Information Commons Movement

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Description

Anthony McCann:


"The term (Information Commons) has become a banner of action for a concerted lobby group of public policy activists and legal scholars from all over the United States, centred primarily in and around the civic communities of Washington D.C. Even more specifically, some of the most intense lobbying for the concept of the “information commons” can be located around a series of interconnected websites, in particular http://www.info-commons.org, and http://onthecommons.org. The first is the website of the Information Commons Project of the ALA, run by Frederick Emrich, a librarian and policy activist.

This website also serves as something of a nexus for all three notions of “the (information) commons”. The second is a private website run by David Bollier, who was a founding member of the non-profit organisation Public Knowledge, and author of the influential book Silent Theft (2002), a veritable bible for the new “commons” movements in the United States. David Bollier might easily be taken as the flag-bearer of the cause, and it is his work that will provide much of the focus of this article. The websites run by Emrich and Bollier have provided a focus for thinkers such as Howard Besser, Yochai Benkler, Jonathan Tasini, and Jorge Reina Schement. Other people that might be included as working in the spirit of the “information commons” lobby, sometimes referred to optimistically as a “movement”, are legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, author of The Future of Ideas (2001), communications scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Anarchist in the Library (2004), and legal scholar James Boyle, author of Shamans, Software and Spleens (1997), among a number of others. I would argue that these people have become key drivers of meaning in discourses of “information commons”." (http://www.beyondthecommons.com/enclosurewithin.pdf)


More Information

Related Movements

  1. The Free Culture Movement at http://www.freeculture.org
  2. The Participatory Culture Foundation, formerly Downhill Battle, at http://participatoryculture.org/
  3. The anti-DMCA group fights the free speech restrictions inherent in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, at http://www.anti-dmca.org/
  4. The Center for Digital Democracy, at http://www.democraticmedia.org/ is a nonprofit organization working to ensure that the digital media systems serve the public interest.
  5. The French group Vecam, at http://www.vecam.org/