Commons

Definition

Michel Bauwens: "The commons consists of any common resource that is available to all (but this notion can be defined locally, or specifically as 'everybody in category x'), and as such there are many type of commons but basically two: physical resources or man-made.

The commons is also a series of specific institutional formats used to manage such common resources.

And finally, it is the political/social movement that promotes them.

I see open/free, participatory/p2p, and commons are a related 3-legged stool of paradigms:

- free and open ensures access to the raw material to build the common

- participatory refers to the process of broad participation in order to actually build it

- the commons is the institutional format used to prevent private appropriation of said creations

- the circle is closed when commons-generated material is again free/open raw material for the next cycle of the Circulation of the Common.

Relation between the definitions of the public domain and of the commons

Most of the time, both concepts are used interchangeably, though the Commons seems to overtake the Public Domain in terms of popularity. The public domain concept relates the 'outside' of the intellectual propery system, i.e. items without copyright, and thus stresses the open access features: nobody can be excluded. The Commons stresses the absense of state, corporate and individual control, in favour of distributed control, and is related to non-private and non-state common property regimes.

For an investigation of the differences between the concepts, see the essays by James Boyle, at http://www.law.duke.edu/pd/papers/boyle.pdf (The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain) and http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/foreword.pdf (The Opposite of Property)

Introductory citation by David Bollier

"The commons is a new way to express a very old idea — that some forms of wealth belong to all of us, and that these community resources must be actively protected and managed for the good of all. The commons are the things that we inherit and create jointly, and that will (hopefully) last for generations to come. The commons consists of gifts of nature such as air, water, the oceans, wildlife and wilderness, and shared “assets" like the Internet, the airwaves used for broadcasting, and public lands. The commons also includes our shared social creations: libraries, parks, public spaces as well as scientific research, creative works and public knowledge that have accumulated over centuries.

This is our common wealth, or the commons. The strange thing is, we have forgotten how to recognize the commons and act like the rightful owners of our own riches. Too many people blindly accept the “enclosure" of our commons, which transforms shared resources enjoyed by all into private commodities available only to those who can afford them. Part of the problem is the narrow version of economics that dominates in the United States today -- a version that presumes that the only important wealth is created through market exchange. We, the commoners, know otherwise." (http://onthecommons.org)

Related Concepts

From: http://friendsofthecommons.org/understanding/index.html

"Commons is the generic term. It embraces all the creations of nature and society that we inherit jointly and freely, and hold in trust for future generations.

Common assets are those parts of the commons that have a value in the market. Radio airwaves are a common asset, as are timber and minerals on public lands. So, increasingly, are air and water.

Common property refers to a class of human-made rights that lies somewhere between private property and state property. Examples include conservation easements held by land trusts, Alaskans’ right to dividends from the Alaska Permanent Fund, and everyone’s right to waterfront access.

Common wealth refers to the monetary and non-monetary value of the commons in supporting life and well-being. Like stockholders’ equity in a corporation, it may increase or decrease from year to year depending on how well the commons is managed." (http://friendsofthecommons.org/understanding/index.html)

We created a separate entry on the Physical Commons, which embrace the creations of nature and the physical creations of society.

Aspects of the Commons

Explained by David Bollier at http://onthecommons.org/key_concepts

Common assets. Those parts of the commons that have a value in the market and which are appropriate to buy and sell (see “inalienability". Radio airwaves are a common asset, for example, as are timber and minerals on public lands and, increasingly, air and water. By recognizing certain resources as common assets, it is easier to ask: Are the common assets being responsibly managed on behalf of the general public or a distinct community of interest? Is the capital being depleted?

Copyleft. A license that allows free re-use and modification of creative work so long as the derivative work remains available on the same terms. Copyleft — formally known as the “General Public License," or GPL — was initiated by computer programmer Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. [link] By protecting the creativity and energy of the commons from private appropriation, the GPL has made free software and open source software possible. A related set of licenses for other types of creative works has been devised by the Creative Commons. [link]

Corporation. A self-perpetuating legal entity whose mission is to maximize short-term return to shareholders. In its aggressive pursuit of this mission, the corporation not only produces new innovations and efficiencies, it also displaces costs onto the environment, our communities and our personal lives (see “market externalities").

Gift economy. A community of shared purpose, such as an academic discipline, whose members give time and creativity to a defined community and reap benefits in return. In gift communities, money is an unacceptable “currency" because relationships are rooted in personal, particular and historical experiences of each individual, and cannot be converted into cash or any other fungible unit.

Enclosure. The conversion of a commons into private property. Enclosure entails not just the privatization of a resource, but the introduction of money and market exchange as the prevailing principles for managing that resource. Enclosure shifts ownership and control from the community at large to private companies. This in turn changes the management and character of the resource because the market has very different standards of accountability and transparency than a commons. (Contrast a public library with a book store, or Main Street with a private shopping mall.) Because of its compulsion to extract maximum short-term rents and externalize costs, market enclosure often results in the “tragedy of the market."

Externality, or illth. A social or ecological cost that is not paid by its creators. As the scope of market activity expands beyond a certain point, engulfing more of nature and daily life, it yields less and less happiness and well-being even as it generates more and more unintended problems. By the premises of market logic, the expanding output must be regarded as “progress" and “wealth." In fact, the accelerating pace of the market machine is producing more “illth" — the opposite of wealth. Author Peter Barnes (Who Owns the Sky) has popularized this term, coined by John Ruskin in the 19th century, to describe the unintended but increasing destruction of nature, social disruptions, health problems and other (unacknowledged or disguised) costs of market activity.

Inalienability. The principle that a given resource shall not be freely bought and sold in the marketplace, but shall remain intact, in its natural context. Inalienability derives from a social consensus that certain things and behaviors are so precious and basic to human identity that they are degraded by allowing their purchase. “Goods" that have traditionally been regarded as inalienable include votes, babies, bodily organs, sex, genes, living species and most aspects of nature, but market forces are increasingly challenging long-standing norms of inalienability.

Public goods. Resources that, because of their “public" nature, are difficult or costly to exclude anyone from using. Examples include lighthouses, city parks, broadcast programming and the global atmosphere. In the lingo of economists, these are “nonrival" and “nonexcludable" resources. Government often steps in to pay for public goods because it is difficult to get individual beneficiaries to pay for them. But in the networked environment of the Internet, it is increasingly feasible for self-organizing groups to create and pay for public goods. Open source software is a prime example.

Public trust doctrine. A legal doctrine that says that the state holds certain resources in trust for its citizens which cannot be given away or sold. Public trust doctrine has its origins in Roman law, which recognized that certain resources such as fisheries, air, running water and wild animals belong to all. Under the doctrine of res communes, the king could not grant exclusive rights of access to a common resource. The point is that there is a clear distinction between common property (which belongs to the people) and state property (which can be conttrolled and mismanaged by government).

Trust. A legal institution for protecting the commons and managing any assets that may arise from them. If the corporation is the preeminent institution of the market, the trust is the premier institution of the commons. The managers of a trust, the trustees, have clear legal responsibilities to manage its resources on behalf of the beneficiaries. This includes strict fiduciary responsibilities, transparency and accountability.

Discussion

A Defense of the Commons

Well-written plea for the importance of the 'environmental' commons.

"The environment isn't just about nature anymore. It has become a metaphor for a battle against market — and sometimes governmental — encroachment that extends to virtually every corner of our society. Everything is up for grabs. Everything is for sale. Politicians and the media are essentially oblivious, just as they were oblivious to the threats to the environment before Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, about the dangers of the pesticide DDT. There isn't even a word for this encroachment and loss, except for the tendentious euphemism "growth."

It is significant, then, that an old term is reappearing to describe what is being threatened. It is "the commons," the realm of life that is distinct from both the market and the state and is the shared heritage of us all. Vandana Shiva, an Indian physicist and environmental activist, writes about the commons of water and seeds. Lawrence Lessig, an author and lawyer, describes the innovation commons of the Internet and the public domain of knowledge. Others are talking about the atmospheric commons, the commons of public squares, and the commons of quiet.

People don't generally connect seeds and bytes, aquifers and silence. But the concept of the commons shows them to be aspects of the same thing, with political, legal, and environmental implications that could be far-reaching.

It is not whether there will be more government or less, but whether the market will be able to expropriate everything. In an "ownership" society, what happens to the realms that belong to all of us together, as opposed to each of us apart? If the atmosphere, say, is a commons, then we start to see that polluters are trespassing on something that is ours, and that we hold in trust for future generations. The same goes for the gene pool, cyberspace, the broadcast spectrum, the world's water, and the still of the night. If such things are commons, then we have rights regarding them — common property rights. And that changes everything."

The preindustrial commons provided livelihood and material sustenance, and in the developing world, it still plays that role….. But increasingly the commons today meets a different kind of need: refuge from the market and its frenzied pace. It provides such things as open space, access to nature, the conviviality of public squares…. It produces by not producing in the narrow economic sense. Each new step of market encroachment has increased the need for counter-production of this kind – for quiet instead of noise, for open space instead of development, for seed banks instead of genetically modified organisms." (http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200507/commongood.asp)

The Cornucopia of the Commons

THE CORNUCOPIA OF THE COMMONS, OR 'POSITIVE EXTERNALITIES'

On the non-problem of freeloading in filesharing and P2P processes generally, Clay Shirky:

The argument against freeloading as a problem is double: taking a file is non-problematic because it is infinitely replicable; using bandwidth is non-problematic because it is replenishable.

1. Downloading

"Two key aspects of P2P file-sharing [are responsible for this]: the economics of digital resources, which are either replicable or replenishable; and the ways the selfish nature of user participation drives the system.

Start with the nature of consumption. If your sheep takes a mouthful of grass from the common pasture, the grass exits the common pasture and enters the sheep, a net decrease in commonly accessible resources. If you take a copy of the Pink Floyd song "Sheep" from another Napster user, that song is not deleted from that user's hard drive. Furthermore, since your copy also exists within the Napster universe, this sort of consumption creates commonly accessible resources, rather than destroying them. The song is replicated; it is not consumed. Even if, in the worst scenario, you download the song and never make it available to any other Napster user, there is no net loss of available songs, so in any file-sharing system where even some small percentage of new users makes the files they download subsequently available, the system will grow in resources, which will in turn attract new users, which will in turn create new resources, whether the system has freeloaders or not." (http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/01/shirky_freeloading.html?page=1)

2. Bandwidth

“But what of bandwidth, the other resource consumed by file sharing? Here again, the idea of freeloading misconstrues digital economics. If you saturate a 1 Mb DSL line for 60 seconds while downloading a song, how much bandwidth do you have available in the 61st second? One meg, of course, just like every other second. Again, the Tragedy of the Commons is the wrong comparison, because the notion that freeloading users will somehow eat the available resources to death doesn't apply. Unlike grass, bandwidth can't be "used up," any more than CPU cycles or RAM can. Like a digital horn of plenty, most of the resources that go into networking computers together are constantly replenished; "Bandwidth over time is infinite," as the Internet saying goes. By using all the available bandwidth in any given minute, you have not reduced future bandwidth, nor have you saved anything on the cost of that bandwidth when it's priced at a flat rate.

Bandwidth can't be conserved over time either. By not using all the available bandwidth in any given minute, you have not saved any bandwidth for the future, because bandwidth is an event, not a conservable resource. Given this quality of persistently replenished resources, we would expect users to dislike sharing resources they want to use at that moment, but indifferent to sharing resources they make no claim on, such as available CPU cycles or bandwidth when they are away from their desks." (http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/01/shirky_freeloading.html?page=1)

Positive externalities, explained by Clay Shirky

“The canonical example of a positive externality is a shade tree. If you buy a tree large enough to shade your lawn, there is a good chance that for at least part of the day it will shade your neighbor's lawn as well. This free shade for your neighbor is a positive externality, a benefit to them that costs you nothing more than what you were willing to spend to shade your own lawn anyway.Napster's single economic genius is to coordinate such effects. Other than the central database of songs and user addresses, every resource within the Napster network is a positive externality. Furthermore, Napster coordinates these externalities in a way that encourages altruism. The system is resistant to negative effects of freeloading, because as long as Napster users are able to find the songs they want, they will continue to participate in the system, even if the people who download songs from them are not the same people they download songs from. As long as even a small portion of the users accept this bargain, the system will grow, bringing in more users, who bring in more songs. In such a system, trying to figure out who is freeloading and who is not isn't worth the effort of the self-interested user." (http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/01/shirky_freeloading.html?page=1)

The Commons vs. the Market

1. When to choose the Commons option, as compared to markets?

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)

2. Optimal usage of sharing principles vs. market economies, by Yochai Benkler

"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 )

A commentary on the Benkler essay by The Economist, at http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3623762 )

Dialogue between David Bollier and Michel Bauwens, on the relationship between the commons, the market, and peer production, at http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=4

See also this essay by Yochai Benkler, "Freedom in the Commons: towards a political economy of information', at http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?52+Duke+L.+J.+1245/

The Tragedy of the Commons

The tragedy of the commons is a phrase used to refer to a class of phenomena that involve a conflict for resources between individual interests and the common good.

The often-quoted classic essay by Garreth Harding, which argued that a commons inevitably leads to abuse, is at http://dieoff.org/page95.htm

There is an extensive discussion in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

More Information

Dialogue between David Bollier and Michel Bauwens, on the relationship between the commons, the market, and peer production, at http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=4

See also this entry at the Cooperation Commons [1]

Friends of the Commons, at http://friendsofthecommons.org/

Key Books to Read

The following bibliography has been provided by Bollier, David.

Alexander, Gregory S., Commodity and Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought, 1776-1970 (University of Chicago Press, 1997).

A magisterial history of the concept of property in American law, and therefore a useful investigation into the basic assumptions embedded in property law discourse.

Barnes, Peter, Capitalism 3.0: A Guide To Reclaiming The Commons (Berrett-Koehler, forthcoming, 2006).

Combine a businessman (founder of Working Assets) and an astute commons advocate, and you get this insightful critique of the core limitations of the market economy, especially as they affect the environment and other commons.

Benkler, Yochai, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press, 2006).

This is a landmark book of economic and legal theory that explains why "commons-based peer production" on the Internet can often out-perform the market in terms of of creativity, efficiency, social satisfaction and political freedom.

Bollier, David, Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth (Routledge, 2002).

An introduction to the commons and a wide-ranging survey of realms of life (mostly in the U.S.) that are under siege by market enclosure.

Buck, Susan J., The Global Commons : An Introduction (Island Press, 1998).

A valuable introduction to the commons paradigm and global environmental commons such as the atmosphere, oceans, Antarctica and outer space.

The Ecologist magazine, Whose Common Future?: Reclaiming the Commons (New Society Publishers, 1993).

One of the first commons-based critiques of contemporary environmental problems and the systemic role of the market in causing them.

Hyde, Lewis, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (Vintage Books, 1979).

An exploration of how creativity may flourish in a market-oriented society, with special attention the moral and social dynamics of the gift economy.

Lessig, Lawrence, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (Penguin Press, 2004).

A thoughtful and timely survey of how intellectual property law, technology and other tools are interfering with creative expression and free speech.

Ostrom, Elinor, Governing the Commons : The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions) (Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Ostrom has pioneered the serious study of the commons as political and social phenomena; this was her first major book on the topic. Mandatory reading.

Radin, Margaret Jane. Reinterpreting Property (University of Chicago Press, 1993).

Thompson, E.P., Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New Press, 1993).

This eminent historian excavates the moral economy, customs and culture in England that were supplanted by the market economy in the 18th Century.