David Bollier

David Bollier is the advocate for Public Commons, the co-founder of Public Knowledge, and the author of Brand Name Bullies.

Source: http://www.bollier.org/

BIO

David Bollier (www.bollier.org) is an author, activist, blogger and consultant who has spent the past ten years exploring the commons as a new paradigm of economics, politics and culture. He has pursued this work as an editor of Onthecommons.org – a leading website about commons-based policy and politics, and Fellow at On the Commons. Bollier also collaborates with a variety of international and domestic partners, and recently co-founded the Commons Strategy Group as an international consulting project. In the spring of 2010, he taught “The Rise of the Commons” as the Croxton Lecturer at Amherst College.

Bollier has worked with American television writer/producer Norman Lear since 1984, and is Senior Fellow at the Norman Lear Center at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. He is also co-founder and board member of Public Knowledge, a Washington policy advocacy organization dedicated to protecting the information commons. Bollier lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Key Publications

Bollier has written ten books; the most recent three deal with the commons. Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own (2009) describes the rise of free software, free culture, and the movements behind open business models, open science, open educational resources and new modes of Internet-enabled citizenship. His first book on the commons, Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Commons Wealth (2002), is a far-ranging survey of market enclosures of shared resources, from public lands and the airwaves to creativity and knowledge. Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture (2005) documents the vast expansion of copyright and trademark law over the past generation. Bollier has written seven other books.