Center for Internet and Society at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CIS-CNRS), France
Schlager & Ostrom (1992) look at tangible commons property as a bundle of rights. We look at how digital commons can also be understood as a bundle of rights. Free and open licenses have frequently been considered to form a bundle of rights which define roles, and segment who is included and who is excluded. Few have actually tried to analyze properly this assessment. Douglas (2011) showed that the key element for free and open source software is not ownership, but access and use, delineation of who has rights and duties. We argue that for digital commons, most of these rights are not based on ownership or copyright, and propose to extend the bundle of rights beyond open and free licenses.
Digital commons are a subset of the commons, where the resources are data, information, culture and knowledge which are created and/or maintained online. They are shared in ways that avoid their enclosure and allow everyone to access and build upon them (Dulong de Rosnay & F. Stalder, 2020). Free and open licenses define the resources' shared rights from a copyright perspective, but the resources’ governance rules result from a combination of licenses with other written and unwritten rules.
We draw from Douglas and include governance documents other than licenses, such charters and code of conducts, to discuss the pertinence of using the bundle-of-rights framework to analyze governance of digital commons beyond copyright.
We achieve this by investigating the rules-in-use for three projects - the operating system Debian, the food transparency database OpenFoodFacts and the communication protocol Matrix. The bundle of rights may include the rights to represent the collective, to take certain decisions, to manage conflict, to redirect the project, to change the license, to ensure care, etc.
References
Douglas, D. M. (2011). A bundle of software rights and duties. Ethics and Information Technology, 13(3), 185–197. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-010-9229-3
Dulong de Rosnay, M. (2016). Peer to party: Occupy the law. First Monday, 21(12). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v21i12.7117
Dulong de Rosnay, M. & Stalder, F. (2020). Digital commons. Internet Policy Review, 9(4). https://doi.org/10.14763/2020.4.1530
Guillier, V. (2024), Au-delà de la propriété ? Vers de nouveaux faisceaux de droits pour étudier la gouvernance des communs numériques, communication at the “TIC.IS
TIC, Information et Stratégies” conference.
Schlager, E & E. Ostrom, E. (1992), Property-Rights Regimes and Natural Resources: A Conceptual Analysis. Land Economics Vol. 68. n°3, p. 249-262.
