British Library Encloses the Public Domain

There's considerable excitement about an announcement from the British Library and Google detailing a wonderful gift to the world:

The British Library and Google today announced a partnership to digitise 250,000 out-of-copyright books from the Library’s collections. Opening up access to one of the greatest collections of books in the world, this demonstrates the Library’s commitment, as stated in its 2020 Vision, to increase access to anyone who wants to do research.

Selected by the British Library and digitised by Google, both organisations will work in partnership over the coming years to deliver this content free through Google Books (http://books.google.co.uk) and the British Library’s website (www.bl.uk). Google will cover all digitisation costs.

Isn't that just swell? Vast quantities of fascinating books in the public domain are being made "available to all", as the press release trumpets:

This project will digitise a huge range of printed books, pamphlets and periodicals dated 1700 to 1870, the period that saw the French and Industrial Revolutions, The Battle of Trafalgar and the Crimean War, the invention of rail travel and of the telegraph, the beginning of UK income tax, and the end of slavery. It will include material in a variety of major European languages, and will focus on books that are not yet freely available in digital form online.

Freely available, too... But, er, exactly *how* freely available?

Once digitised, these unique items will be available for full text search, download and reading through Google Books, as well as being searchable through the Library’s website and stored in perpetuity within the Library’s digital archive.

Fab, and....?

Researchers, students and other users of the Library will be able to view historical items from anywhere in the world as well as copy, share and manipulate text for non-commercial purposes.

But hang on: these are materials that are in the public domain; public domain means that anyone can do anything with them - including commercial applications. So this condition of "non-commercial purposes" means one thing, and one thing only: although the texts themselves are public domain, the digitised texts are not (otherwise it would be impossible to impose the non-commercial clause).

In other words, far from helping to make knowledge freely accessible to all and sundry, the British Library is actually enclosing the knowledge commons that rightfully belongs to humankind as a whole, by claiming a new copyright term for the digitised versions. Call me ungrateful, but that's a gift I can do without.

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The Most Important Fish You've Never Heard Of

The Menhaden:

The only remaining significant checks on the phytoplankton that cause algal blooms and dead zones are those menhaden schools, and they are now threatened by the ravages of unrestrained industrial fishing. By the end of the twentieth century, the population and range of Atlantic menhaden had virtually collapsed. The estimated number of sexually mature adult fish had crashed to less than 13 percent of what it had been four decades earlier. Although northern New England had once been the scene of the largest menhaden fishery, adult fish had not been sighted north of Cape Cod since 1993.

Marine biologist Sara Gottlieb, author of a groundbreaking study on menhaden's filtering capability, compares their role with the human liver's: "Just as your body needs its liver to filter out toxins, ecosystems also need those natural filters." Overfishing menhaden, she says, "is just like removing your liver."

If a healthy person needs a fully functioning liver, consider someone whose body is subjected to unusual amounts of toxins -- just like our Atlantic and Gulf coasts. If menhaden are the liver of these waters, should we continue to allow huge chunks to be cut out each year, cooked into industrial oils, and ground up to be fed to chickens, pigs, and pets? Menhaden have managed to survive centuries of relentless natural and human predation. But now there are ominous signs that we may have pushed our most important fish to the brink of an ecological catastrophe.

Menhaden are therefore a commons - something owned by all, and in this case, needed by all. Just for a change, human greed is destroying that commons. And once again, there will be a heavy price to pay.

Enclosing the Language Commons

One of the many arguments against patenting software is that it's as stupid as copyrighting language: if you did that, nobody could talk without getting sued. Similarly, thanks to the essential nature of software algorithms, nobody can program without infringing on something.

It seems that we may need to revise that example of ridiculousness:

Last year, in an attempt to wrestle a few pennies of the GST from the tight-fisted grip of the federal government, the City of Toronto launched a snazzy public relations campaign under the banner “one cent now.”

Unfortunately, before they could enjoy the fruits of their labour, they were slapped with a cease-and-desist order by the Royal Canadian Mint.

The dispute was over the phrase “one cent.” It turns out it is not in the public domain. For the privilege of using it, the City of Toronto needed to pay the mint more than $47,000 in licensing fees, something it neglected to do.

It was an honest oversight. After all, who would have thought a corporation, private or public, could own a phrase so common to everyday language?

De-Commodifying an Enclosed Commons

Confused? You will be:

in today’s world, the crush of branded meanings has become overwhelming. The cultural space is too cluttered with signifiers, and words are losing their credibility. And marketing itself is so ubiquitous that it is difficult for a super-elite establishment to convey that it is “above it all” -- grandly indifferent to the market. Clearly the next step is to de-commodify the product or service that was sold in the market, and previously belonged to the commons, and make it a proprietary gift! Ah, now that’s really luxury!

Selling Off the Family Spectrum Commons

Radio frequencies form a commons for each country. Mostly these have been enclosed through auctions selling them to the highest bidder. Whether that's a good idea is another matter, but assuming for a moment that you think it is, at the very least you'd try to get plenty of dosh for this precious resource.

Well, according to this fascinating, and extremely thorough, paper, that didn't happen in the US:

According to calculations presented in this paper, since 1993, the government has given to private interests as much as $480 billion in spectrum usage rights without public compensation. That comes to more than 90 percent of the value of spectrum usage rights it has assigned from 1993 through the present.

Now, admittedly "as much as $480 billion" includes zero, but I don't think that's the case here. We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars that the US public won't be getting. Which means that there are some companies - and corporate fatcats - who are richer by the same amount.

So, how about if we start treating like a commons instead? That way, you can be sure that everyone gets their fair share - unlike the situation in America.

Enclosing the Commons, 21st-Century Style

In an age where commons are rare and exotic beasts, "enclosing the commons" seems quaint rather than troubling. But in the modern context, this is what enclosure means:

Amateur photographer Chip Py was wandering around the newly developed downtown section of Silver Spring when he decided to snap a few pictures. He thought the building rooftops set against the blue sky made for a handsome image. A security guard promptly rushed out to tell him that he was not allowed to take pictures; the Peterson Companies, the developer of Ellsworth Street, prohibited it.

Welcome to the latest enclosure of the commons: privately controlled public streets. Even if streets may be nominally public, companies have few qualms about claiming them as private and bullying people into forfeiting their rights as citizens.

The Enclosure of the Starbucks Experience

Here's an insightful piece:

Let’s face it: a brand is all about creating a monoculture. It is all about efficiencies, bureaucratization of process, and the marketing of a single cultural image. It is all about carefully crafting an experience and then monetizing it. The commodification of experience is the polar opposite of what a commons offers. In this case, the market is trying to replicate that which only the commons can truly generate.

As more and more companies seek to emulate Starbucks, and to tap into the power of the commons, this paradox is one that will increasingly crop up. It hints, perhaps, that the commons simply does not scale.

Saving the Academic Commons from Enclosure

Another thought-provoking piece from OnTheCommons, this time about the academic commons and the threats it faces:

One of our most valuable commons are universities: a special non-market system for generating reliable and valuable knowledge. This is precisely why so many businesses are trying to privatize the academic commons.

...

One way that academia can begin to fight back, I believe, is by developing a stronger, more coherent analysis for why its open sharing and collaboration represent a “value proposition.” The academic commons is at least as generative as the market, but you rarely hear that stated or explained. Until it is, administrators and even many professors are likely to see more value in cold, hard cash than in the norms and ethics of the academic commons.