User:Toussaint/Copyleft economics

Copyleft economics is a field of economics which is concerned with the copyleft and related subjects. While being a potential mix of various ideologies, including mutualism, cooperativism, various shades of economic anarchism, and post-industrialism, the copyleft poses a challenge to economics in that it is not necessarily a means for pricing, payment or trade, but a means of sharing and distribution by automatically copying the materials or objects and sharing the copies with others.

Since the copyleft (or the inclusion of an allowance to redistribute copies in both source and binary forms of digital compositions in the licensing) can also be tied directly to the development of decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing networks that share free data, it holds an appeal for even capitalist, industrial societies in the reduction of cost for usage and redistribution of corporately-viable tools. The question that may need asking is this: "what can be copied?"

Copying is one thing that can easily solve the issue of service or goods redistribution, which, under past programs of state- or institution-mandated redistribution, resulted in the taking away of goods and services from one person to share them with another. What if services and goods were not only automated, but copyable and redistributable without deprecation in amount of service or goods against anyone in the society?

The copyleft, of course, is dependent upon further advances of technology, which, again, are produced by agents of capitalist industrial economies. The further that the data-replicating and networking capabilities of machines can reach, the more post scarcity settings which we can experience. Copying hardware, including robot hardware, over networks may be the next step towards such a post-scarcity world.