In recent decades, activists interested in making knowledge universally available for human purposes have created a number of alternatives to private intellectual property rights. Broadly, these are called “open-access” licenses, and include such things as Copyleft, Patentleft, Creative Commons licenses, and BiOS (Biological Open Source) licenses. These and other licenses have been used to protect the accessible status of open-source software, scientific discoveries with applications to agriculture and medicine, cultural products and other forms of knowledge. In a democratic socialist economy, while there may be a residual role for private intellectual property rights and limited patents, in general scientific and technical knowledge and information would be treated as part of a knowledge commons.