Non-restrictive proprietary licenses and capital. Analysis on the determinations of openness in knowledge-intensive commodities

Abstract

The philosophy of openness champions the free and unrestricted use of knowledge-intensive products of labour, their dissemination without those burdens imposed by intellectual proprietary rights. For many authors from critical traits of thought, openness posed an irresolvable contradiction to the capitalist relationship of production, in so far as it evidences the impossibility of subduing cognitive commodities to the logic of value-producing. This article offers an alternative interpretation on the relationship between knowledge-intensive commodities and the production of relative surplus value; and it does so by critically reconstructing from a Marxian perspective those determinants openness is under. We thereby elucidate that those social potencies borne by such concrete are actually the ones belonging to capital; that the movement of total social capital towards its self-valorisation yields the proliferation of non-restrictive proprietary licenses. The automobile and energy solutions Tesla will be considered as a case of study