--- layout: default title: 'Freedom Continuum: From Access to Knowledge to Privacy (Transcript)' description: "Transcript of Sunil Abraham's presentation 'Freedom Continuum: From Access to Knowledge to Privacy', delivered in Cape Town, South Africa, on 11 December 2013." categories: [Resources, Sunil Abraham, Transcripts] permalink: /sunil/freedom-continuum-transcript/ created: 2026-06-28 --- **Freedom Continuum: From Access to Knowledge to Privacy (Transcript)** is a transcript of a presentation delivered by [Sunil Abraham](/sunil/) at the combined Third Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest and Open AIR Conference on Innovation and IP in Africa, held in Cape Town, South Africa, on 11 December 2013. The presentation introduces the concept of the "Freedom Continuum" as a framework for understanding different approaches to knowledge production, attribution, intellectual property and privacy. It concludes by using Leo Lionni's children's picture book [*Frederick*](/frederick/) as a thought experiment for reflecting on attribution, tangible labour and intangible labour. This transcript has been lightly edited for punctuation, paragraphing, spelling, typography and the correction of obvious transcription errors. The wording, sequence and substance of the presentation have not been altered. ## Transcript I'd like to begin by saying thank you to the organisers for having me here at Cape Town. Like Mark and Susan who spoke before me, I'm also not a lawyer, so please be generous when I make mistakes. It's also the first time that I am making this particular presentation, so please be gentle. What I'm trying to do is respond to Ahmed's challenge, which is how do we connect the access to knowledge world to other more fundamental rights such as privacy, and also perhaps building on Tobias's argument, which is that one size does not fit all. This diagram was produced by a gentleman called David Eaves. He works on managing communities; he has worked with the Mozilla Foundation. I had a conversation with David Eaves in Bangalore and I sketched for David the first two rows of this diagram, and then David went home and sketched all the other rows. What you have on the first row and on the far left is the proprietary model, and then we go right through No Derivatives, Non-Commercial, which is the Creative Commons (CC) model, then the classic GNU GPL—or sorry, that should be—there's a mistake on this diagram—the ShareAlike is GNU, but the next one should be just BSD without the GPL. The next line is ignoring proprietary rights, which is the pirate model, and then you have other models which even ignore the attribution layer: counterfeiting, plagiarism, claiming false attribution. So the important division, at least for me, on the freedom continuum—David Eaves has called this the openness continuum—is that part of the continuum has the attribution layer intact and part of the continuum does not have the attribution layer intact. Using this model, I'm hoping to explain a variety of phenomena, from what journalists do, to what Lawrence Lessig says, to what Aaron Swartz did, the Pirate Party, the free software world, the open content world, the open data world, and other groups such as Yes Men and Anonymous. Broadly divided into that part of the world which is protected by state regulation and that part of the world which is mostly protest and counter-power strategies. Very broadly, one could say that the more to the right you are, the more radical your position on these questions. So let's start with the middle. The four freedoms enabled by the General Public License, the GNU General Public License. The simple way to remember this is to compare software with your clothing. You can use your clothing for any purpose. If you want to change your profession from intellectual property academics to fashion designers, then you have the right to study your clothing. If you're unhappy with the boring colours you wear, you can modify your clothing, and you can also potentially share your clothing—both the original version or derivative versions—either for free or for a fee. I have not used the exact definition in the GNU General Public License, but in brackets you have the numbers within the General Public License from zero to three. I have split number two into two pieces: study and modify. But unlike tangible objects like clothing, I don't lose my copy of software when I share it with you, so you don't have the horror of seeing me naked, etc. So that's the advantage. The obligations are attribution, ShareAlike for derivative works, and source code availability to enable the freedom to study and the freedom to modify. So that's right in the middle of the diagram: the GNU General Public License. Moving on to the copy-centre licence, the BSD licence, distinct from the copyleft licence. With the copy-centre licence, derivative works can either be copyright or copy-centre or copyleft. You can change the licence of the derivative work. And because there is no ShareAlike obligation, I would like to see it as the fifth freedom. So five freedoms on the BSD licence. But still there is the obligation for attribution and source code availability for the original to enable the freedom to study and modify. Now let's go to the more restrictive side. Creative Commons licences, a bouquet of licences. And let's try and map them against the very same set of freedoms. There are options within this bouquet; some licences don't come with all the freedoms. The Non-Commercial licences interfere with the use freedom, the freedom of use. Study is not sufficiently distinct in the world of Creative Commons; there is no source code parallel. Perhaps there could be when authors, animators produce or distribute their works; they could perhaps also share drafts and drawings and source material. This is possible, but we don't really see it in practice. Those licences that have the "No Derivs" condition interfere with the freedom to modify. Again, those licences that have the Non-Commercial requirement interfere with the freedom to share. And the licences that have the ShareAlike requirement interfere with the freedom not to share. And the obligation remains attribution. So if you did the math, since I'm an engineer I always reduce it to numbers, five minus zero to two, you could end up with anywhere between five to three freedoms. So that's why I've put it to the left and it stretches right across on the continuum. Piracy—without the enabling licence, of course—you could do anything that you possibly can, so five plus plus. There is no source code availability, but you could potentially reverse engineer, not a foolproof methodology, and in some jurisdictions this is a user right, so this will be possible. But in most cases, again very interestingly, the pirates don't play around with attribution. Suppose I were to go to Pirate Bay and upload a torrent of Miley Cyrus's latest album, then I don't say the album is by me, I continue to say that this is Miley Cyrus's album. So attribution still seems to be sacred for the pirates. They don't play with it as much as I'd like them to play with it. This is my favourite artist from Bangalore, a gentleman called Kiran Subbaiah, and this is the licence terms for some of his works. I don't—I'm not sufficiently qualified to comment on things like original photocopy, but forgery and pirating welcome. So pirating we already dealt with on the previous slide, so let's look at the additional freedom provided by this licence. Okay, we'll do these also. So Anonymous—super interesting—the mask comes from the movie "V for Vendetta" and also the comic that preceded the movie by Alan Moore. And the most important event in the comic and most important scene in the movie is when V distributes thousands of copies of the mask, and then the citizens rise against the pervasive surveillance state and they all share V's identity, they all wear the common mask. And if you think of Anonymous in the copyright frame, what they do is really produce works of copyright. They produce software which helps you launch denial-of-service attacks, distributed denial-of-service attacks. Almost everything that they do is mostly the production of copyright works. This is what Anonymous does. And they have given us the secret or the recipe to deal with pervasive state surveillance, which is very important after Edward Snowden's disclosures. Similarly another group that hacks the identity or attribution layer in the freedom continuum is the Yes Men. So there was a big disaster in India where a factory producing—I don't know—fertiliser leaked and harmful substances were released into the environment. Many people died, many people continue to live, thousands of people continue to live with injuries even today, to this day. And the corporation Dow, which was—Dow, which was responsible for this accident, industrial accident, did not take responsibility, does not take responsibility even to this day. So the Yes Men pretended to be Dow representatives, managed to fool BBC World, got onto television on the anniversary of the tragedy in Bhopal, and then apologised on behalf of the corporation and promised to pay all those affected in Bhopal compensation. Almost immediately the stock value dropped in the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, wiping off $2 billion of market value. But because they were able to issue a statement correcting this, share value of course recovered. So they do—these are pranksters and they have conducted several pranks. You should go and visit the website to get an idea of what they have managed to accomplish. So what do Kiran Subbaiah and the Yes Men and Anonymous have in common? It's again six plus plus freedoms. You can do whatever it is that you can do, if you can do it then you are allowed to do it. And in particular the exciting part is you are attributing your work to others. So the anonymity afforded by the crowd or a shared pseudonymous identity renders requirements such as Know Your Customer or KYC—this is how we refer to it in India—and data retention requirements completely irrelevant. Therefore the state is unable to pin down a particular act against a particular person, and that is why they are so effective. Ideally this should go beyond just sharing intangible objects. We should also be sharing tangible objects. If we had a community where people shared SIM cards or shared phones or laptops, much more complicated for the state to figure out what exactly is going on. Or an even simpler example, if you left your Wi-Fi router open, then anybody could potentially be using your connection; you have what they call plausible deniability. Main takeaways: no one size fits all. Maybe a different way of saying it is: freedom is like the Kama Sutra, there is a multiplicity of positions. So just as shared knowledge is the way we deal with the access to knowledge challenge, shared identities is the way we should deal with the surveillance challenge. Shared identities is one way we can protect our privacy. To give you an example of how we can stretch these ideas, not really in a shared identity sense, is the UID project in India. It's a project that hopes to collect biometric information from all Indian citizens, iris data from both eyes and fingerprint data from all ten fingers, and use it to identify Indian citizens and authenticate Indian citizens every time they deal with the state or every time they deal with a variety of essential products and services. So the project that I'm trying to start called Plausible Deniability would be to scan my fingerprints and my iris and then upload that information onto the internet under an open licence, perhaps. And then have plausible deniability whenever the state says I subscribed for a telephone connection or a broadband connection, I will say, "Can't be me, my biometrics are up on the internet." Another smaller takeaway, and since I have a child and I've stopped reading thick books, I only read books about mice to her, is that if attribution is no longer sacred, as hopefully the freedom continuum argues, then intangible labour is not necessarily more important than tangible labour and vice versa. This story, parable perhaps, "Frederick" by Leo Lionni, is the story of a mouse that engages in intangible labour, producing poetry and making speeches, who lives with a family of other mice that engage in tangible labour, and how they have a deal amongst themselves and how they work for one another. So it's a nice story and you should read it. This is my scholarly reference for this research finding. These are the limitations of my framework. I won't dwell on them because I've run out of time. I'll just use the opportunity to plug a workshop on Friday at 9:00 AM. The workshop is titled "What Technological Patent Pools Can Learn from the Access to Medicines Movement". Professor Jorge Contreras is organising this workshop. I'm supporting him, and it would be lovely if some of you can join us at that workshop. Our countries depend upon cheap access devices, sub-$50, sub-$100 devices, and access to those devices is going to be stopped unless we can address the patent problem just as we did for medicines. Thank you.