Telematics Freedom

The thousands of generic software patents held by large software giants, and other dedicated private entities, are increasingly becoming a huge and unfair barrier for new software companies, development communities and products to achieve wide market adoption.
In fact, as a software product competes with a product made by one of those large patent holders, they will sue or threaten to sue developers and/or large organization and corporate users for the infringement of their patents.

There are 2 approaches to solve this problem:
(1) The problem would be easily solved politically: (a) Put some sanity in the standards for approval of software patent claims; (b) re-proportion the duration of patent holders rights to the average duration of “useful economic life” of a software invention, so as not to prevent the ability of the wider population to and new creators to benefit from the use and remixing of those ideas. Efforts to enact this changes are under way, but it seems that lobbying efforts in the opposite direction are stronger (see for example the extension of copyright duration in the US and the continued awarding of ridiculous software patents).

(2) Another solutions is represented by the creation of a “copylefted” patent pool.
Here’s how it would work: A well founded and solid non-profit organization would:
- aggressively solicit the assignment to it of a large number of software patent rights
- it would instantly issue an irrevocable full license to such patents ideas to anyone in the world, except to anyone who will anytime in the future sue, or threaten to sue, anyone over software patent claims.

This article that appeared today shows encouraging signs for the possible success of this strategy.

Share This

Sustaining an ecosystem of “truly copylefted” telematics applications through the “Work-for-hire” loophole of FLOSS licenses

- - - Imagine Google decided to aggressively responsiblize and incentivize his employees, consultants and partner companies.
It would offer them very extensive performance bonuses on profits generated by software services, which they could design, develop and manage, by extending both publicly available FLOSS and unreleased Google-derivatived FLOSS.
It would offer them a “Consulting/Partnering Agreements” where it irrevocably stated to hire their services (as “work-for-hire”) to modify such source code; as well as to hold full responsibility for the managing and hosting, except for its obligation towards Google to respect a set of specific (mainly) hosting requirements. They would sign concurrently the assignment of all copyrights and other intellectual goods generated from their work on such code to Google.
Google, as the provider of partially-copyrighted source code, branding (and possibly some inevitable liabilities), would get 1-5% of the direct revenue generated by the service. The Partner, in turn, would get 95-99% of the revenue, sustain all consulting and hosting costs, as well as and fully “manage”, and be responsible for, the hosting of such service on behalf of Google.

It would also offer “Software Quality Review Agreements” to the same parties, in order to apply the same decentralization principles to quality and security assurance of its code. All such parties would be offered (under “work-for-hire” terms) a small symbolic amount to: obtain the code, review it and offer their feedback at their will.

Now, let’s imagine instead that all these would done by a foundation (or governmental entities, or a redundant network of national governments), which irrevocably commits to the following:
* any user and anyone in the world could decide at anytime to become a “Partner”
* all source code that is assigned to the foundation, and therefore that running on any of the partner-managed “derived services”, would always be available to anyone willing to sign (online or on paper) one of those 2 agreements.
* Requires that those Partners abide (possibly just above a certain number of “active users”) by severe hosting requirements (similar to the ones we have drafted here) for the running of those services, which concretely and enforceably places all hardware and software, running beyond the point of decryption, under the collective democratic control of its users.
* As the foundation reaches X thousands of active users of services hosted by it or by Partners; it would offer to each of those users to join other willing users in forming the sovereign body of the foundation, though a carefully designed constituent processes.

I am suggesting this may be a good thing, as it would create an ecosystem of developers and users where anyone, though partly limited from such democratically-controlled foundation, could access remotely-accessible software applications under “practically-copylefted” terms
They could start building new applications, as well as derivative works from any publicly-available FLOSS. Those works would never be “released” to anyone and, although still bound to the derivative terms of  GNU GPLv2 or other FLOSS license, would be made accessible to users and everyone under terms that amount practically to those of the current Affero, plus the means to collectively verify the code that is actually running.

Share This

Telematics, the integrated use of telecommunications and informatics, is the most crucial industry sector for the future of humanity. It is key to the indispensable updating and possible deepening of our democratic systems, through their adequate extension to the global level and to the main systems of public opinion formation. Only such extension, in fact, will avoid that citizens of the world will stand, both powerless and unaware, while largely unaccountable interests lead them to ultimate nuclear, environmental and biological catastrophe.
The patterns of control over network-enabled software that will become legal and predominant over the next few years, will weigh more than anything on a definite slide of humanity towards, either its extinction, or an unprecedented deepening of democracy and freedom.

Telematics can be defined as ways software programs are used to control hardware devices and data networks to provide a communication experience. Software is not only the key element of information networks like the Internet and the Web but, by now and increasingly, of practically all those media that originated as bare telecommunication channels, such as: radio, analog TV, satellite and digital TV, mobile phones.

Paradoxically, over the next few years, the practical nature of certain telematics innovations, especially those enabling remote democratic organizing and audience-controlled mass self communications, and the way our democratic societies will legislate and enforce their access and control, will be the main potential instrument for reviving democracy and therefore substantially reducing the abovementioned risks.

Share This