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URL = http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/114-2/Benkler_FINAL_YLJ114-2.pdf
URL = http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/114-2/Benkler_FINAL_YLJ114-2.pdf


"The paper offers a framework to explain large scale effective practices of sharing private, excludable goods. It starts with case studies of distributed computing and carpooling as motivating problems. It then suggests a definition for “shareable goods�? as goods that are lumpy and mid-grained in size, and explains why goods with these characteristics will have systematic overcapacity relative to the requirements of their owners. The paper then uses comparative transaction costs analysis, focused on information characteristics in particular, combined with an analysis of diversity of motivations, to suggest when social sharing will be better than secondary markets to reallocate this overcapacity to non-owners who require the functionality. The paper concludes with broader observations about the role of sharing as a modality of economic production as compared to markets and hierarchies (whether states or firms), with a particular emphasis on sharing practices among individuals who are strangers or weakly related, its relationship to technological change, and some implications for contemporary policy choices regarding wireless regulation, intellectual property, and communications network design."
"The paper offers a framework to explain large scale effective practices of sharing private, excludable goods. It starts with case studies of distributed computing and carpooling as motivating problems. It then suggests a definition for “shareable goods" as goods that are lumpy and mid-grained in size, and explains why goods with these characteristics will have systematic overcapacity relative to the requirements of their owners. The paper then uses comparative transaction costs analysis, focused on information characteristics in particular, combined with an analysis of diversity of motivations, to suggest when social sharing will be better than secondary markets to reallocate this overcapacity to non-owners who require the functionality. The paper concludes with broader observations about the role of sharing as a modality of economic production as compared to markets and hierarchies (whether states or firms), with a particular emphasis on sharing practices among individuals who are strangers or weakly related, its relationship to technological change, and some implications for contemporary policy choices regarding wireless regulation, intellectual property, and communications network design."
(http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/114-2/Benkler_FINAL_YLJ114-2.pdf )
(http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/114-2/Benkler_FINAL_YLJ114-2.pdf )


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"None of this is to say that nonmarket and decentralized production will completely displace firms and markets. That is not the point. The point is that the networked information economy makes it possible for nonmarket and decentralized models of production to increase their presence alongside the more traditional models, causing some displacement, but increasing the diversity of ways of organizing production rather than replacing one with the other.This diversity of ways of organizing production and consumption, in turn, opens a range of new opportunities for pursuing core political values of liberal societies -- democracy, individual freedom, and social justice."  
"None of this is to say that nonmarket and decentralized production will completely displace firms and markets. That is not the point. The point is that the networked information economy makes it possible for nonmarket and decentralized models of production to increase their presence alongside the more traditional models, causing some displacement, but increasing the diversity of ways of organizing production rather than replacing one with the other.This diversity of ways of organizing production and consumption, in turn, opens a range of new opportunities for pursuing core political values of liberal societies -- democracy, individual freedom, and social justice."  
(http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?52+Duke+L.+J.+1245/)
(http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?52+Duke+L.+J.+1245/)


===James Boyle, on the [[Public Domain]] and the Second Enclosure movement===
===James Boyle, on the [[Public Domain]] and the Second Enclosure movement===
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“'''Copyright, Commodification and Culture: Locating the Public Domain''',�?
“'''Copyright, Commodification and Culture: Locating the Public Domain''',"


URL = http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=663652
URL = http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=663652
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Comment by David Bollier of the On The Commons weblog: "Georgetown law professor Julie E. Cohen has a path-breaking law review article on copyright law’s failure to recognize the “centrality of borrowing, collaboration and environment to creative practice of all sorts." Cohen’s paper, “'''Copyright, Commodification and Culture: Locating the Public Domain'''," calls for "a sociology of creative practice" and analyzes why the “public domain," as traditionally understood in the law, fails to recognize the actual dynamics of creativity.  
Comment by David Bollier of the On The Commons weblog: "Georgetown law professor Julie E. Cohen has a path-breaking law review article on copyright law’s failure to recognize the “centrality of borrowing, collaboration and environment to creative practice of all sorts." Cohen’s paper, “'''Copyright, Commodification and Culture: Locating the Public Domain'''," calls for "a sociology of creative practice" and analyzes why the “public domain," as traditionally understood in the law, fails to recognize the actual dynamics of creativity.  


Cohen writes: "Although economic modeling can contribute to the understanding of markets for creative goods,…. by itself it cannot provide adequate theoretical foundation for understanding the dynamics that drive the development of artistic culture, and therefore it cannot provide adequate theoretical foundations for copyright policy….Creativity and creative practice are social phenomena that are both broader than and antecedent to the institutions with which both economics and more broadly political economy are concerned…. If copyright law is to recognize a right of creative access to the cultural landscape, it is precisely this right that must be limited, yet that is precisely what copyright law increasingly refuses to do. Instead, conventional wisdom holds that any curtailment of derivative rights would reduce “incentives�? to invest in works of mass culture."
Cohen writes: "Although economic modeling can contribute to the understanding of markets for creative goods,…. by itself it cannot provide adequate theoretical foundation for understanding the dynamics that drive the development of artistic culture, and therefore it cannot provide adequate theoretical foundations for copyright policy….Creativity and creative practice are social phenomena that are both broader than and antecedent to the institutions with which both economics and more broadly political economy are concerned…. If copyright law is to recognize a right of creative access to the cultural landscape, it is precisely this right that must be limited, yet that is precisely what copyright law increasingly refuses to do. Instead, conventional wisdom holds that any curtailment of derivative rights would reduce “incentives" to invest in works of mass culture."


"Attention to the social parameters of creative practice suggests that the common in culture is not a separate place, but a distributed property of social space. The legally constituted common should both mirror and express this disaggregation. The paper offers a different organizing metaphor for the relationship between the public and the proprietary that matches the theory and practice of creativity more accurately: The common in culture is the cultural landscape within which creative practice takes place." (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=663652)
"Attention to the social parameters of creative practice suggests that the common in culture is not a separate place, but a distributed property of social space. The legally constituted common should both mirror and express this disaggregation. The paper offers a different organizing metaphor for the relationship between the public and the proprietary that matches the theory and practice of creativity more accurately: The common in culture is the cultural landscape within which creative practice takes place." (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=663652)
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===Brett Frischmann, an economic theory for the [[Commons]]===
===Brett Frischmann, an economic theory for the [[Commons]]===


Brett Frischmann, a professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law has published an essay, "'''An Economic Theory of Infrastructure and Commons Management''',�? (89 Minnesota Law Review 4, April 2005). “a rigorous, clear-headed explanation of the economic and social benefits of commons-based infrastructures:
Brett Frischmann, a professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law has published an essay, "'''An Economic Theory of Infrastructure and Commons Management''', (89 Minnesota Law Review 4, April 2005). “a rigorous, clear-headed explanation of the economic and social benefits of commons-based infrastructures:


“The basic problem with relying on markets to allocate access to common assets, Frischmann explains, is that the market mechanism exhibits a bias for outputs that generate observable and appropriable returns at the expense of outputs that generate positive externalities [public benefits that cannot be captured by market players]. This is not surprising because the whole point of relying on property rights and the market is to enable private appropriation and discourage externalities. The problem with relying on the market is that potential positive externalities may remain unrealized if they cannot be easily valued and appropriated by those that produce them, even though society as a whole may be better off if those potential externalities were actually produced. “Positive externalities�? are precisely those “goods�? that benefit all of us, as commoners – clean air, access to information, an open Internet, functioning ecosystems. Yet neoclassical economics and the laws based on it generally discount or ignore these types of value; they assume that monetized forms of individual property are the only important types of value worth maximizing. By looking at “infrastructure�? through the lens of the commons, however, we can begin to appreciate the positive, non-market externalities that a resource actually generates – and begin to design public policies to protect these benefits on their own merits.�?
“The basic problem with relying on markets to allocate access to common assets, Frischmann explains, is that the market mechanism exhibits a bias for outputs that generate observable and appropriable returns at the expense of outputs that generate positive externalities [public benefits that cannot be captured by market players]. This is not surprising because the whole point of relying on property rights and the market is to enable private appropriation and discourage externalities. The problem with relying on the market is that potential positive externalities may remain unrealized if they cannot be easily valued and appropriated by those that produce them, even though society as a whole may be better off if those potential externalities were actually produced. “Positive externalities" are precisely those “goods" that benefit all of us, as commoners – clean air, access to information, an open Internet, functioning ecosystems. Yet neoclassical economics and the laws based on it generally discount or ignore these types of value; they assume that monetized forms of individual property are the only important types of value worth maximizing. By looking at “infrastructure" through the lens of the commons, however, we can begin to appreciate the positive, non-market externalities that a resource actually generates – and begin to design public policies to protect these benefits on their own merits."
(Commentary from On the Commons blog, at http://onthecommons.org/node/613; original essay by Frischmann at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=704463; a bio on the author at http://www.luc.edu/law/faculty/frischmann.shtml)
(Commentary from On the Commons blog, at http://onthecommons.org/node/613; original essay by Frischmann at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=704463; a bio on the author at http://www.luc.edu/law/faculty/frischmann.shtml)


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When the historical advancement of democracy is seen like this, the current position of “the new movements‿—arguing that “another world is possible‿ and at the same time fiercely defending the existing welfare state arrangements—becomes less paradoxical. Neoliberalism is perceived as reactionary. The foes of the welfare state are truly “winding the clock backwards‿. Therefore we fight to defend what already exists. But there is something to fight for beyond the instable truce of the so-called mixed economy of Keynesian times. Therefore, we also fight for what does not yet exist."
When the historical advancement of democracy is seen like this, the current position of “the new movements‿—arguing that “another world is possible‿ and at the same time fiercely defending the existing welfare state arrangements—becomes less paradoxical. Neoliberalism is perceived as reactionary. The foes of the welfare state are truly “winding the clock backwards‿. Therefore we fight to defend what already exists. But there is something to fight for beyond the instable truce of the so-called mixed economy of Keynesian times. Therefore, we also fight for what does not yet exist."


===Eben Moglen on the DotCommunist Manifesto===
===Eben Moglen on the DotCommunist Manifesto===
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'''Introductory paragraph''': "A specter is haunting multinational capitalism — the specter of free information. All the powers of "globalism" have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcize this specter: Microsoft and Disney, the World Trade Organization, the United States Congress and the European Commission. Where are the advocates of freedom in the new digital society who have not been decried as pirates, anarchists, communists? Have we not seen that many of those hurling the epithets were merely thieves in power, whose talk of "intellectual property" was nothing more than an attempt to retain unjustifiable privileges in a society irrevocably changing? But it is acknowledged by all the Powers of Globalism that the movement for freedom is itself a Power, and it is high time that we should publish our views in the face of the whole world, to meet this nursery tale of the Specter of Free Information with a Manifesto of our own."
'''Introductory paragraph''': "A specter is haunting multinational capitalism — the specter of free information. All the powers of "globalism" have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcize this specter: Microsoft and Disney, the World Trade Organization, the United States Congress and the European Commission. Where are the advocates of freedom in the new digital society who have not been decried as pirates, anarchists, communists? Have we not seen that many of those hurling the epithets were merely thieves in power, whose talk of "intellectual property" was nothing more than an attempt to retain unjustifiable privileges in a society irrevocably changing? But it is acknowledged by all the Powers of Globalism that the movement for freedom is itself a Power, and it is high time that we should publish our views in the face of the whole world, to meet this nursery tale of the Specter of Free Information with a Manifesto of our own."
===Marshall Sahlins on The Original Affluent Society===
'''The Original Affluent Society'''
URL = http://www.appropriate-economics.org/materials/Sahlins.pdf
Marshall Sahlins, celebrated anthropologist, was one of the first to challenge the industrial-era myth of progress, showing in his essay on The Original Affluent Society, that tribal economies were in fact operating in a context of abundance.
"When Herskovits (13) was writing his Economic Anthropology (1958), it was common anthropological practice to take the Bushmen or the native Australians as "a classic illustration; of a people whose economic resources are of the scantiest", so precariously situated that "only the most intense application makes survival possible". Today the "classic" understanding can be fairly reversed- on evidence largely from these two groups. A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.  The most obvious, immediate conclusion is that the people do not work hard. The average length of time per person per day put into the appropriation and preparation of food was four or five hours. Moreover, they do not work continuously. The subsistence quest was highly intermittent. It would stop for the time being when the people had procured enough for the time being. Which left them plenty of time to spare. Clearly in subsistence as in other sectors of production, we have to do with an economy of specific, limited objectives. By hunting and gathering these objectives are apt to be irregularly accomplished, so the work pattern becomes correspondingly erratic."
===Clay Shirky on the web as evolvable system===
''In Praise of Evolvable Systems'''
One of the best essays explainging why the Web became the next big thing: because, despite its flaws, it was designed as an evolvable thing.
URL = http://www.shirky.com/writings/evolve.html
===David Skrbina, the participatory worldview===
'''Participation, Organization, and Mind: Toward a Participatory Worldview.'''
URL = http://www.bath.ac.uk/carpp/davidskrbina/summarycontents.htm
"As I conceive it, the concept of 'participation' is fundamentally a mental phenomenon, and therefore a key aspect of the Participatory Worldview is the idea of 'participatory mind'. In the Mechanistic Worldview mind is a mysterious entity, attributed only to humans and perhaps higher mammals. In the Participatory Worldview mind is a naturalistic, holistic, and universal phenomenon. Human mind is then seen as a particular manifestation of this universal nature. Philosophical systems in which mind is present in all things are considered versions of panpsychism, and hence I argue for a system that I call 'participatory panpsychism'. My particular articulation of participatory panpsychism is based on ideas from chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics, and is called 'hylonoism'. In support of my theory I draw from an extensive historical analysis, both philosophical and scientific. I explore the notion of participation in its historical context, from its beginnings in Platonic philosophy through modern-day usages. I also show that panpsychism has deep intellectual roots, and I demonstrate that many notable philosophers and scientists either endorsed or were sympathetic to it. Significantly, these panpsychist views often coexist and correspond quite closely to various aspects of participatory philosophy. Human society is viewed as an important instance of a dynamic physical system exhibiting properties of mind. These properties, based on the idea of participatory exchange of matter and energy, are argued to be universal properties of physical systems. They provide an articulation of the universal presence of participatory mind. Therefore I conclude that participation is the central ontological fact, and may be seen as the core of a new conception of nature and reality."
(http://www.bath.ac.uk/carpp/davidskrbina/summarycontents.htm)
Thesis Title: '''Participation, Organization, and Mind: Toward a Participatory Worldview.'''
Book: David Skrbina. Panpsychism in the West. MIT Press, 2005
David Skrbina is a student and continuator of Henryk Skolimowsky's work on the Participatory Mind
"The astrophysicist John Archibald Wheeler may have been the first to announce, in an articulate way (in the early 1970s), the idea of the Participatory Universe. He wrote, "The universe does not exist 'out there' independent of us. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening. We are participators. In some strange sense this is a Participatory Universe."
In the early 1980s, drawing from the insights of Wheeler, on the one hand ("In some strange sense this is a participatory universe"), and building on the insights of Teilhard de Chardin ("We are evolution conscious of itself"), I have developed the theory of the Participatory Mind. This theory, on the one hand, attempts to vindicate the claims of the New Physics about the participatory nature of the universe; and, on the other hand, attempts to fill the missing dimension in Teilhard's opus — which wonderfully describes the unfoldment of evolution but misses the role of the mind in the whole process. Consciousness is one of the key terms in Teilhard's story. But strangely, it is consciousness as if there were no minds. The theory of the Participatory mind provides an epistemological foundation to Teilhard's cosmology.  The participatory theory of mind maintains that our world is the creation of our mind. But not in a solipsistic manner a la Berkeley (esse-percipi), but in a participatory manner: we have become aware that we can elicit from reality only that much as our mind is capable of conceiving. This is precisely the sense in which we say that we dwell in a participatory universe.  We elicit what is potentially 'out there' in continuous acts of participation. Participation is of the essence not only in our cognitive acts but also in our social activities and political endeavors. Tell me what you participate in and I will tell you who you are; and what the meaning of your life is. We become that in which we participate. As we participate so we become. If we participate all the time in trivial matters, we become trivial persons."
(http://epc.eco-tea.com/articles/cosmocracy.html)
===Bruno Theret, on the tradition of 'civil socialism'===
The peer to peer movement differs from the traditional socialist movement in that it does not rely on the state, but on autonomous developments within civil society. Such a movement was prefigured by what Bruno Theret calls the tradition of civil socialism. Very interesting French-language essay.
The essay by Bruno Theret is at http://fr.pekea-fr.org/?p=11&c=2-3-Theret.html
Theret also refers to three historical traditions necessary to develop these ideas further: 1) the pre-marxist socialism of Pierre Leroux, very strong in the revolutions of 1848; 2) the federal or guild socialism of Karl Polanly, author of the landmark book The Great Transformation; 3) the contemporary neo-communautarian theory of Michael Walzer.
===Evan Thompson, on the enactive theory of consciousness===
'''Title: Human Consciousness: from intersubjectivity to interbeing'''
URL = http://www.philosophy.ucf.edu/pcsfetz1.html
Evan Thompson contrasts three approaches to human consciousness. He finds that both the cognitivist and the connectionist approaches rely on a undue separation between a reprentational mind and the world it represents. The enactive approach, pioneered by Varela and others, on the other hand, is based on a structural coupling of the brain, the body, and its environment.
"''Human consciousness is not located in the head, but is immanent in the living body and the interpersonal social world. One’s consciousness of oneself as an embodied individual embedded in the world emerges through empathic cognition of others. Consciousness is not some peculiar qualitative aspect of private mental states, nor a property of the brain inside the skull; it is a relational mode of being of the whole person embedded in the natural environment and the human social world''."
More by Evan Thompson at http://individual.utoronto.ca/evant/
===Raoul Victor, on [[Free Software]], the sharing culture, and Marxism===
'''The Visibility of the Revolutionary Project and New Technologies'''
URL = http://dorax.club.fr/Visibility.htm
Raoul is the pen name of a French socialist activist. His thesis is that the widespread emergence of sharing practices makes possible a visioning of what a non-capitalist future would look like, something hitherto impossible, and on of the key sources for the failure of radical social change efforts. This is a key text from within the Marxist tradition.
'''[[Free Software]] and Market Relations'''
URL = http://www.oekonux.org/texts/marketrelations.html
This essay defends the idea that free sofware is a germ of what the future society may look like, and is translated from a debate within a French Marxist group.
'''Marxism and [[Free Software]], an analysis by Raoul Victor'''
URL = http://www.oekonux-konferenz.de/dokumentation/texte/Victor.html 
The author examines three questions: 1) To which extent is Marxism confirmed by the reality of free-software? 2) To which extent is Marxism questioned by this reality? 3) Which relation between class struggle and free-software?
"Marx did not know computers, nor software. But the reality of the contradictions that gave birth to free-software is a perfect confirmation of his vision of history. But that is not all. Free-software is also an evidence of the Marxist idea that the post-capitalist society can be a worldwide non-merchant society, and not a bureaucratic wage-slave society, for example. Finally, it confirms the Marxist conviction that communist ideas are not the product of some brilliant individual brain but the movement of capitalist society itself. Even if many hackers still think that "Marxism" means a hundred million deaths in the 20th century, they are acting, without knowing it, some of the basic ideas of the true Marxism.
To which extent is Marxism questioned by the reality of free-software? For Marxism there is no possibility of development of a communist economic form within capitalism. The revolutionary class, the working class, is an exploited class, without power on the economy. It cannot have the power to build a new social organization without making first a political revolution, contrary to the past where the revolutionary class, the bourgeoisie, for example, had built its economic power within feudalism, within the old society. Graham Seaman, in a mail in the English list said that this idea "doesn't seem to be ever explicit in Marx. But it certainly seems to be taken for granted by every communist after Marx".
Marx wrote about the workers cooperatives, which were an important part of the workers movement in the 19th century. He said that the capitalist-worker relation was to a certain degree eliminated inside the cooperative. But he insisted on the fact that they remained prisoners of the surrounding capitalist world, that the workers were in fact their own collective capitalists and that they would not resist to the development of the trusts and monopolies. Marx never developed a theory about a possible coexistence between capitalism and lasting, stable germs of communism.
In that sense, if we understand free-software as germs of a communist society, it contradicts a specific aspect of Marxism. But many questions remain: 1) Can these germs easily coexist with capitalism? 2) Is a war between the two worlds avoidable? 3) Can these germs develop to the point of supplanting capitalism? 4) Is this possible without a political revolution?"
The Debate in French continues, at http://membres.lycos.fr/resdisint/Arch_capit/020629JCrt.htm ; http://membres.lycos.fr/resdisint/Arch_capit/020608RVrt.htm ; all these discussions take place at http://membres.lycos.fr/resdisint/

Revision as of 15:21, 6 March 2007

Richard Barbrook on the 'High-tech Gift Economy'

The High-tech Gift Economy

URL = http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_12/barbrook/

This is a seminal essay that was often discussed during the first phase of the dotcom era. Abstract from First Monday: "During the Sixties, the New Left created a new form of radical politics: anarcho-communism. Above all, the Situationists and similar groups believed that the tribal gift economy proved that individuals could successfully live together without needing either the state or the market. From May 1968 to the late Nineties, this utopian vision of anarcho-communism has inspired community media and DIY culture activists. Within the universities, the gift economy already was the primary method of socialising labour. From its earliest days, the technical structure and social mores of the Net has ignored intellectual property. Although the system has expanded far beyond the university, the self-interest of Net users perpetuates this hi-tech gift economy. As an everyday activity, users circulate free information as e-mail, on listservs, in newsgroups, within on-line conferences and through Web sites. As shown by the Apache and Linux programs, the hi-tech gift economy is even at the forefront of software development. Contrary to the purist vision of the New Left, anarcho-communism on the Net can only exist in a compromised form. Money-commodity and gift relations are not just in conflict with each other, but also co-exist in symbiosis. The 'New Economy' of cyberspace is an advanced form of social democracy."


Yochai Benkler on Peer Production

Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm.

URL = http://www.yale.edu/yalelj/112/BenklerWEB.pdf


The Political Economy of the Commons

URL = http://www.upgrade-cepis.org/issues/2003/3/up4-3Benkler.pdf

The concept of Information Commons is defined by Yochai Benchler in "The Political Economy of Commons", in Upgrade, juin 2003, vol. IV, n° 3


Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production.

URL = http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/114-2/Benkler_FINAL_YLJ114-2.pdf

"The paper offers a framework to explain large scale effective practices of sharing private, excludable goods. It starts with case studies of distributed computing and carpooling as motivating problems. It then suggests a definition for “shareable goods" as goods that are lumpy and mid-grained in size, and explains why goods with these characteristics will have systematic overcapacity relative to the requirements of their owners. The paper then uses comparative transaction costs analysis, focused on information characteristics in particular, combined with an analysis of diversity of motivations, to suggest when social sharing will be better than secondary markets to reallocate this overcapacity to non-owners who require the functionality. The paper concludes with broader observations about the role of sharing as a modality of economic production as compared to markets and hierarchies (whether states or firms), with a particular emphasis on sharing practices among individuals who are strangers or weakly related, its relationship to technological change, and some implications for contemporary policy choices regarding wireless regulation, intellectual property, and communications network design." (http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/114-2/Benkler_FINAL_YLJ114-2.pdf )


Freedom in the Commons: Towards a Political Economy of Information

URL = http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?52+Duke+L.+J.+1245/

"None of this is to say that nonmarket and decentralized production will completely displace firms and markets. That is not the point. The point is that the networked information economy makes it possible for nonmarket and decentralized models of production to increase their presence alongside the more traditional models, causing some displacement, but increasing the diversity of ways of organizing production rather than replacing one with the other.This diversity of ways of organizing production and consumption, in turn, opens a range of new opportunities for pursuing core political values of liberal societies -- democracy, individual freedom, and social justice." (http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?52+Duke+L.+J.+1245/)


James Boyle, on the Public Domain and the Second Enclosure movement

The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain

URL = http://www.law.duke.edu/pd/papers/boyle.pdf


The Opposite of Property

URL = http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/foreword.pdf


Julia Cohen, on copyright law and sharing

“Copyright, Commodification and Culture: Locating the Public Domain,"

URL = http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=663652

Comment by David Bollier of the On The Commons weblog: "Georgetown law professor Julie E. Cohen has a path-breaking law review article on copyright law’s failure to recognize the “centrality of borrowing, collaboration and environment to creative practice of all sorts." Cohen’s paper, “Copyright, Commodification and Culture: Locating the Public Domain," calls for "a sociology of creative practice" and analyzes why the “public domain," as traditionally understood in the law, fails to recognize the actual dynamics of creativity.

Cohen writes: "Although economic modeling can contribute to the understanding of markets for creative goods,…. by itself it cannot provide adequate theoretical foundation for understanding the dynamics that drive the development of artistic culture, and therefore it cannot provide adequate theoretical foundations for copyright policy….Creativity and creative practice are social phenomena that are both broader than and antecedent to the institutions with which both economics and more broadly political economy are concerned…. If copyright law is to recognize a right of creative access to the cultural landscape, it is precisely this right that must be limited, yet that is precisely what copyright law increasingly refuses to do. Instead, conventional wisdom holds that any curtailment of derivative rights would reduce “incentives" to invest in works of mass culture."

"Attention to the social parameters of creative practice suggests that the common in culture is not a separate place, but a distributed property of social space. The legally constituted common should both mirror and express this disaggregation. The paper offers a different organizing metaphor for the relationship between the public and the proprietary that matches the theory and practice of creativity more accurately: The common in culture is the cultural landscape within which creative practice takes place." (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=663652)

More articles by Julie Cohen at http://www.law.georgetown.edu/faculty/jec/publications.html


Paul de Armond, on netwar in political protest

Netwar in the Emerald City, at http://nwcitizen.com/publicgood/reports/wto/

Legendary account of the new swarming tactics employed by the alterglobalist protesters in the Seattle anti-WTO protests.


Erik Douglas, on peer governance and democracy

Erik Douglas. Peer to Peer and the Four Pillars of Democracy

Examines the inter-relationship between peer governance and representative democracy.


Stephen Downes on P2P epistemology

Introduction to Connective Knowledge, by Stephen Dowes

URL = http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=33034

This is a marvellous non-technical introduction to participative epistemology. It ends with a critique of the naturalistic conceptions of the Power Law, which states that networks inevitably become unequal, counterposing Knowing Networks as a counter-example.

"First, diversity. Did the process involve the widest possible spectrum of points of view? Did people who interpret the matter one way, and from one set of background assumptions, interact with with people who approach the matter from a different perspective?

Second, and related, autonomy. Were the individual knowers contributing to the interaction of their own accord, according to their own knowledge, values and decisions, or were they acting at the behest of some external agency seeking to magnify a certain point of view through quantity rather than reason and reflection?

Third, interactivity. Is the knowledge being producted the product of an interaction between the members, or is it a (mere) aggregation of the members' perspectives? A different type of knowledge is produced one way as opposed to the other. Just as the human mind does not determine what is seen in front of it by merely counting pixels, nor either does a process intended to create public knowledge.

Fourth, and again related, openness. Is there a mechanism that allows a given perspective to be entered into the system, to be heard and interacted with by others?"


Nick Dyer-Witheford on the Circulation of the Common

URL = http://www.geocities.com/immateriallabour/withefordpaper2006.html

" Marx deemed the cellular form of capitalism to be the commodity, a good produced for exchange between private owners. His model of the circulation of capital traced the metamorphosis of the commodity into money, which commands the acquisition of further resources to be transformed into more commodities. The theorists of autonomist Marxism demonstrated how this circulation of capital is also a circulation of struggles, meeting resistances at every point. But although this concept proved important for understanding the multiplicity of contemporary anti-capital, it says very little about the kind of society towards which these struggles move, a point on which the autonomist tradition has mainly been mute. Today, new theorizations about multitude and biopolitics should to reconsider this silence. I suggest that the cellular form of communism is the common, a good produced to be shared in association. The circuit of the common traces how shared resources generate forms of social cooperation—associations-- that coordinate the conversion of further resources into expanded commons. On the basis of the circuit of capital, Marx identified different kinds of capital—mercantile, industrial and financial—unfolding at different historical moments yet together contributing to an overall societal subsumption. By analogy, we should recognise differing moments in the circulation of the common. These include terrestrial commons (the customary sharing of natural resources in traditional societies); planner commons (for example, command socialism and the liberal democratic welfare state); and networked commons, (the free associations open source software, peer-to-peer networks, grid computing and the numerous other socializations of technoscience). Capital today operates as a systemic unity of mercantile, industrial and financial moments, but the commanding point in its contemporary, neoliberal, phase is financial capital. A twenty-first century communism can, again by analogy, be envisioned as a complex unity of terrestrial, state and networked commons, but the strategic and enabling point in this ensemble is the networked commons. These must however, also be seen in their dependency on, and even potential contradiction, with the other commons sectors. The concept of a complex, composite communism based on the circulation between multiple but commons forms is opens possibilities for new combinations of convivial custom, planetary planning and autonomous association. What follows expand on these cryptic observations." (http://www.geocities.com/immateriallabour/withefordpaper2006.html)

Jo Freeman, on the dark side of Peer Governance

URL = http://www.spunk.org/texts/consensu/sp000760.txt

The alterglobalisation’s mode of functioning took a large part of its inspiration from the experience of feminist and civic action groups of the sixties and seventies. What they discovered was that structureless anti-authoritarian modes actually lead to hidden power distributions, so that it is important to have open and transparent procedures that can insure a flexible and wide distribution of power. The following comes from a seminal essay on the subject:

Source: 'The Tyranny of Structurelessness', by Jo Freeman, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 1970

"Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a 'structureless' group. Any group of people of whatever nature coming together for any length of time, for any purpose, will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible, it may vary over time, it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities and intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals with different talents, predispositions and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate 'structurelessness' and that is not the nature of a human group."

When these principles are applied, they ensure that whatever structures are developed by different movement groups will be controlled by and be responsible to the group. The group of people in positions of authority will be diffuse, flexible, open and temporary. They will not be in such an easy position to institutionalize their power because ultimate decisions will be made by the group at large. The group will have the power to determine who shall exercise authority within it." (http://www.spunk.org/texts/consensu/sp000760.txt )


Brett Frischmann, an economic theory for the Commons

Brett Frischmann, a professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law has published an essay, "An Economic Theory of Infrastructure and Commons Management, (89 Minnesota Law Review 4, April 2005). “a rigorous, clear-headed explanation of the economic and social benefits of commons-based infrastructures:

“The basic problem with relying on markets to allocate access to common assets, Frischmann explains, is that the market mechanism exhibits a bias for outputs that generate observable and appropriable returns at the expense of outputs that generate positive externalities [public benefits that cannot be captured by market players]. This is not surprising because the whole point of relying on property rights and the market is to enable private appropriation and discourage externalities. The problem with relying on the market is that potential positive externalities may remain unrealized if they cannot be easily valued and appropriated by those that produce them, even though society as a whole may be better off if those potential externalities were actually produced. “Positive externalities" are precisely those “goods" that benefit all of us, as commoners – clean air, access to information, an open Internet, functioning ecosystems. Yet neoclassical economics and the laws based on it generally discount or ignore these types of value; they assume that monetized forms of individual property are the only important types of value worth maximizing. By looking at “infrastructure" through the lens of the commons, however, we can begin to appreciate the positive, non-market externalities that a resource actually generates – and begin to design public policies to protect these benefits on their own merits." (Commentary from On the Commons blog, at http://onthecommons.org/node/613; original essay by Frischmann at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=704463; a bio on the author at http://www.luc.edu/law/faculty/frischmann.shtml)


Garreth Harding on The Tragedy of the Commons

URL = http://dieoff.org/page95.htm

Classic essay which argued that the Commons inevitably leads to abuse.


Magnus Marsdal on Socialist Individualism

Socialist Individualism. Essay by Magnus Marsdal.

URL = http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/marxind2.html

"socialism is defined as the democratic management of society’s vital resources (“the economy‿). Under Stalinism, undeniably the economy was subject to explicitly political governance, but no-one would ever label that political economy “democratic‿. It belongs at the far end of our axis, with meagre individual liberties. Now, notice how the nearest challenger of the Evil Empire in this respect is unrestrained capitalism! Market liberalism weakens the position of the working individual on the labour market as far as it can, and does pretty much the same with the political bodies of democracy. Under the welfare state there are substantial “socialist inroads‿ in the capitalist system. This partial protection from “the tyranny of the rich‿ strengthens the position of the individual.

When the historical advancement of democracy is seen like this, the current position of “the new movements‿—arguing that “another world is possible‿ and at the same time fiercely defending the existing welfare state arrangements—becomes less paradoxical. Neoliberalism is perceived as reactionary. The foes of the welfare state are truly “winding the clock backwards‿. Therefore we fight to defend what already exists. But there is something to fight for beyond the instable truce of the so-called mixed economy of Keynesian times. Therefore, we also fight for what does not yet exist."


Eben Moglen on the DotCommunist Manifesto

The DotCommunist Manifesto

URL = http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/10/dot_communist.php

Classic statement for the freeing of copyright.


Introductory paragraph: "A specter is haunting multinational capitalism — the specter of free information. All the powers of "globalism" have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcize this specter: Microsoft and Disney, the World Trade Organization, the United States Congress and the European Commission. Where are the advocates of freedom in the new digital society who have not been decried as pirates, anarchists, communists? Have we not seen that many of those hurling the epithets were merely thieves in power, whose talk of "intellectual property" was nothing more than an attempt to retain unjustifiable privileges in a society irrevocably changing? But it is acknowledged by all the Powers of Globalism that the movement for freedom is itself a Power, and it is high time that we should publish our views in the face of the whole world, to meet this nursery tale of the Specter of Free Information with a Manifesto of our own."

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