In today's Guardian there is a story about coffee and trademark protection (mistakenly related to copyright law):
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,1931675,00.html

It is a story that uses morality to assert or entrench in the public imagination the inherent good-ness of trademark protection (as a form of private property) by pitching Ethiopia, whence coffee originates, against a coffee shop chain whose "whose annual turnover is equivalent to about three quarters of Ethiopia's entire gross domestic product".

We are told that Ethiopian coffee producers "sell organic coffee for less than £1 a pound but that pound can make 52 specials in coffee shops selling for £2 each, meaning the retailer is selling it for £104. The people who are producing this in Ethiopia don't have enough food, clean water or health centres."

In other words, if the original coffee beans, Sidamo, Harar and Yirgacheffe, were protected under trademark laws, then, so it is estimated by Oxfam, Ethiopia could make an annual £47 million - and there is no doubt that some help to self-help for the Ethiopian economy would be a good thing. But is trademark law something worth celebrating as a saviour of anyone, of anything?

How come the coffee shop can buy the coffee so cheaply in the first place? Who would actually benefit from trademark law protection, would it be the plantation labourers? Or would it rather be lawyers in office buildings in the capital of Ethiopia (or elsewhere)? Also, why not tax the coffee shop chain, -a global tax on global corporations for global development?

Trademark law is a sub-category of private property: it allows the holder of a trademark to exclude others from using whatever is protected, or it allows them to license the use of their protected trademark to others. In this case a network coffee producers could then get a sip of every cup of profit that Starfuckers make on exploiting cheap labour in Ethiopia (and elsewhere). But is privatisation of names and places and algorithms or techniques the way forward - is privatisation a good idea at all?

Consider something else: copyright. Also related to private property in that it excludes anyone else than the creator of a work to copy it. In other words, filesharing is illegal because it breaches the copyright of Sony, Time Warner and other such corporations. When Corporate Media speak about the evils of filesharing they will pitch poor musicians against amoral downloaders - recall: poor Ethiopians against Starfuckers - but is that where it is at? Without wanting to go into detail about the example of music download and the cut that musicians get (suffice to say that while Time/Warner is making a lot of money, they seem to share it with the likes of Madonna and Bowie and not your local, independent venue or musicians) - what we can see here is a pattern: time and time again the idea of private property, the capitalist model of an economy, is being preached as the way to save the world. It can save the poor in Ethiopia (except it can't, 'cause it is more likely to line the pockets of some lawyers educated at Harvard or Yale or Oxford some other Holy Grail of Capitalism) and it can rescue musical culture from the evil file sharers. Or can it?


Or should the tables perhaps be turned completely? As a matter of fact that is exactly what Free Software is all about. It is based on Copyleft, which is a hack of copyright:  http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/ . The idea is to use the concept of protection inherent in copyright, namely that a creator has a right to determine herself the limits of her creation - and Copyleft limits the use of a given creation within a community, not in the name of an individual (although, one aspect of copyright, perhaps the greater incentive for innovation, namely attribution, remains intact in the concept of Copyleft, so that whatever you have created you will be recognised for). By being focused on community and perpetuating sharing and cooperation - on the basis of a subversion, or hack, of copyright, the idea of copyleft - and the particular example of Free Software - opens a whole new understanding of ownership forms: it is neither communist, nor capitalist and so it breaks with the old bi-polar paradigm that we know best as the Cold War. (For more info see this article, which is already three years old:  http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.11/opensource_pr.html - or start here with the basics:  http://gnudist.gnu.org/philosophy/why-copyleft.html - or here:  http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/ )

Going down the road less travelled, the Free Software movement paves the way for a different economy by successfully showing that a mode of production different from the conventional capitalist version is possible - and that it might indeed be a stronger and socially and developmentally (innovation, distribution) better way of organising a world in which cyberspace gains more and more significance.

But, just as it may be argued that Oxfam keeps wars going by feeding those lost and recruitable in conflict zones, so do they applaud capitalism and the status quo of power in other realms. Although some very good work has been done by Oxfam policy advisor Peter Drahos (see for example this summary of a very important, in empirical terms, book:
 http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/item.shtml?x=85821 ), his conclusions reassert the desirability and necessity of what he calls a weak Intellectual Property Regime. (Consult the social history written by people like E.P. Thompson and Peter Linebaugh to get a grasp of the violent origins of the modern (capitalist) world.)

There are many supporters of Information Freedom and Information Commons, but there are few who are ready, and also, of course, given air-time and publishing deals if they elaborate their defence of such freedoms and community forms to question the political structures and social construction that created the private property forms that threaten Information Freedom. As McCann writes:

“Simply declaring the existence or the desired existence of an "(information) commons" does not suddenly sweep away the political baggage that comes along with each of these issues. But it is not uncommon, consistent with the wonderful dynamics that any condition of hegemony tends to imply, that such issues are often conveniently swept under the carpet, shrouded in the mists of denial, or immunised against criticism by the blinding light of the best of intentions. Discourses of "the (information) commons" allow people to purport that they are focusing attention on the fundamental political implications of new technologies, intellectual property laws, free market economics, and American democracy without ever really taking any of those implications seriously enough to challenge them at base.” (McCann, 2005 - Read the rest of McCann's article:  http://www.beyondthecommons.com/enclosurewithin.pdf ).

In other words: information can only be free if private, exclusive ownership in the tangible realm is severely limited. Ethiopian peasants and tribes in bonded labour are not set free by an expansion of plantation owners' profit margin - they are set free if they share in the ownership of the coffee plantations and the beans that they help grow and harvest, and thereby are in a position to bargain with Starfuckers for a better price - or even better, if they work with a network of independent coffee shops around the world. Musicians cannot buy their first guitar -or pay for a concert ticket to go see and hear their sources of inspiration play- with the shareholder returns of Time/Warner.

What is really going on when Oxfam "helps" in this way and when The Guardian writes in this way, is that they create in the public imagination an acceptance of private, exclusive property rights as a very good way of helping the poor. It is a subliminal justification of trademark law, the neo-liberal, private property regime. But it does not help "the poor" understood as an abstract category of people, it can at best help some clearly defined, specific poor people by making them propertied people - which then of course makes the rest of the poor even more poor. "Everybody knows, the rich get rich, the poor stay poor."

What follows is a long excerpt from "Property relations in the knowledge economy: in search of anti-capitalist commons"-, which is a draft (of an academic paper) that deals with philosophical/legal/economic aspects of common ownership, the by now classic fictitious/constructed "tragedy of the commons", and Roman law and ownership history. The purpose is to reverse the way we generally think about ownership and social organisation - and to show that common ownership is a good thing.

"Elinor Ostrom (1990, 2000) has led extensive empirically based research work that complements Taylor's theoretical refutation of the N-Prisoners' Dilemma game at the heart of the influential stories supporting the neoliberal privatisation agenda, here in the words of Carol Rose (ibid; p. 106):

“Elinor Ostrom ... and her colleagues point out [that] there is no reason to think that the only forms of resource governance must come from individual ownership on the one hand, or from central governmental management on the other. [N]umerous examples of informal group property of "common-pool resources" far beyond Europe, from irrigating communities in the Philippines, to livestock-raising communities in Japan, to fishing communities in Turkey. Such communities clearly refute the idea that the commons is necessarily "tragic"; on the contrary, a number of these limited common property regimes have lasted in Tangible Space for centuries.”.

Ostrom has in her work unpacked the Tragedy of the Commons by investigating real-life commons where people sometimes for centuries or more have successfully constituted their own non-exclusive form of organisation. Instead of the one-sided idea that human beings are naturally self-interested and therefore must be coerced to cooperate, Ostrom points to future areas of research to better understand how resources can be shared. She confirms that free-riding is a problem, she admits that some people do indeed seem not to naturally cooperate, but that, also, many people happily cooperate on a voluntary basis. So, rather, the real life situation of the commons is that it is a not a tragedy and the problems that privatisation arguments invoke in this context are not as significant as they are purported to be: successful management of natural resources is not doomed to fail due to a lack of cooperative skills and does not necessarily require external, coercive authority. Human societies provide empirical evidence that no economic logic can refute or deny.

However, the collective work to undermine the idea that people can self-constitute successful governance models is not a done deal, as Ostrom writes with a careful balance (2000 p. 138):

“While these empirical studies have posed a severe challenge to the zero contribution theory, these findings have not yet been well integrated into an accepted, revised theory of collective action. A substantial gap exists between the theoretical prediction that self-interested individuals will have extreme difficulty in coordinating collective action and the reality that such cooperative behaviour is widespread, although far from inevitable”

Ostrom's forthcoming integration of theoretical and empirical arguments for and evidence of the success of the commons can be linked to lessons from cyberspace as well as to practices of and theories around social movements creating forms of communal social relations, events and venues, and one may wish that such integrative work would constitute taking a baby step towards what we can call an anti-capitalist jurisprudence."

For further reading see sites such as:
 http://www.commoner.org.uk/
 http://www.geneva03.org/
 http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/08/09/0441208&mode=nested&tid=24
 http://knowledgelab.org.uk/wiki/Enclosures%26Commons
 http://knowledgelab.org.uk/wiki/Privacy%26Surveillance

and then switch off the computer and go meet some people :)