Third Enclosure

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The concept of Enclosure refers to the private appropriation of hitherto common goods, while the new concept of an eventual Third Enclosusre refers to the appropriation of individually created material by corporations or sharing platforms.


Citations

Michel Bauwens:

"The First Enclosures took part in 15th-18th England, and refers to the loss of the common agricultural lands of the medieval peasantry (see the entry on the Commons; which set the stage for the emergence of capitalism: James Boyle has eloquently written about the Second Enclosures of the copyright era; especially its dramatic extension and the impoverishment of the Public Domain.

But it’s time to give a name to the new processes of appropriation which are more and more common on the free videosharing sites and most recently evidenced in the user agreement of the mashup project of the Washington Post. Let’s calll it the Third Enclosures of self created content! In short, participating in the project means that you are giving your intellectual property to the publisher. This is done because most people, and that includes myself, usually never bother to read the user agreements, or because we think that we can not make money anyway. So we are already happy to be published. This is a dangerous impulse, and we should insist that content creators own their creations, not the platforms, and choose those platforms, like Democracy TV or Ourmedia, which respects this." (http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=402)


Rik Moens:

"Many of these new “Web 2.0″ businesses tout the “convenience" of doing the opposite: entrusting our personal and business data to their specialised Web-based servers, and then manipulating that data remotely via AJAX-driven messaging from our Web browsers, so that all that confidential material lives on the service’s data store.

Let’s say you start using some of those. Now, you have an entirely new class of worries: Your files are accessible only when your Internet connection is up. They’re at the mercy of your vendor’s security problems, reliability, management, and funding shortfalls. They may vanish if the firms change their business models, go broke, or undergo many other types of abrupt change, possibly even just to silence critics. Not only may the firms pry into and abuse knowledge of your personal affairs, so may their business partners and people with both legitimate and illegitimate access. Check the fine print in your service agreements: You’ll probably find out that there not only are big holes in your privacy, but also that you specifically consented to them.

One motive force behind open source was getting away from cruddy software that was in someone else’s control — that you could not control, modify or commission modifications of, and so on. The Web 2.0 schemes recreate that very problem, and then compound it, in that the software isn’t even running on your machine at all, plus they get real-time information on your activity and interests (the spyware author’s dream!), so they can manipulate you with “sticky" Web site features, directed advertising, and feeds of information about you to others.

Open source isn’t a slogan; it’s facts on the ground. When our community decided it was fed up with abusive licence agreements and unfixable software, it didn’t skulk about trying to weasel through holes in licence enforcement, or whine, or ask for legal protection. It sat down and wrote from-scratch replacements that better suited its needs.

We proved the merit of our work by using it — by living it, by improving it and lengthening its reach. We proved we were serious about getting out from under the thumb of proprietary software arrangements by doing the necessary redesign and coding. Thus, the open source fan’s characteristic response to a neat hosted Web service isn’t “Cool. Where do I sign up?" but rather “Cool. I wonder if there’s a reasonable way to do that with my own computing resources using open source." (http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=403)


Free/open alternatives to commercial sharing platforms

From http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=403

Rik Moen recommends:


  • You like Del.icio.us; we have Annotea Ubimarks, Unalog, De.lirio.us, and Scuttle.
  • You like Backpack; we have backpack-clone.
  • You like LiveJournal; we have WordPress, the blogs portion of Drupal, and others. (Drupal also has beta modules that are aiming to clone the functionality of Backpack and upcoming.org. Flickr and digg.com emulation has been attempted but there’s not yet working code.)
  • You like GMail; we have webmail packages.
  • You like .Mac/iCalShare/iCal Exchange; we have Hula.
  • You like Flickr; we have Gallery and the Open Media and Image Exchange (OMIXX) project.
  • You like digg.com; we have Pligg aka Menéame.
  • You like Ta-da List; we have Bla-bla List and TaskTHIS!.
  • You like Basecamp; we have nothing quite like it, but Important Projects is likely to develop one in time. (update, see the ActiveCollab project)
  • You like Google Maps and/or Frappr; we have engines such as MapServer Enterprise that can be used to develop mapping services and Frappr clones. (Frappr is a mashup based on the proprietary Google Maps service’s public programming interface.)
  • You like SubEthaEdit; we have Gobby and MateEdit."

(http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=403)