Viral Spiral - How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own potx

VIRAL SPIRAL ALSO BY DAVID BOLLIER Brand Name Bullies Silent Theft Aiming Higher Sophisticated Sabotage (with co-authors Thomas O. McGarity and Sidney Shapiro) The Great Hartford Circus Fire (with co-author Henry S. Cohn) Freedom from Harm (with co-author Joan Claybrook) VIRAL SPIRAL How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own David Bollier © 2008 by David Bollier All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher. The author has made an online version of the book available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. It can be accessed at http://www.viralspiral.cc and http://www.onthecommons.org. Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 38 Greene Street, New York, NY 10013. Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2008 Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York ISBN 978-1-59558-396-3 (hc.) CIP data available The New Press was established in 1990 as a not-for-profit alternative to the large, commercial publishing houses currently dominating the book publishing industry. The New Press operates in the public interest rather than for private gain, and is committed to publishing, in innovative ways, works of educational, cultural, and community value that are often deemed insufficiently profitable. www.thenewpress.com A Caravan book. For more information, visit www.caravanbooks.org. Composition by dix! This book was set in Bembo Printed in the United States of America 10987654321 To Norman Lear, dear friend and intrepid explorer of the frontiers of democratic practice CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Part I: Harbingers of the Sharing Economy 21 1. In the Beginning Was Free Software 23 2. The Discovery of the Public Domain 42 3. When Larry Lessig Met Eric Eldred 69 Part II: The Rise of Free Culture 91 4. Inventing the Creative Commons 93 5. Navigating the Great Value Shift 122 6. Creators Take Charge 145 7. The Machine and the Movement 168 8. Free Culture Goes Global 180 9. The Many Faces of the Commons 203 Part III: A Viral Spiral of New Commons 227 10. The New Open Business Models 229 11. Science as a Commons 253 12. Open Education and Learning 281 Conclusion: The Digital Republic and the Future of Democratic Culture 294 Notes 311 Index 335 [...]... collections of redefinitions gradually became system programs in their own right.” 2 Emacs was one of the first software projects to demonstrate the feasibility of large-scale software collaboration and the deep well of innovative ideas that it could yield Emacs enabled programmers to add new features with great ease, and to constantly upgrade and customize the program with the latest improvements The Emacs... successful, each was indispensable to the larger, later task of imagining and building a digital republic to secure basic human freedoms, the subject of Part II 1 IN THE BEGINNING WAS FREE SOFTWARE Richard Stallman’s mythic struggle to protect the commons of code set the viral spiral in motion The struggle to imagine and invent the software commons, which later set in motion a viral spiral now known as free... business Naturally, the company was eager to maximize its profits, so in 1985 it began to charge a licensing fee for Unix Stallman grieved at the disintegration of the hacker community at the AI Lab as closed software programs inexorably became the norm As he wrote at the time: The people remaining at the lab were the professors, students, and non-hacker researchers, who did not know how to maintain the system,... be a spontaneous and natural development In fact, it is a hard-won achievement An infrastructure of software, legal rights, practical expertise, and social ethics had to be imagined, built, and defended In a sense, the commoners had to invent themselves as commoners They had to learn to recognize their own distinct interests—in how to control their creative works, how to organize their communities, and... communities How then shall we create the commons and protect it? That question lies at the core of this book and the history of the commoners in cyberspace I am mostly interested in exploring how the Creative Commons has galvanized a variety of interrelated crusades to build a digital republic of, by, and for the commoners One reason why a small licensing project has grown into a powerful global brand is that,... For the commoners, just asking the question is halfway to answering it PART I Harbingers of the Sharing Economy The rise of the sharing economy had its roots among the renegades living on the periphery of mainstream culture At the time, they were largely invisible to one another They had few ways of making common cause and no shared language for even naming the forces that troubled them It was the 1990s,... of the Internet, and they worry about the totalizing inclinations of large corporations and the state, especially their tendency to standardize and coerce behavior They object as well to processes that are not transparent They dislike the impediments to direct access and participation, the limitations of credentialed expertise and arbitrary curbs on people’s freedom One of the first major gatherings of. .. ethic of proprietary control, in the late 1970s, is an oft-told part of his story The Xerox Corporation had donated an experimental laser printer to the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, where Stallman was then a graduate student The printer was constantly jamming, causing frustration and wasting everyone’s time Stallman wanted to devise a software fix but he discovered that the source code was proprietary... morphing into a differentiated organism of flesh-and-blood, idiosyncratic individuals, as if awakening from a spell Newly empowered to speak as they wish, in their own distinctive, personal voices to a global public of whoever cares to listen, people are creating their own transnational tribes They are reclaiming culture from the tyranny of mass-media INTRODUCTION 11 economics and national boundaries In... musicians and filmmakers, the avant-garde artists and political dissidents, the educators and scientists, and many others It is a spontaneous folk-tech conspiracy that belongs to everyone and no one As we will see in chapter 1, Richard Stallman, the legendary hacker, played an indispensable first-mover role by creating a sovereign domain from which to negotiate with commercial players: free 12 VIRAL SPIRAL . that soft- ware’s great promise is not as a stand-alone tool on PCs, but as a so- 2 VIRAL SPIRAL cial platform for Web-based sharing and collaboration. The. . . . and their own capabilities and one another. As the commoners began to take charge of their lives, they dis- covered anew that traditional markets,