Re: [diybio-eu] Bio-Commons Whitepaper

[Bryan Bishop]

Haven't read your paper. Here's some thoughts on the other content, though.

On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 9:19 AM, Rüdiger Trojok <tro...@openbioprojects.net> wrote:

in June we had a little workshop on the festival Pixelache in Helsinki on the topic of the Commons (e.g. creative commons).

Why a workshop?

 

There, a number of biohackers and citizens from Europe and Asia discussed ways to make the concept of the commons (e.g. creative commons) fruitful for the life science.

That sounds really weird, how is it not already fruitful. For example, the creative commons licenses aren't invalid in these circles. Often patent law overrules the creative common licenses for hardware and biotech artifacts, but that's only because patent law overrules copyright law, not because the creative common licenses are fundamentally broken.

 

Citizens proposed a ‘Bio-Commons’ license model to put biological innovation into service to society and at the same time limit the potential misuse of knowledge and material.

No amount of licensing is going to prevent bad actors from doing bad things. That's a silly motivation to write a license. Instead of trying to license away bad actors, you could focus on a license providing benefits to its users.

 

Taking the antibiotic resistance problem as an example, this whitepaper aims to demonstrate the necessity and feasibility of a Bio-Commons approach.

Focusing a license on bad actors doesn't seem to have much to do with "the antibiotic resistance problem".... For example, a bad actor will simply ignore the license and misuse the antibiotics to his heart's desire anyway.

 

In a citizen science project dubbed ‘Biostrike’, people around the globe could contribute to the solution to the antibiotics problem by raising awareness on the issue.

Or they could do actual science, instead of being pigeonholed into a marketing campaign about awareness.

 

Citizens and Scientists could participate in a global community around Biostrike, collaborating to find new antibiotics. Specialists from all fields of expertise could put together their knowledge to build the tool sets – that is wetware, hardware and software - to enable decentralized research on antibiotics. The Bio-Commons license could make licensing of innovation and discovery easier for researchers and thereby stabilize global collaborations that will help overcome market failure situations as they exist in antibiotics research.

That is a much better thesis than the other things you are trying to pitch.

 

A widely accepted regulatory framework would be required to provide legal security and reliability as well as equal, transparent, and fair terms for all participants.

That sounds bogus. That has never been required for authoring any other type of copyright license, to my knowledge.

 

Opening up the Bio-Commons discussion and introducing democratic decision making will make everybody a stakeholder.

Uh, that sounds like a really bad idea. As you increase the number of "stakeholders", you at least geometrically increase the amount of communication that has to happen between participants. Instead of indefinitely expanding that set of stakeholders, you can release a single version and let others fork it. Then you can let the market decide which version of the license gets used the most. The individual licenses would compete based on the benefits they offer their users. This way, you don't need to organize 7 or 8 billion stakeholders first.

 

It was thought that the blockchain technology could in future comprise the technical infrastructure for the Bio-Commons.

What about just using a LICENSE file instead of an entire blockchain?

 

Please read the whitepaper and contribute to the development of the idea on github!

https://github.com/Bio-Commons/Bio-Commons

Where's the license text? This is blank:

https://github.com/Bio-Commons/Bio-Commons/blob/master/license.md

also this link is broken:

http://lenada.github.io/Bio-Commons

Also, in the whitepaper you should be more skeptical of Maidsafe's implementation. I proposed a theoretical attack against their cryptocurrency proposals, and they basically brushed me off, but it has since been independently brought to their attention as a Sybil attack (which is true) or "Google attack" (I dunno why someone called it a Google anything)*. Ultimately these broken incentives break the Maidsafe model and lead to instability on their network when parties collude as giant caches to collect a disproportionate amount of their network currency without providing the pledged amount of redundant storage. So far I have not seen a secure "proof of resource" implementation that works.

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507

* I was most likely not the first person to tell them, but I wasn't paying attention before I looked anyway.

[Ruediger Trojok]

Bryan,
you missed the points that i made in the document. Please take some minutes and read the paper,
i think it will become clearer to you what this is about.
Thanks for the advice on maidsafe, i wasnt aware of their problems.
Currently fixing the github page. The license file is available and if you look closely you will also find it.
Best,
Rüdiger