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Todd Suomela

OnTheCommons.org » Private Property and the Power of Magical Thinking - 0 views

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    All the talk about rights-based fishing and IFQs is a red herring that throws all of us off the track of what is important. IFQs do not work because they are rights, or because they are property rights…. IFQs work because they involve an assigned catch, as opposed to having catch be determined competitively. (Vermont Law Review, Spring 2004, p. 659) It is apparently irresistible for people, even trained scientists, to misunderstand ITQs as a triumph of the market and privatization. ITQs play into the grand narrative that private property rights promote good stewardship of a resource. Remember the so-called "tragedy of the commons" story? That parable holds that if you give people private property rights in the commons - if only your privatize the collective resource! - people won't over-exploit it. "Tragedy" can be averted. The mythology insists that the commons can be responsibly managed only if it is duly privatized.
Todd Suomela

Quilligan's "Failed Metaphysics Behind Private Property" | David Bollier - 1 views

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    "Many people don't recognise that the commons is not just a thing - a physical element of nature or a resource like the Internet - but a distinct metaphysics and epistemology that challenges some deeply rooted premises of contemporary politics and policy. James Quilligan probes this territory with a thoughtful piece in the latest issue of Kosmos magazine. In particular, he explores the "social nature of property"and how its individual, atomistic nature in liberal political philosophy is responsible for "its catastrophic impact on the commons.""
Todd Suomela

News item (The University of Manchester) - 0 views

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    to begin the process of formulating a 'Manchester Manifesto' which they hope will lay down a consensus on intellectual property in science. The Manchester Manifesto process will be completed in November this year.
Todd Suomela

OnTheCommons.org » "The Commons is About 'Commoning'" - 0 views

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    The commons, said Wolcher, citing Linebaugh, is not simply a conflict over property rights. It is about "people expressing a form of life to support their autonomy and subsistence needs." The commons is a verb - "commoning." It's about "taking one's life into one's own hands, and not waiting for crumbs to drop from the King's table."
Todd Suomela

OnTheCommons.org - The commons as a new sector of value-creation - 0 views

  • So my first point is the importance of recognizing the commons as a distinct sector for creating value. It can be difficult to recognize this reality because we don’t have an agreed-upon language or taxonomy for talking about the value-proposition of the commons. The phenomenon is still too novel. For many people, it is difficult to accept that value can exist without the sanction of money or private property rights—that value that is intangible and unquantifiable can actually matter. Cold, hard cash is nearly always seen as more valuable than something as amorphous and non-physical as an online community
  • I call these epochal changes in economic and cultural production The Great Value Shift. In the networked environment that is becoming pervasive, we are being forced to recognize that markets—or at least, traditional hierarchical institutions such as the corporation—do not have a monopoly on the ability to generate value.
  • If you can acknowledge this fact, then it follows that we should take affirmative steps to preserve the commons and the special types of value that it produces. Let me conclude by suggesting four general strategies.
    • Todd Suomela
       
      1. protect integrity of commons 2. new models for understanding value 3. invent new hybrids 4. active government support of commns
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    Keynote by David Bollier at Economies of the Commons Conference, April 12, 2008, Amsterdam.
Todd Suomela

OnTheCommons.org - The economics of online commons - 0 views

  • The focus of many presentations was how to organize the production and distribution of new creative works in a world where free/cheap digital transmission is the norm. It turns out that many established institutions—if they are going to come to terms with the Internet—are going to have to seriously transform themselves in order to survive.
    • Todd Suomela
       
      Key summary of the conference in Amsterdam.
  • If you want to see the future, one of the best places to look is the freeboot innovators of the underground. They are always the ones who tried out the new ideas that later ripen into market opportunities. Think how hip-hop emerged from record-scratchers in Brooklyn basements and how the hobbyists of the Homebrew Computer Club pioneered many of the early innovations in computing.
  • The idea of “culture without property” seems just too radical and counter-intuitive for some folks to get (or they get it only too well, because it jeopardizes their established business model). But this is not actually such a radical vision. There are already all sorts of profit-making enterprises that are building business models around open, non-proprietary platforms. IBM’s embrace of GNU Linux, the open-source operating system, is one of many prominent examples. So is Flickr, the photo-sharing website.
Todd Suomela

OnTheCommons.org » The Public Domain as a "Jungle" - 0 views

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    Terms of Use: Negotiating the Jungle of the Intellectual Commons, Eva Hemmungs Wirtén offers up an internationally minded, interdisciplinary meditation on the "intellectual commons." Wirtén, a professor at Uppsala University in Sweden, is developing a sophisticated new frontier of public domain scholarship.
Todd Suomela

Common Theft - 0 views

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    a socialist take on enclosure
Todd Suomela

john wilbanks' blog - Nature Network - 0 views

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    Agitating for innovation through open licensing and good technology.
Todd Suomela

On the Erosion of the Public Domain - john wilbanks' blog - john wilbanks' blog on Natu... - 0 views

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    The public domain is not contractually constructed. It just is. It cannot be made more free, only less free. And if we start a culture of licensing and enclosing the public domain (stuff that is actually already free, like the human genome) in the name of "freedom" we're playing a dangerous game.
Todd Suomela

OnTheCommons.org » Art, God and Copyright - 1 views

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    Two examples of copyright and religion in conflict: Indonesian batik designers, and sermon sharing sites.
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