Inclusive Appropriation and the Double Freedom of Knowledge: On the Capitalist exploitation of non-for profit software, contents and data producers

Abstract

During the last decades, the widespread opposition to the dramatic expansion of intellectual property helped to set a quasi-public sphere of non-commercial digital knowledge. Nevertheless, the flows of "free knowledge" also enabled the development of a (partially) unexplored region of the private and for-profit sphere. A new kind of business methods is being shaped. Somehow, it is based on the disguised exploitation of unpaid digital work, carried out mostly in the leisure time, with non-commercial purposes. This ‘exploitation side’ has only received attention recently. However, the literature still lacks of: i) a name and a definition of the phenomenon, ii) a sound theoretical foundation and iii) an empirical description of its varieties. Thus, this paper tries to shed some light in these three regards by: i) advancing and defining the concept of Inclusive Appropriation (IA); ii) anchoring the IA in the Double Freedom of Knowl-edge (inspired to Marx’s double freedom of labor power) and iii) analyzing three modes of IA, respectively associated with software, contents and data.