Propertyleft

Propertyleft is to "Property Rights" as Copyleft is to Copyright.

• Copyleft, enforced by Copyright, requires each User gain "their own instance of" the Immaterial Sources of Production whenever they receive any Good held under those terms.

• Propertyleft, enforced by "Property Rights", requires each user gain "their own instance of" the Material Sources of Production whenever they receive any Good held under these terms.

This Free as in Freedom Mode Of Production requires Land and other Real World Assets be continuously distributed to the users of those Goods, as they work to build a network of User Owned supply-chains.

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The following is a remix of http://GNU.org/copyleft

[image of a Philosophical Gnu]

Propertyleft is a general method for making a Good Free, and requiring all Modified, Copied and Shared versions of the Good to be Free as well.

The simplest way to make a Material Source free is to put it in a public place, unprotected. This allows people to share the Goods of that Material Source and their improvements, if they are so minded. But it also allows uncooperative people to take more of the Goods than they paid toward the maintenance of the Material Sources, or they may Own and organize many Material Sources, but might hold them and their Goods proprietary, away from users for the purpose of Profit. They may disallow others from ever using the Material Source, or they may make changes, many or few, and distribute the resulting Goods as a proprietary product. People who want to use the Good or a modified form do not have the Freedom that the original Owner gave; the middleman has stripped it away.

In the GNU project, our aim is to give all users the freedom to use GNU Goods. If middlemen could strip off the freedom, we might have many users, but those users would not have freedom. So instead of putting a GNU Good in the public domain, we Propertyleft it. Propertyleft says that anyone who uses the Good, with or without changes, must pass along those Freedoms. Propertyleft guarantees that every User has freedom to access the Material Sources.

Propertyleft also provides an incentive for Owners and Workers to add to free sources and helps investors of money or effort who want to contribute improvements to Free Goods get permission to do that. These investors often work for companies or universities that would do almost anything to get more profit. An investor may want to contribute her changes to the community, but her employer may want to turn the changes into a proprietary product.

When we explain to the employer that it is illegal to distribute the improved version except as a free Good, the employer usually decides to release it as a free Good rather than throw it away.

To Propertyleft an Good, we first state that it is Owned; then we add use and distribution terms, which are a legal instrument giving everyone the rights to Use, Modify, Copy and Share the Good or any Good derived from it but only if the distribution terms are unchanged. Thus, the Use and the Freedoms become legally inseparable.

This is done by requiring some % of profit (any amount above 0) be invested "for the User who paid that profit" so each User gains property rights over the Material Sources required to produce more of that Good in the future.

Proprietary owners use property rights to take away the users' freedom; we use property rights to guarantee their freedom. That's why we reverse the terms, changing property right into Propertyleft.

Propertyleft is a general concept; there are many ways to fill in the details. In the GNU Project, the specific distribution terms that we use are contained in the GNU General Public Law.

This law is designed so that you can easily apply it to your own objects, assuming you are the owner. You don’t have to modify the law to do this, just include a copy of the law in or on the object, and add notices in or on the sources of that object that refer properly to the law.

Using the same terms for many different objects makes it easy to various different objects in harmony. Since they all have the same terms, there is no need to think about whether the terms are compatible.

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Concept and development proposed by Patrick Anderson.