Le leggi sulla proprietà intellettuale comprendono i brevetti, i diritti d’autore e i marchi commerciali. Da qualche decennio ad oggi le imprese americane, soprattutto quelle ad alto contenuto tecnologico, hanno preso a dipendere sempre di più da queste leggi per proteggere i “loro profitti”: l’impresa prende il capitale mentre il lavoro individuale raramente riceve una ricompensa. Nota la Reuters, inoltre, che questo aumento delle cause legali è il prodotto di differenze tra le sentenze dei giudici costituzionali e le sentenze di una corte d’appello specializzata con sede a Washington che si occupa dei casi di brevetto a livello nazionale; su alcuni punti chiave le due parti non hanno raggiunto un accordo. Tenete conto del fatto che una sentenza sulla proprietà intellettuale può avere vaste conseguenze sulla società: il genoma umano e i vaccini dovrebbero essere brevettati o possono rimanere risorsa comune? Io propendo per quest’ultima. Ma l’industria farmaceutica investe molti soldi e molte energie politiche a favore di una forte protezione dei brevetti, così da poter proteggere il suo “diritto” multimilionario ad incassare una rendita su un monopolio inventato.

Se poi le cause legali che riguardano la PI sono aumentate è anche perché questa restringe l’ambito dell’attività umana e l’innovazione.

Le cause aumentano perché la libertà è la nuova etica: creative commons è qui per restare. La rivoluzione tecnologica generata dall’open source sta emergendo davanti ai nostri occhi con il suo tema della decentralizzazione, costringendo lo status quo a cambiare, e questo agli interessi particolari non piace. Per nostra fortuna il mondo è anarchico. La rivoluzione stigmergica lavora per vie traverse attorno alle gerarchie tradizionali e il loro potere di coercizione: il vecchio ordine (per quanto ci provi) non riesce a stare dietro.

Quello che vediamo è forza sociale in azione. In questa nuova pubblica piazza le corti, il potere legislativo e gli interessi particolari sono impotenti. Il mercato così liberato non è interessato alla proprietà delle idee, ma al progresso, all’innovazione e alla collaborazione nel lavoro. Il colonialismo corporativo ha i giorni contati.

Se si vuole liberare la società le idee non devono avere padroni. Una volta che queste finiscono nel mercato, chiunque dovrebbe essere libero di aggiungervi le proprie conoscenze e mandarne avanti la realizzazione pratica. Questo significa semplicemente massimizzare le capacità innovative dell’attività umana. Le migliori realizzazioni pratiche dovrebbero essere lasciate libere di svilupparsi. La PI, con le leggi che riconoscono la “proprietà” dell’informazione, restringe il potenziale creativo e innovativo della popolazione in senso ampio. Le leggi sulla PI servono a proteggere il capitale a spese dei lavoratori dotati di talento. Le idee sono uno strumento potente, fondamentale, in una società libera; e non dovrebbero essere ingabbiate dall’attivismo legalistico.

Grazie alle nuove tecnologie, oggi informazione e idee si diffondono senza restrizioni. L’attività umana ha un nuovo management: l’individuo. L’uso dei tribunali per privatizzare le idee e proibire il libero flusso delle informazioni è un credo che appartiene al passato; ecco perché è emerso creative commons. Il mercato va sempre alla ricerca della libertà, perché l’attività umana opera per l’avanzamento reciproco di tutte le parti della società.

L’attività umana dotata di talento, libera, è il motore che fa andare una società libera. L’ordine anarchico sta emergendo. Mentre seppelliamo la proprietà intellettuale reclamiamo il nostro potere sul bene comune.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

“What we are seeing is social power at work. The courts, legislature and special interests are powerless in the new public arena. The liberated market is not interested in the ownership of ideas, but rather progress, innovation and co-operative labor. The days of corporate colonialism are numbered.”

IP law includes patents, copyright and trademarks. In recent decades U. S. businesses, especially those in the technology industry, have become increasingly dependent upon them to protect “their profits” — business gets the capital, individual labor is rarely rewarded. Reuters also reports that this rise in litigation is the product of differences between rulings by the justices and the findings of a specialized Washington-based appeals court, which handles the nation’s patent cases, because they have failed to reach consensus on some key issues. Keep in mind, rulings on IP can have wide-ranging consequences for society — should the human genome or vaccines be patented or remain common pool resources? I think the latter. The pharmaceutical industry, however, spends a lot of money and political energy on IP, favoring strong patents to protect its multi-million dollar “right” to collect rent on a manufactured monopoly.

Another reason for the sudden rise in IP litigation is because IP restricts human labor and innovation.

Litigation is up in the courts because liberty is the new ethic – the creative commons are here to stay. The open source, technological revolution emerging before our very eyes around the globe, with its theme of decentralization, is forcing a change of the status quo — and special interests don’t like it. Lucky for us, the world is anarchic. The stigmergic revolution works around traditional hierarchies and coercive power — the old order (try as it might) cannot keep up.

What we are seeing is social power at work. The courts, legislature and special interests are powerless in the new public arena. The liberated market is not interested in the ownership of ideas, but rather progress, innovation and co-operative labor. The days of corporate colonialism are numbered.

For a society to be liberated its ideas cannot be owned. Once in the market others should be free to add their knowledge to a concept and advance its practice. This does nothing but maximize the innovative capacity of human labor.  Best practices should be free to develop. IP restricts the creative, innovative potential of the populace as these laws allow the “ownership” of information. IP laws serve to protect capital at the expense of inclined labor. Ideas are powerful and fundamental to a free society — they should not be caged by legal activism.

Today, due to new tech, information and ideas are free to spread without restriction. Human labor is under new management — the individual now has agency. The use of courts to privatize ideas and prohibit the free flow of information is an aging creed — hence the rise of creative commons. The market always seeks liberation as human labor always works for the mutual advancement of society.

Inclined, liberated human labor is the engine behind free societies. The anarchic order is emerging. By leaving IP behind we are reclaiming our power in the commons.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Proprietà Comune, Potere Comune.

What’s missing from the political discussion is any mention of the Federal Reserve at all — even as  new executive  Janet Yellen takes the reins of arguably the world’s most powerful economic institution. Even worse, the very political ideology that has created systemic poverty, the top down approach to economics, guides the current conversation.

That discussion needs to shift to the mechanisms of poverty and how to liberate ourselves from them. Until we do so, we will continue to witness a precipitous increase in wealth disparities.

Income inequality restricts market opportunity. Extreme inequality — characterized by rampant poverty — chains our inclined labor. Economist Amartya Sen describes the persistence of poverty as the robbing of human potential, stating “poverty is not just a lack of money. It is not having the capability to realize one’s full potential as a human being.” Poverty, then, is the reduction of human contributions to the market, to the commons and, ultimately, to the human condition.

Systemic poverty exists because people are not able to access or create markets. In order to alleviate poverty we need to struggle for market liberation. This calls for the rejection of authorities who wish to direct economic systems. As witnessed in bailouts, corporate aid/welfare and their subsequent restrictions to economic diversity, it is the political class that benefits from the top down approach. In the liberated market, the populace will labor to create new ways — alternative institutions and new federations — to serve one another. Outside the current system, in the true public arena, markets can create a new mutualism, social goods, common interests among market actors and individual prosperity.

Centralized authority steers our creative output away from the dreams, aspirations, ethics and labor of individuals and to the benefit of the politically connected. In the halls of power, economic policy is decided upon, announced to the populace and defended against popular protest. In this model, outside knowledge is imposed upon us. But the individual and the collective know how to better the community. The decentralized, networked, stigmergic revolution works around command and control to co-ordinate and cultivate markets.

If we are serious about tackling income inequality and systemic poverty, we must first realize that any authority over the market is illegitimate. Then, on an individual basis, we can decide to directly engage or work around the current political system to dismantle such authority. Liberated economic systems will arise out of the old order, granting each individual sustainable agency over his or her own labor.

The key to success and actualization of human potential is, as always, liberty.

For y’all keeping track at home, hyperlocal news means exactly what it sounds like: basically, a person or group of persons are covering events in a town, sometimes down to the individual street level, and publishing it for their friends and neighbors – and audiences beyond either – to see. (Sounds awfully like blogging.)

Almost every city in America has a website devoted to something along the lines of hyperlocalism, whether or not they call it that. Some consist of independent reporters covering things they’re passionate about. Others, like Journatic, are in the business of outsourcing hyperlocal, which has made for some interesting and sometimes cringeworthy times.

AOL wanted their network to be the largest in the country, which is not in itself a deplorable goal. Where they went wrong? Trying to flood out their smaller competitors and gouge advertisers for more than they could afford – natural, if you model yourself off your predecessors.

Media critic Jeff Jarvis wrote (“The Almost Post-Mortem for Patch”), “Hyperlocal works in town after town. What doesn’t work is trying to instantly scale it by trying to own every town in sight. That was Patch’s fatal error: acting like an old-media company.”

Instead of trying to own everything from the top down, new, hyperlocal media needs to be built from the bottom up. Stigmergic, decentralized outlets have already been proven to thrive and be as effective – if not more so – than old media sites.

 -Richard Stallman, Words to Avoid (or Use with Care) Because They Are Loaded or Confusing

Science and innovation are chaotic, stochastic processes that cannot be governed and controlled by desk-bound planners and politicians, whatever their intentions. Good scientists are by definition anarchists.

-Theo Wallimann, biologist at ETH Zurich

The individual is the basic functional unit of innovation. Institutions provide resources — capital, human and fixed. But free people can achieve a lot with very little.

Steve Wozniak built Apple from a garage (with the help of frontman Jobs), and now it reigns among the largest companies in the world (not to glorify the crooks at Apple — they are patent trolls and sweatshop labor exploiters).

Do-It-Yourself scientists working in hackerspaces are positioned to make significant contributions with low overhead and little formal training (becoming necessary and valuable apprenticeship sites as the current higher education system deteriorates). The state has yet to heavily clamp down, but, because such freedom threatens the status quo, we can expect intervention to intensify.

Stigmergic Science

The magnitude of creative productivity is most strongly correlated with the number of researchers, and less with the talent of the individuals involved, and fortunately the positive feedback loop (or virtuous cycle) of technology continues to lower the cost of instrumentation. That is, happy accident probability is proportional to time invested rather than just skill.

Establishment science institutions are somewhat impeded from developing groundbreaking, disruptive or revolutionary technologies, for three reasons:

First, they need to be able to monopolize them. Anything that lends itself to decentralization (solar power, self-replicating 3D printers) threatens the established order and will be resisted to the end. If a modern-day Nikola Tesla were to invent a disruptive energy technology, s/he would likely be suppressed, just as J.P. Morgan and Edison suppressed [1] Tesla.

“Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has, as its ultimate goal, the betterment of humanity.”                            – Nikola Tesla

Second, visible and legally liable institutions must abide the patent monopoly structure. They must pay for the use of ideas. Garage developers fly below the radar. Thus, R&D is cheaper, but patents make marketing a product prohibitively expensive and retard deliverability.

Finally, far-out ideas make established scientists uncomfortable. If your entire career was built around the fax machine, phrenology, the geocentric model or the beeper, you’re not too excited about these crazy kids and their ideas. There is a lot of untapped brainpower out there. The state education mill is a barrier to entry, a great divider — a credential firewall. MOOCs and badges may displace the academic cartel, but not without vested interests fighting to halt creative destruction along the way.

Aided by Randomness

“Academic Libertarian,” statistician and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb recognizes that “stochastic tinkering” rather than systematic, institutional agendas yield the greatest discoveries. Taleb is best known for coining the term “Black Swan,” to describe hard-to-predict and disproportionately momentous events.

Stochastic tinkering is a process of trial and error, present in all creative endeavors, where randomness plays a great role. Taleb writes, in his essay The Birth of Stochastic Science (PDF):

The world is giving us more “cheap options”, and options benefit principally from uncertainty. So I am particularly optimistic about medical cures. To the dismay of many planners, there is an acceleration of the random element in medicine putting the impact of discoveries in a class of Mandelbrotian power-law style payoffs.

It is compounded by another effect: exposure to serendipity. People are starting to realize that a considerable component of the gravy in medical discoveries is coming from the “fringes”, people finding what they are not exactly looking for. It is not just that hypertension drugs lead to Viagra, angiogenesis drugs lead to the treatment of macular degeneration, tuberculosis drugs treat depression and Parkinson’s disease, etc., but that even discoveries that we claim to come from research are themselves highly accidental, the result of tinkering narrated ex post and dressed up as design. The high rate of failure should be sufficiently convincing of the lack of effectiveness of design. […]

All the while institutional science is largely driven by causal certainties, or the illusion of the ability to grasp these certainties; stochastic tinkering does not have easy acceptance. Yet we are increasingly learning to practice it without knowing — thanks to overconfident entrepreneurs, naive investors, greedy investment bankers, and aggressive venture capitalists brought together by the free-market system [sic].

I am also optimistic that the academy is losing its power and ability to put knowledge in straightjackets and more out-of-the-box knowledge will be generated Wiki-style. But what I am saying is not totally new.

Accepting that technological improvement is an undirected (and unpredictable) stochastic process was the agenda of an almost unknown branch of Hellenic medicine in the second century Mediterranean Near East called the “empirics”. Its best known practitioners were Menodotus of Nicomedia and my hero of heroes Sextus Empiricus. They advocated theory-free opinion-free trial-and-error, literally stochastic medicine. Their voices were drowned by the theoretically driven Galenic, and later Arab-Aristotelian medicine that prevailed until recently.

Radical Biology

As a biologist, I can strongly affirm the accuracy of Taleb’s notion of “accidental” discovery in this field. Biology is extremely complex and experimental outcomes are unpredictable.

Living organisms and cells require time to grow and change. There are too many moving parts and holding them constant is difficult because we don’t even know how many parts there are and how they interact. Metabolic pathways are considered both discrete and continuous, but no one doubts that they are dynamically equilibrating systems that cannot be easily modeled, not as amenable to tinkering like mechanical or chemical engineering — even basic biology is expensive and has historically been the purview of big-budget institutions.

That is changing.

Theory, as usual, has a weak barrier to entry. Projects like TinkerCell allow cellular biologists to design their own metabolic pathways and share them open-source with a community, dramatically boosting stigmergic idea development and cross-pollination. What one wrote on a pad and paper and filed away in a dusty file cabinet for posterity will soon be indexed and searchable.

“Wetlabs,” however, are the big story. These labs are now becoming available to those not associated with universities or corporations. Anyone in the community can pitch in and do biology. Science enthusiasts are organizing IRL to poke and prod at the mystery of life (Making the Modern Do-It-Yourself Biology Laboratory, Singularity Hub).

Molecular biologist Ellen Jorgensen established Genspace, a major DIY lab in Brooklyn. Some highlights from her TED talk:

“You might be asking yourself, ‘What would I do in a biolab?’ Well, it wasn’t that long ago we were asking, ‘What would anyone do with a personal computer?’”

“The press had a tendency to consistently overestimate [biohackers’] capabilities and underestimate our ethics.”

“DIY [biotech] people from all over the world … got together last year, and we hammered out a common code of ethics. That’s a lot more than conventional science has done.”

“[In a DIY bio lab,] you can work on a project and you don’t have to justify to anyone that it’s going to make a lot of money, that it’s going to save mankind, or even that it’s feasible.”

If you want to get involved, check out this listing of DIY wetlabs, or start your own.

If the success of young scientists like Jack Andraka (who surfed the internet and developed a promising and cheap pancreatic cancer screening test — with the help of professionals) are any indication, it’s better to have a lot of moderately-trained people doing science than just a vanguard of highly trained experimenters.

Regarding experiments, something can be said for quantity over quality, perhaps for two reasons: First, experiments take time. The more the merrier. Second, accidental, wild, speculative results are born from intractable randomness — and positive Black Swans may be more likely to come out of science than, say, finance or statecraft.

In this era of big science, the most important lesson to be learned from […] the achievements of countless amateurs is that scientific observations and discoveries don’t necessarily require giant government grants and huge teams of researchers with specialized degrees. Small science still works, and it often works during off hours, weekends, and holidays when professionals are generally at home or on vacation. -Forrest M. Mims III (1999), writing in Science.

Paternalism Comes Knocking

As is evident from several millennia of prudent governance by states, the right balance between free-form innovation and legal restriction will be struck. Statists are already calling for regulation, but restrictions are quite unenforceable (the tools and knowledge of garage science are becoming ever more accessible).

A number of regulatory approaches have been put forward: requiring biosafety training for all practitioners through programs designed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, registering community labs with government agencies, requiring some type of personal liability insurance, excluding felons from DIY activities, and instituting screenings for loyalty and integrity. [2]

The feds have already goofed up an investigation, branding an artist as a bioterrorist.

Casting a long shadow over the DIY bio movement is the case of Steven J. Kurtz, an art professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The case has been held up as a warning about overly aggressive law enforcement in cases involving home laboratories. While not a scientist—professional or amateur—Kurtz uses DNA and other biological materials in his artwork.

In May 2004, Kurtz and his wife, Hope, had been preparing commissioned works when Hope Kurtz died at their home. Her husband called 911. Her death was later determined to be of natural causes. In attending to Hope Kurtz, emergency personnel observed Petri dishes containing bacteria cultures and food–testing equipment that was considered suspicious. They contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Authorities later told Kurtz he was being investigated for bioterrorism, and, eventually, Kurtz and Robert E. Ferrell, former chair of the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Human Genetics, were indicted on mail and wire fraud for their alleged efforts to obtain biological organisms from a lab that was not allowed to sell to individuals.

In April 2008, a federal judge dismissed the mail and wire fraud charges against Kurtz, noting that there was insufficient proof to go forward. Ferrell was fined $500 after pleading guilty to a count of mailing an injurious article, a misdemeanor.

Scientists had feared the case would be precedent–setting, but instead it has turned out to be a cautionary lesson about the dangers of under–educated law enforcement personnel who cannot tell the difference between a bioterrorist lab and an artist’s studio using common bacteria.

The FBI says it has done much to make sure the Kurtz incident stays as the exception rather than the rule. Many safeguards and precautions have been put into place since the announcement, most important, the education of local law enforcement about DIY scientists and labs.

State enforcement will prove incapable of preventing anyone from, say, dumping noxious chemicals or developing the next superbug (indeed, states are already doing that — they just try to keep them in the lab) — but bio-hackerspace communities might. Everyone else’s experiments tend to be known to others, and getting away with anything sinister is much harder.

The greatest risk in state control of scientific inquiry is this: the government is likely to suppress inventions that threaten profit and mass control. Energy and medicine (PDF) are particularly sensitive areas for the corporation-state. Scientists of the future must be skeptical of idea management by means of centralized systematic violence.

“It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in power. We are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible and which are not.”- Carl Sagan, UCLA commencement speech on June 14, 1991

What they call the “social order,” we call predation.

What they call “unregulated” chaos, we recognize as a driver of innovation.

The state cannot be overcome by force, because another state would rise from the ashes of the human mind.

The scarcity and dependence on centralized expertise that appears to justify states can be abolished with the spread of disruptive technology.

$1.00 for the copy. $0.75 for every additional copy.

From Kevin Carson and David S. D’Amato, two Market Anarchist takes on the concept of stigmergy and spontaneous order, and its relationship to the explosion of networked, leaderless resistance in grassroots, radical social movements.

The term ‘stigmergy’ applies to any form of human social­iz­at­ion in which coordination is achieved not by social negotiation or administration or consensus, but entirely by independent individual action against the background of a common social medium. That’s essentially the organizational form used by the Linux developer community, by networked resistance movements like the Zapatista global support network of the 1990s, and by the post-Seattle anti-globalization movement. Those with the highest level of interest in a particular aspect and the highest affinity for finding a workable solution contribute to that part of the project. In networked movements, any contribution or innovation in a single cell will only be adopted by those who find it valuable. Those that are considered valuable instantly become the property of the entire network, and those solutions that work become immediately available for adoption by each cell deciding only for itself.

That’s exactly what’s happened with the social movements of the past year and a half. The Occupy movement itself operates stigmergically, with innovations developed by one node becoming part of the total movement’s common toolkit. It’s only a matter of time until local Occupy movements become centers of innovation, not only in protest tactics, but in new forms of social organization in the communities where they live. In communities all across the country, people will realize that they’re neighbors who live in the same town or city – there’s no reason their cooperation has to be limited to the park or town square. Occupy will become not just a protest movement, but a school for living. . . . All over the world, we’re figuring out ways to live without the land and capital of the classes who think they own the planet, ways to make their land and capital useless to them. And they can’t stop us because we have no leaders. . . .

Includes “The Stigmergic Revolution” (Carson) and “The General Idea of the Revolution in the 21st Century” (D’Amato).