The commons breaks with the individualistic vision as conceived by the capitalist tradition, a vision that has progressively transferred the idea of rights to individual people. The commons take inclusion and everyone’s equal right to access as its starting point, while property and the idea of the state that upholds it is based on a rivalry of goods, and thus on exclusion and concentration of power in institutions that insure and protect it. The commons try to situate themselves outside the subject-object reductionism that would lead to their commodification. The commons cannot be commodified (because they cannot be transferred, or alienated), and they cannot be the object of individualised possession. And so they express a qualitative logic, not a quantitative one. We do not ‘have’ a common good, we ‘form part of’ the common good, in that we form part of an ecosystem, of a system of relations in an urban or rural environment; the subject is part of the object. Common goods are inseparably united, and they unite people as well as communities and the ecosystem itself."

- Joan Subirats [14]

"Imagine a world where property is owned because it is being well stewarded rather than ownership being a priori to stewardship. Much of the worst behavior we see in the economy would be impossible, because the second any firm stopped stewarding their properties for the benefit of the larger community, they would no longer own their properties (intellectual or otherwise). In this world ownership is derived from good stewardship, rather than the other way around."

- Alan Rosenblith [15]

"Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning. … labor [will] become not only a means of life but life's prime want

- Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme [16]

At the center of the digital revolution, with the executable bitstreams that make everything else possible, propertarian regimes not only do not make things better, they can make things radically worse. Property concepts, whatever else may be wrong with them, do not enable and have in fact retarded progress. In the network society, anarchism (or more properly, anti-possessive individualism) is a viable political philosophy … because defection is impossible, free riders are welcome, which resolves one of the central puzzles of collective action in a propertarian social system.

- Eben Moglen, in his essay Anarchism Triumphant [17]

"In Roman law, property, or dominium, is a relation between a person and a thing, characterized by absolute power of that person over that thing....Human beings can have relations with one another. But what would it mean to have a 'relation' with a thing?....[But,] Imagine a man trapped on a desert island. He might develop extremely personal relationships with, say, the palm trees....and, if he's there too long, he might well end up giving them all names and spending half his time having imaginary conversations with them. Still, does he 'own' them? ....Clearly, then, property is not really a relation between a person and a thing. It's an understanding or arrangement between people concerning things."

~ David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years [18]

"As long as we focus on types of ownership, we seem to be leaving out all who are not owners. That is one reason I argue for a civic based economy rather than a property-based economy.

I am certainly for employee ownership and worker co-ops. One needs to remember, however, that property and ownership are legal concepts, or civic concepts. In "Civilizing the Economy]] I tried to develop a civic view of ownership and of property.

The civic is about membership and the rights of members to control their lives, rather than have their lives control by owners. Ownership, in my view, should rest on a civic foundation."

- Marvin Brown (email, August 2013)

Subcategories

This category has the following 2 subcategories, out of 2 total.

L

Licensing‎ (238 P)

S

Standards‎ (1,229 P)

Pages in category "Peerproperty"

The following 200 pages are in this category, out of 799 total.

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4P Model of Ownership and Governance

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