Ideas for a Pirate Party program (was: [ox-en] Fwd: [Eugen Leitl] [p2p-research] Pirate Party program)
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:00:13 +0200
Hi list, Eugen!
3 days ago Stefan Merten wrote:
From: Eugen Leitl
There's a window of opportunity right now to help formulate the
goals of the emerging global Pirate Parties. I'm working on the
German Pirate Party platform currently, and I'm asking for your
input.
Well, in this mail I'll think a bit about the topic and may be some
ideas / thoughts are useful.
As an Oekonux participant the most important thing for me is
furthering peer production and this is what I'd expect from the Pirate
Party. That means
1. Production of goods which are generally useful
2. by volunteers
3. who like to work in a respective project
4. where the products are available to the general public.
In other words: The mode in which much of Free Software, Wikipedia and
similar projects are running.
.. _drawing board intitiative: http://en.wiki.oekonux.org/Oekonux/DrawingBoard
In the `drawing board intitiative`_ there are lots of challenges and
questions listed. The ones I think are interesting for a party at the
current point in history are these:
* Availability of means of production
A precondition for each production is the availability of the means
of production. In this point I'll focus on the technical means of
production.
For many peer production projects the technical means of production
are computers connected to the Internet. Today these are generally
available in the rich countries.
For other peer production projects such as OpenAccess the means of
production are paid by those who finance the research - such as the
state.
Peer production in general would greatly benefit from the general
availability of means of production. This can be turned into a
political demand easily: Lower the cost of means of production when
they are used for peer production. This could be done for instance
by special tax reductions.
* Alienated uses of peer products
Alienated uses of peer products is something which may impede peer
production which otherwise would take place: If you can sell peer
products instead of using them for your own needs then this reduces
the motivation of volunteers.
A legislation which prevents such abuse would be useful.
* Technology
There is technology which furthers peer production. One instance
seems to be production technology which is very universal and at the
same time widely available. Computers are of course the obvious
example. It could be the duty of the state to further such
technology stronger than other technology.
* Let capitalists build fundaments
There are many fields in which peer production is not yet possible -
mainly because of the lack of means of production. On the other hand
capitalist companies can support peer production by incarnating the
part which peer production is not yet able to accomplish.
This could mean that these companies produce things with their means
of production which are designed in peer production projects and
sell them to whoever wants them. Examples are contract producers
which are already quite common in rapid prototyping. Also ideas for
a car based on peer production often think this way.
It could be the duty of the state to further such companies somehow.
* Enable the unemployed to peer produce
This is about the human side of means of production. You need enough
(qualified) humans to produce something. As long as the majority of
people need money for a living there is a conflict between peer
production and making money.
One strategy could be to enable unemployed people to engage in peer
production projects. Those institutions which care about unemployed
people would be the "natural" institutions to support such
engagement.
This way the unemployed would do something useful which also could
help them finding a new job. At the same time the idea of peer
production would be spread to people which are unaware of it now.
May be there are other ways to aliment persons who engage in peer
production.
* Peer production as a legal concept
As of now the concept of peer production is not well reflected in
contemporary law. Since in capitalism law is the basis for many
interventions a legal concept of peer production would be very
useful. That would be the basis for many other strategies rooted in
strategic interventions by the state.
As a very minimum the legal status of contemporary licences used in
peer production - such as the GPL - needs to be clarified and
affirmed.
Additional ideas include:
* Fighting patents
Patents are a danger for peer production because they declare
ownership of ideas of other persons. Also the use of patents is
questioned since the beginning of them. Patents need to be removed.
Copyright on the other hand probably needs to be kept because at the
moment it is the basis for Copyleft licenses. If, however, there are
more useful concepts these should be furthered.
* Research on peer production
Peer production is still a rather new phenomenon. Research needs to
be furthered to understand the phenomenon better.
May be others here have mode ideas?
Grüße
Stefan
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