Ecopyleft

Description

According to Patrick Godeau, the creator of the IANG License:

“By ecopyleft, I mean the extension of copyleft to the economy of a free work.

While copyleft freedoms (to analyze, to modify, to distribute) apply to an intellectual work, we can define similar freedoms applying to the economic entity that commercializes the work:

- The freedom to access all accounting informations, so you can study how the money is spent.

- The freedom to participate in all economic decisions, so you can choose how the money is spent.

- The freedom to resell the work in another economic entity.

Ecopyleft guarantees that all who acquire the reselled work have the same freedoms, and that no middleman captures these freedoms for his own exclusive profit.”

Discussion

- Users vs contributors

We asked Patrick the following question:

> If you care to re-explain, for my benefit and that of our readers, how you see the exact relation between contributors and users. I have always thought that proposals for economic arrangements, where everything is completely owned by users, are unaceptable, and that we need schemes that give associated power to both users and producers. What is your thought on this?

Patrick Godeau responds:

“What I think is based on the principle that those who contribute are those who decide. Contributors are of two kinds, creative contributors and economic contributors. Incidentally, both users and producers can belong to both kinds of contributors, so this isn’t a relevant qualifier.

- Creative contributors bring modifications to the intellectual work, and therefore decide development orientations, combination of different creative contributions into the work, etc.

- Economic contributors bring either money or workforce to the economic project, and therefore take economic decisions about investment priorities, distribution of profits, etc.

These contributors include workers, investors, and customers, the latter being presumably the most numerous, thus driving the project towards the greatest social utility. But while being a majority, consumers must share control with workers.

Each project is of course democratically managed (1 person = 1 vote). In principle, the creative project and economic project are independent in respect to each other, so for example creative contributors can’t be subjected to an authority relationship based on wages."