This talk has been presented by Vincent BACHELET, during the 2019 edition with the thematic “Legal aspects of digital commons”.
Valorising digital commons through an IP license
CoopCycle is an association founded in 2016 from the meeting of a bike delivery man and a developer. They were united by the observation that the current delivery model proposed by the Uber Eats and Deliveroo platforms does not offer decent working conditions to delivery people. They decided to create an alternative based on the model of digital commons. Today, CoopCycle presents itself as a common that goes beyond software alone, the resource at the centre of the project being more the working conditions of the deliverers. This translates into the pooling of various services such as communication, canvassing assistance and response to calls for projects, etc., within an international federation whose governance is ensured collectively by the deliverers of the collectives involved in the project. This desire to build itself as a digital community initially led CoopCycle to distribute its code under a free license, but this model had several drawbacks in view of the objective of offering better conditions to delivery companies and, more generally, to improve the qualification of the work. The project is based on two tools: an open license that discriminates against commercial use, and a federation ensuring the governance of the common, as well as its financing via a system of contributions. This response, still imperfect, to the difficulties encountered by any community project wishing to ensure its sustainability, constitutes a basis around which we wish to engage in discussions with other actors of digital communities.
About Vincent BACHELET :
Vice-president legal department, Coopcycle
Lawyer in intellectual property and digital law, specialized in issues related to free licenses and the organization of digital communities, Vincent is a consultant in the Inno3 team while at the same time conducting a CIFRE thesis on the legal tools for the valorization of digital commons. Vincent is also vice-president of the legal department of the association Coopycle.
