How do you contextualize the movement to create, curate, and protect an intellectual commons (of which Creative Commons is a part) within the broad concept and history of the commons?
Unfortunately, Garrett Hardin’s famous 1968 essay in Science on the “tragedy of the commons” has cast a long shadow on the commons. Mainstream economists and conservative political groups seized upon the “tragedy” paradigm. They saw it as a way to promote the idea that only private property rights can truly solve the problem of over-exploitation of a shared resource. They helped turn the “tragedy of the commons into an economic truism that simply isn’t really true. (As he later admitted, Hardin was discussing an open access regime, in which there is no community and no rules, which of course is not a commons.)
With her 1990 book, Governing the Commons, however, Indiana University political scientist Elinor Ostrom marshaled many empirical examples of natural resources that have been managed as commons for decades or even hundreds of years. She identified some recurrent principles that seem to make a commons work – things like clearly defined boundaries around a resource; group monitoring of usage of the resource; and graduated sanctions against free riders or those who might abuse a resource....
Starting in the 1980s and 1990s, an entirely different group of academics – mostly law scholars – helped develop the idea of the intellectual commons. Peter Jaszi, David Lange, Pamela Samuelson, Jessica Litman, James Boyle, Yochai Benkler, Larry Lessig and others took the public domain seriously. A number of notable activists such Mitch Kapor, John Perry Barlow, Fred von Lohmann and Gigi Sohn also helped bring the problems of copyright law to public attention.
As the Internet took off in the 1990s, and the film and record industries began to win major expansions of copyright protection, these law scholars and activists helped re-conceptualize the public domain. They re-cast it as something worth protecting. People started to realize that the public domain is necessary for new types of creativity. This challenged the orthodoxies of mainstream copyright law and economics....
What parts of the book did you find most fun and most frustrating to write?
It was great fun interviewing key figures in the free culture movement – Larry Lessig, Richard Stallman, Joi Ito, Ronaldo Lemos, Jamie Boyle and many others — to ask questions that had always perplexed me, and to figure out how the movement evolved fitfully over time....
It was exciting to learn that this movement is not just about law scholars tweaking boring copyright licenses – but about the rise of a new type of international political culture. The licenses have attracted passionate musicians from Brazil, resourceful hackers from Amsterdam, talented remix artists from Japan, educators from South Africa concerned with open education and open access publishing....
The most difficult challenge in writing Viral Spiral was identifying the overarching narrative. There was such a dense, confusing mass of material, participants and historical developments to sort through. I had to immerse myself in vast quantities of information, interviews, Web content and personal experiences – and somehow tease out an intelligible storyline. If my book achieves anything, I hope it confirms that the rise of the digital commons is truly one of the great stories of our time....
PS: Also see our past posts (1, 2) on Viral Spiral and our posts on Bollier.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/06/2009 02:43:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
