Authors: Jeremy Rifkin
Print democratized writing by allowing anyone to write down their thoughts, then print and circulate them widely for others to read. The introduction of copyright laws, in turn, introduced the novel idea of owning one’s thoughts and words. Owning one’s words led inevitably to the idea that one’s thoughts were the product of one’s labor and therefore personal achievements that could be sold in the marketplace. Print and the accompanying copyright laws partially enclosed the Communications Commons for the first time in history. (In a script or oral culture, the concept that one could own his or her own words and charge other people to listen to them would have been simply unbelievable.)
The printed book also enclosed communications on still another level. In oral cultures, communication between people took place in real time. Thoughts flowed back and forth between people in an open-ended way, often drifting from one theme to another. A book, by contrast, is a one-way conversation, generally highly structured around a central theme or set of ideas, fixed forever on the printed page, and enclosed and bound by the front and back jackets.
While language is meant to be a shared experience between people, what’s so unusual about print is that it is experienced alone. Print privatizes communication. One reads a book or newspaper in isolation from others. A reader can’t carry on a conversation with the author. Both the author and the reader are entrenched in their own separate worlds, unable to participate in a “real-time” dialogue. The solitary nature of reading reinforces the idea of communication as an autonomous act that takes place purely in one’s mind. The social quality of communication is severed. When reading, one recedes into an enclosed space, shunted away from the Commons. The enclosure of communication, in effect, creates millions of
autonomous worlds. The historian Elizabeth Eisenstein notes that a reading culture is more individualistic and autonomous than an oral culture. She writes:
The notion that society may be regarded as a bundle of discrete units or that the individual is prior to the social group seems to be more compatible with a reading public than with a hearing one.
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The Internet, by contrast, dissolves boundaries, making authorship a collaborative, open-ended process over time rather than an autonomous, closed process secured by copyright through time. Lessig draws attention to the pastiche nature of cultural creation on the Internet. For starters, the Internet generation does not write with words as much as it communicates with images, sounds, and video. The distributed nature of the medium makes it easy to mix and match and cut and paste within and across genres. Because the marginal cost of copying anything on the Internet is nearly free, kids grow up with the idea that sharing information is little different than sharing conversation. The interconnectivity and interactivity of the medium cries out for collaboration and gives rise to what Lessig calls the “remix” culture, in which everyone is playing off everyone else, using a mix of media and adding their own variations to a theme, and passing it down the line in a never-ending game. “These remixes are conversations,” says Lessig, and just as previous generations didn’t charge one another when they conversed, the Internet generation feels the same way, except their conversation is of a different nature.
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The new remix form of communication has become almost as cheap as oral communications, although now the conversation is among 2.7 billion human beings.
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Ensuring that the global conversation and the collaborative culture it creates are not cut off requires finding the legal means to keep the new Commons open. Lessig and a number of colleagues founded Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization, in 2001. The organization followed the lead of Stallman and others in the Free Software Movement by issuing copyleft licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to anyone involved in creating cultural content. The licenses provide a number of options by which authors can mark their content and determine the freedoms they would like to extend to others. In place of “all rights reserved,” the critical feature of copyrights, the Creative Commons licenses substitute “some rights reserved.” Lessig explains:
The freedoms could be to share the work, or to remix the work, or both. The restrictions could be to use the work only for noncommercial purposes, or only if the user shares alike (giving others the freedom inherited), or both. The creator can mix these freedoms and restrictions, resulting in six licenses, which come in three layers.
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Lessig gives his favorite example of how the Creative Commons license rolls out in practice.
[It’s] a song, “My Life,” written by the artist Colin Mutchler. He uploaded the guitar track to a free site that allowed other people to download it under a Creative Commons license. A 17-year-old violinist named Cora Beth downloaded it, added a violin track on top, renamed the song “My Life Changed,” and then re-uploaded the song to the site for other people to do with as they wanted. I’ve seen a whole bunch of remixes of the song. The critical point is that these creators were able to create, consistent with copyright law and without any lawyer standing between them.
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The Creative Commons license has gone viral. By 2008, there were 130 million works licensed under Creative Commons, including some big names in the recording business.
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Flickr alone showcased 200 million Creative Commons licensed photos.
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In 2012, just one year after YouTube launched its Creative Commons video library, 4 million licensed videos were listed on the site.
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In 2009, Wikipedia relicensed all of its content under a Creative Commons license.
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Creative Commons has also established a science Commons. Researchers argue that copyright law and especially patents prohibit the timely sharing of information, slow down research, discourage collaboration among scientists, and hold back new innovations. At worst, intellectual property protection gives big players—Life Science companies, agribusiness, pharmaceutical companies, etc.—a means to thwart creativity and dampen competition. More and more scientists in universities and foundation-sponsored laboratories around the world are abandoning the idea of patenting genetic information in favor of uploading their research in open-source networks to be shared freely with colleagues in managed Commons.
The Creative Commons license has been implemented by the Harvard University Medical School in its Personal Genome Project.
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This is a long-term cohort study that aims to sequence and publicize the genome and records of 100,000 volunteers in order to advance research in the field of customized personal medicine.
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All the genome data covered by a Creative Commons license will be put in the public domain and be made available on the Internet to allow scientists open and free access for their laboratory research.
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Despite the success of the Creative Commons licensing, Lessig takes every opportunity to distance himself from what he calls “a growing copyright abolitionist movement.”
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He believes that copyright will remain a viable part of the coming era but will need to make room for open-source licensing in a world that will be lived partially in the market and partially on the Commons. I suspect he’s right in the short run, but not in the long run.
Patents and copyrights thrive in an economy organized around scarcity but are useless in an economy organized around abundance. Of what relevance is intellectual-property protection in a world of near zero marginal cost, where more and more goods and services are nearly free?
The spectacular rise of open-source licensing is already posing a serious challenge to traditional copyright and patent protection as creative works are migrating from single authorship to multiple collaborative inputs over time. Concurrently, an increasing amount of Big Data is being shared by millions of individuals whose personal information is contributed to the mix. Just as information wants to be free, “Big Data wants to be distributed.” What makes Big Data valuable is the information inputted from millions of individual contributors and sources that can be analyzed and used to find patterns, draw inferences, and solve problems. In a distributive, collaborative society, the millions of individuals whose data contributes to the collective wisdom are increasingly demanding that their knowledge be shared in open Commons for the benefit of all, rather than being siphoned off and enclosed in the form of intellectual property owned and controlled by a few.
A New Commons Narrative
Open-source licenses, designed to encourage a democratization of culture, are all well and good. Attaching such legal instruments to a Commons approach to management is even better. The idea that much of the social life of our species is best optimized in the public domain makes “common” sense—after all, it is the arena in which we create social capital and trust. But can we lean on open-source licenses, Commons management, and a vague notion of the public domain to build out a new society? These are legal tools and management prescriptions but hardly qualify, in and of themselves, as a worldview. Missing from the script is an overarching narrative, a new story about the future of the human journey that can make sense of the reality unfolding.
The leaders of the IT, Internet, and Free Culture Movement became aware of the missing narrative element in the midst of their mounting successes with free software licenses and Creative Commons agreements. While they had momentum, their activism was more reactive than visionary. They found themselves putting out fires rather than claiming new ground. Being restrained by having to maneuver inside an older paradigm of centralized, proprietary relationships in capitalist markets made it difficult to break out and create something new from whole cloth.
Free-culture theoreticians began to wrestle with the larger question of finding a narrative to frame their intuitive but still inchoate vision. In 2003, James Boyle, a professor of law at Duke University and a founder of Creative Commons, published an essay entitled “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain.” The essay touched off a debate around finding that narrative.
Although I don’t know Boyle personally, his essay refers to the work done by the Foundation on Economic Trends and other environmental and genetic activists to keep the genetic Commons open—referring to our claim that the human genome, and all other genomes, are the “common heritage” of evolution and therefore cannot be enclosed as private property.
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Boyle sensed that while the new field of “bioinformatics blurs the line between computer modeling and biological research,” it might be possible that open-source genomics could liberate biological research from narrow corporate interests, making the stewardship of Earth’s genetic resources the “common” responsibility of the human race.
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With this example in mind, Boyle stepped outside the day-to-day struggle between free-culture activists and traditional market defenders to muse on the prospect of an alternative future for the human race—one utterly different from the current course we find ourselves on. His thoughts were more contemplative than declarative—and put forth in the form of an observation. He wrote:
At the very least, there is some possibility, even hope, that we could have a world in which much more of intellectual and inventive production is free. “‘Free’ as in ‘free speech,’” Richard Stallman says, not “‘free’ as in ‘free beer.’” But we could hope that much of it would be
both
free of centralized control
and
low cost or no cost. When the marginal cost of production is zero, the marginal cost of transmission and storage approaches zero, the process of creation is additive, and much of the labor doesn’t charge—well, the world looks a little different. This is at least a
possible
future, or part of a possible future, and one that we should not foreclose without thinking twice.
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How do we get to that future? Certainly not by moving back to the vague legal concept of the public domain as justification for a new way to live in society. Boyle and others realized that they needed a general theory that could tie up the loose ideas and give them a framework for talking about the world they wanted to build.
It dawned on Boyle that the Environmental Movement, which had been paralleling the Free Culture Movement for two decades, had successfully developed a rigorous general theory that could be instructive for their own movement—maybe even bring the two movements together in a larger narrative.
The modern Environmental Movement has always been a dual phenomenon. Ecological science continues to hone in on the patterns and relationships that make up the complex dynamics of Earth’s living systems, while activists use the knowledge gained to push for new ways of reorganizing human beings’ relationship with nature. For example, early activists focused much of their effort on protecting individual species threatened
with extinction. As ecologists learned more about the intricate relationships between organisms and their environments, they began to realize that if they were to save individual species they would have to focus on saving their habitats. This led to the further realization that threatened species were often in jeopardy because of the imposition of arbitrary political, commercial, and residential boundaries that severed ecosystems and undermined complex ecological dynamics, resulting in a diminishing of the natural flora and fauna. In the 1990s, activists seized on the data and began pushing for transborder peace parks, a new development concept that is being implemented around the world. The mission is to reconnect natural ecosystems that were formerly severed by national boundaries in order to restore not only migratory patterns but also the many other complex biological relationships that exist in various ecosystems.