I met Philippe quite a few times in the 00s, when we both worked on
issues of copyright and the digital commons. We became friends easily. A
man of profound humanity and intellect, curious and generous. He was in
it for the long-term. Now cut short. How very sad. Felix
On 27.07.21 15:49, J.C. DE MARTIN wrote:
I leave briefly lurkedom to mourn a dear friend,
a great person, a wonderful intellectual and an effective activist.
This is our center's obituary (in Italian):
https://nexa.polito.it/philippe-aigrain-ricordo
This is La Quadrature's in memoriam:
https://www.laquadrature.net/2021/07/15/in-memoriam-philippe-aigrain-1949-2021/
juan carlos
juan carlos de martin
nexa center for internet & society
polytechnic of turin
On 27/07/21 15:30, patrice riemens wrote:
Philippe Aigrain, the French world known champion of the digital
commons died two weeks ago in a mountain accident. He was 71:
https://www.liberation.fr/societe/philippe-aigrain-le-sens-du-commun-20210712_WSLMCXM33BFAVFHZVGUTAT6LAE/
(not paywalled, for once, and afaik)
I learn about his death from Geert Lovink who send me this article
from Le Monde Diplo:
Original to:
https://mondediplo.com/2005/11/13commons
The internet and common goods
Own or share?
by Philippe Aigrain
Enforcing intellectual property law in the digital age means fighting
ever more effective and powerful new modes of creation made possible
in part by collaborative development through the internet.
Is there any limit to property? Current developments might suggest
not, as property rights are steadily extended. Property rights, in the
form of patents, copyright and, to a lesser extent, brands, apply to
ever wider fields and are protected by ever stronger laws, police
powers and technological tools. Resistance to the patenting of
medicines, software, plant varieties and cell strains has been active
and determined. But it is up against a concerted offensive by
multinational companies, patent offices, specialised legal
consultants, the United States government and the European Union, all
working together to reinforce and extend property rights.
New technologies are helping to make copyright law more strictly
enforceable, preventing the use of copyright material even for
legitimate ends (1). When it comes to violating intellectual property
rights, everyone is guilty until proven innocent, from users of
peer-to-peer file-sharing networks to farmers whose crops have
accidentally become mixed with genetically modified varieties for
which they do not hold licences (2).
Jean-René Fourtou, the CEO of Vivendi Universal and chairman of the
International Chamber of Commerce, addressed directors representing
pharmaceutical, media and software multinationals at the United
Nations in October 2004. He announced a global war on intellectual
property piracy, calling on business leaders to unite and form a
massive lobby working to influence governments (3). This will be a
pre-emptive war that lumps independent producers and users in with
industrial counterfeiters and organised crime, imagining a single
enemy that will be defeated via tightly and ingeniously enforced
property mechanisms.
There has been resistance to this offensive. Campaigns for access to
medicines in developing countries have had some success, as have those
against the patenting of software or living organisms. Increasingly,
patent applications for GM crops or biotechnology products are
rejected. But resistance is fragmented; campaigns only rarely succeed
in pulling together as parts of a single cause.
On the technological side, there is a strong pull away from ownership
of published works or recorded media. New forms of collaborative
innovation, whereby ideas and expertise are freely shared, are proving
more productive than traditional ways of working. Once dismissed as
the work of an eccentric fringe of naive scientists who didn’t
understand the harsh reality of economics, these cooperative
approaches are now being taken more seriously. They have the
particular advantage of orienting innovation towards the general
interest and the preservation of cultural diversity, rather than being
tied to profit incentives.
Academic research has convincingly established the superiority of what
Yochai Benkler calls “commons-based peer production” (4) in a wide
range of information technology development. In this model, every
stage in the development of a product is freely accessible to all, and
anyone who wants to use or modify it may do so as they see fit. The
product is in this sense a common good, and is often protected against
patenting by any individual or group.
The development of diametrically opposed visions vying for
pre-eminence will have profound implications for the future not only
of technology, but also of the world’s economies and social systems.
Two scenarios are proposed. One vision’s most fervent supporters are a
small group of large multinationals, represented by Fourtou’s UN
audience. Their position was summed up by Bill Gates, who dismissed
those wishing to restrict intellectual property rights as “modern-day
communists” (5). More moderately, the defence of intellectual property
is based on a conviction that it is the oil, “black gold”, of the 21st
century. Critics such as Jeremy Rifkin (6) regard that defensive
vision as a plausible nightmare which is to be avoided. And the
defensive vision has flaws that cannot be ignored. IT networks do not
lend themselves to requisitioning or to restrictions on access and
usage; such restrictions are a hindrance to their development.
A number of important projects (see Open sources, below) have shown
how powerful the alternative vision of cooperative development can be
when freed of the constraints imposed by property and contracts. But
there are difficulties: attempts to expand free cooperation models and
apply them to new areas meet internal obstacles. One problem is the
complexity and perceived impenetrability of technology, whose future
we have been too willing to abandon to specialists. Another is fear
about what reappropriation by the public might mean. Society’s
inventiveness is gradually finding ways around these problems.
The preservationists, with their artificial engineering of scarcity to
maintain monopoly prices, are encountering serious difficulties:
information capitalism is proving as fragile as it is powerful. A
serious illustration of this fragility is the total divorce between
pharmaceutical companies’ profits and share values, and their
strategies’ real effects on public health. Financial concerns lead
them to prioritise research objectives that are not those which
society needs (7). Coalitions are now emerging to challenge the
arrogance of big pharma proposing an alternative that will
re-establish the common good alongside the principle of property,
complementing the more general effort to rein in the financial
sphere’s unrestrained power over the economy and society.
Is this hoped-for coalition of the common good possible? Or is the
fight against restrictions on the circulation of information goods
(including data, software, expertise, genetic information and the
organisms that contain it) a utopian dream? The movement has had a few
successes: resistance to software patents in Europe; the emergence, at
the World Intellectual Property Organisation; and at Unesco, of
coalitions that bring diverse NGOs together with developing countries’
governments. Officially, documents such as the 2004 EU directive “on
the enforcement of intellectual property rights” (8) are intended to
fight organised crime and its links with industrial counterfeiting. In
practice, they facilitate attacks on generic medicines, freeware and
voluntary sharing of products.
Do charities and campaign groups working with impoverished countries,
plus a few lawyers and political figures, have a chance against highly
organised business lobbies defending IP with armies of lawyers and
connections at the highest level in governments and political parties?
There are reasons for optimism. Though the international legal system
seems biased towards the interests of multinational companies, it does
not know how information is exchanged and innovation achieved in
reality. Despite redoubled efforts, tighter rules and harsher
enforcement practices, stopping free information exchange is about as
easy as pushing water uphill.
The popularity of freeware is helping to establish the principles on
which it is based. Goods developed through free exchange and
cooperative innovation present such advantages, in independence from
suppliers, that they are finding their way into more homes and
offices, including those of major administrations and companies.
This kind of creeping, underground spread among users is not enough.
It keeps commons-based peer production at a distance from the
mainstream economy, instead of developing new forms of integration. It
cannot provide funding to enable all citizens to participate in the
development of common goods and of a large, vibrant sphere of
activity. If it is to be credible, any coalition in defence of common
goods must articulate its proposals around the general aim of bringing
capitalism back under control.
To do that, we need to reject the defeatist mentality that treats
technological change as an external factor independent of human
choices and actions.
Translated by Gulliver Cragg
------
Notes:
Philippe Aigrain was a campaigner for common goods and author of Cause
Commune (Fayard, Paris, 2005, www.causecommune.org) Also: Sharing.
Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age, Amsterdam University
Press, 2012.
(1) EU Directive 2001/09 frees the providers of “protection”
technology from any obligation to allow for legitimate uses of the
material they protect, even where the law recognises these legitimate
uses. If the protection is bypassed, it is so hard to prove that this
was for a legitimate end that in practice the technology makes the law
instead of the judge.
(2) See the case of Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser’s battle with the
chemical giant Monsanto. Schmeiser was found guilty of violating its
patent even though the Monsanto patented crops he was accused of
“exploiting” had grown on his land because of natural accidents. See
www.percyschmeiser.com
(3) Financial Times, London, 12 October 2004.
(4) Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the
Firm” in Yale Law Journal, New Haven, 4 June 2002.
(5) Michael Kanellos, “Gates, ‘Restricting IP is Tantamount to
Communism’”, CNET News.com.
(6) Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access, Putnam Publishing Group, Itasca,
2000.
(7) See Frederic M Scherer, “Global welfare and pharmaceutical
patenting”, The World Economy, Oxford, July 2004.
(8) Directive 2004/48/CE, 29 April 2004.
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