# Licenses, IP, & Digital Ownership (Discussion Session)

(Introductions in the [framapad for the day](https://annuel2.framapad.org/p/ttw-bookdash-nov2023-day4))

Licenses For Software, Data, Hardware, Music, Visual Art, AI/ML models are complicated.

Let's step back and ask why and how we think we think we can license things in the first place

# Back to Basics

- **All digital artefacts, can be thought of as numbers** (Code, data, video, photos)
- Let's play taboo with 'intelectual property' (copyright, patent, trademark, design rights), and replace it is with 'owning numbers'
- What does it mean therefore to hand out the deeds to a number?
- What would happen if I could claim the rights to the number 3 and start charging people rents to use it, and developing the means to detect unlicensed instances of the number 3 on you computer or even in your head?
- Numbers are public goods, they are non-rivalrous and non-excludable
- *non-rivalrous*: Their use by one person does not diminish their utility to others - i.e. they don't get used up
- *non-excludable* - The distribution of a digital artefact entails giving you a copy of that artefact, you must download digital media to view it even is temporarily and in fragments, you must download software to run it even if only a binary blob. *attempts to make them excludable have undesirable consequences for digital liberties*
- Finding useful and interesting numbers however requires labour
- Which numbers are useful changes over time
- Compute is a comodity, it is rivalrous (a server can only support so many users) & excludable (Authentification & Authorisation)

- Ownership of a number is a legal fiction, a limited grant of monopoly by a government
- Why have the legal fiction of ownership of numbers?
- Incentivisation of innovation & Creation
- **Do the current legal fictions serve this purpose well?**
- **What might be better ones?**

- Technical enforcement measures for the ownership of numbers
- What would it look like to be able to near-perfectly enforce the ownership of numbers?
- 'on-device scanning' end-to-end encryption circumvention 'content id' systems, digital rights/restrictions management (DRM), anti-cheat rootkits, & emerging AI regulations
- see UK 'Online Saftey'/s bill & EU 'Chat control' leglation/proposals
- Do you really 'own' a device that will report you to the authorities for posession of an illegal number?

- Numbers as Speech, Expression, & Cognition
- As computing devices become more ubiquitous we offload more of out cognition to them, and the bounds between computations we perform in our heads and externally get blurier, thus the need to trust our computational devices to be in alignment with us increases.

- Power relations created by the ownership of numbers
- Copy-left as a ulysses pact
- By adopting a license of this type you pre-commit to not abusing the users of your software as they are free to find another steward of the project's development if you try
- Free-rider problem
- lock-in & the cohersive nature of proprietary systems
- software freedom in furthernace of consensual relationships between developers and users of software
- Perverse incentives of proprietary Saas systems, enshitification

# Activities

Things to do whilst participating in the discussion

Input on this PR https://github.com/the-turing-way/the-turing-way/pull/3142 (see: https://deploy-preview-3142--the-turing-way.netlify.app/reproducible-research/licensing) would be most welcome
Currently pondering how to edit the software licensing sub-chapter as so much of it is covered in the opening chapter in licensing.

## Free Space, Share your thoughts in bullet point form

-

## Concepts

Expand the mind map with additional concepts in IP & digital ownership.

[Mermaid mindmap syntax](https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/mindmap.html)

mindmap
    root((Intellectual Property))
        Definitions
            
        Motivation
            Incetivise Innovation
            Incetivise Creative Works
        Types
            ((Copyright))
                (Copyrightable Things)
                    Visual Art
                    Music
                    Software
                    Data
                Exemptions
                    'Fair Use' / 'Fair Dealing'
                        
                Enforcement
                    Administrable Vs. Fact intensive measures
            Patent
            Trademark
            Design Rights

## A history of 'Intellectual Property'

Fill in the Gaps with more important landmarks

[Mermaid timeline syntax](https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/timeline.html)

timeline
    1331 : First 'letters patent' issued to to John Kempe & Co. in England
    1958 : Lisbon Agreement
    1976 : US Copyright Act Supersedes previous 1909 act
    1998 : Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
    2015 : Lisbon Agreement revised in the Geneva Act

## Sources & Reading Materials

- [What if we could reimagine copyright? Edited by Rebecca Giblin & Kimberlee Wetherall](https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1q1crjg) [[PDF](https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/n2190/pdf/book.pdf)]
- [Open Source Law, Policy and Practice (2nd edn) Edited by Amanda Brock](https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198862345.001.0001)
- [Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labour Markets, and How We'll Win Them Back by Cory Doctorow & Rebecca Giblin](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL27032796W/Chokepoint_Capitalism)
- [Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation by Cory Doctorow](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL28800590W/The_Internet_Con)
- <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/q118B_QdP2k?si=-ph7dQZ0dmWyuKD6" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
- >"IP is any rule or law that lets me reach outside the four corners of my business and exhert control over the conduct of my competitors, my customers, & my critics"
> \- Cory Doctorow 2023
- [How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL21164193W/How_Innovation_Works)
- [Governing The Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action by Elinor Ostrom](https://archive.org/details/ElinorOstromGoverningTheCommons/page/n1/mode/2up)
- It may not be immediately obvious why but: [Reflections on Trusting Trust - Ken Thompson](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf)
- [Cypherpunks: freedom and the future of the internet by Julian Assange](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20037452W/Cypherpunks)
- [Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16798062W/Coding_Freedom)

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# Starting random thoughts

- Personally I'm leaning towards more foundational discussions around the philosophy of ownership of intangible goods - legal, moral and ethical implications of 'intellectual property' and are current conceptions of it fit for purpose? The more discussions I get into about licensing the more I think that we have some really basic confusions about what we are trying to achieve with licensing and what the implications of some of these choices are. Given the renewed interest in this area arising from AI/ML models not quite fitting into the previous boxes now is a good time to think about this more deeply. Given that we are considering potentially risky additions/extensions to the current status quo when a re-design is necessary/highly desirable instead. This is not however immediately applicable and is straying more into political than technical questions.
- More narrowly constrained conversations topic options:
- Use restrictions on software and AI/ML systems, RAIL and ethical source. What are they, are they a good idea, and how might they be enforced, technically and legally and what are the ramifications of this - Mike Nolan or someone else with a connection to the organisation for ethical source would be good to have for this.
- Open source hardware - Pen and his co-authors on their new book would be much better qualified to talk about this than me, I don't really know enough about it
- A More introductory angle, what is a license why do you need one and how should go about choosing one that is right for you?
- Foundational / philosophical topics of conversation:
- Analogy to stimulate reflection: 'owning' a digital artefact is equivalent to the government saying you own this number and if anyone else has or distributes a copy of it the have stolen your property
- Economics of digital ownership - addressing the incentives problem for digital goods creation
- unlike conventional physical goods digital goods meet the criteria for being considered public goods, they are:
- non-rivalrous: Their use my one person does not diminish their utility to others - i.e. they don't get used up
- non-excludable - The distribution of a digital artefact entails giving you a copy of that artefact, you must download digital media to view it even is temporarily and in fragments, you must download software to run it even if only a binary blob. *attempts to make them excludable have undesirable consequences for digital liberties - i.e. DRM making the user of a computer no longer it's owner but a renter with less access to their computer that it's manufacturers and other 3rd parties.
- hosting is both rivalrous and excludabe so can be treated as a regular commodity ( as long as it remains interoperable - some issues around portability of low level compute tasks e.g. Nvidia's CUDA)
- In the software context Open-source development & maintainership could be modelled as a common-core resource (Elinor Ostrom). As whilst the end product of development has the properties of a public good it's development does not, development and maintainership are labour which should be rewarded. Using this finite labour pool for one thing rather than another has opportunity costs.
- The ostensible purpose of 'intellectual property' is to encourage innovation by the provision of incentives to creators of digital goods
- Failures of the current system to do this, ('choke-point capitalism') ever lengthening copyright terms, rent extraction, monopsony
- See also the book 'What If We Could Reimagine Copyright?'
- Civil society implications of technical enforcement measures for digital ownership
- 'on-device scanning' end-to-end encryption circumvention 'content id' systems, digital rights/restrictions management, anti-cheat systems and the like, emerging AI regulations.
- Relationship between 'freedom of compute' to other forms of free expression & cognition. As we offload more cognitive tasks to external computational devices the ability to have to devices serve our and our chosen associates interests and not the interests of 3rd parties increases. In the limit condition freedom of compute may equate to freedom of thought.
- generalisability of these technologies - technical measures to restrict distribution of any digital object enable the restriction of any digital object. A perfect technical enforcement mechanism for censoring any material is capable of censoring all material. building such an apparatus could therefore be considered of necessity totalitarian, and thus extremely risky and requiring a standard of governance which is as yet unattainable
- lack of public sector technical capacity and expertise to appropriately consider these challenges.
- Power relations in closed/propritary systems vs free/open ones
- lock-in & the cohersive nature of proprietary systems
- software freedom in furthernace of consensual relationships between developers and users of software
- perverse incentives of Saas, enshitification
- copy-left as a ulysses pact
- What do you think people would prefer / would be most suitable?

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