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Community, as in freedom. This is an answer to Tony Curzon Price's article about the need for scarcity.After a few opening shots, Tony puts forward the following argument: “The commons have always been sustained by communities, and the digital commons, embodied in the iCommons movement, will be the same. Communities both pay for and give life to endeavours in the public space. They supply both sense and cents.”

Wow. Tony, thanks so much for taking the time to comment on my post!! I didn’t say so in the original posy but wanted to comment on the stones it took to pen an article that flies so much in the face of “revolutionary orthodoxy”. I agree with you that the situation of the republished articles is different from a straight up barter in as much as a barter arraignment is usually (always?) entered consciously. What you described in “Scarcity” is more of an “accidental” value transaction and so more difficult to quantify.

It tries to authorize sharing and reuse — not within a commercial economy, but within a sharing economy. It tries to do so in a way that wouldn't trigger at least most non-copyright rights (though again, most is not all -- a CC BY-NC licensed photograph by a voyeur still violates rights of privacy, for example). And it tries to do so in a way that protects the copyright owner against presumptions about the waiver of his rights suggested by posting a work freely.