James Boyle: The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · commons, copyright, filesharing, intellectual property, public domain
In this enlightening book, James Boyle describes what he calls the range wars of the information age – today’s heated battles over intellectual property. Boyle argues that just as every informed citizen needs to know at least something about the environment or civil rights, every citizen should also understand intellectual property law. Why? Because intellectual property rights mark out the ground rules of the information society, and today’s policies are unbalanced, unsupported by evidence, and often detrimental to cultural access, free speech, digital creativity, and scientific innovation. Boyle identifies as a major problem the widespread failure to understand the importance of the public domain – the realm of material that everyone is free to use and share without permission or fee. The public domain is as vital to innovation and culture as the realm of material protected by intellectual property rights, he asserts, and he calls for a movement akin to the environmental movement to preserve it. With a clear analysis of issues ranging from Jefferson’s philosophy of innovation to musical sampling, synthetic biology and Internet file sharing, this timely book brings a positive new perspective to important cultural and legal debates. If we continue to enclose the ‘commons of the mind’, Boyle argues, we will all be the poorer.
Publisher Yale University Press, 2008
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
ISBN 0300137400, 9780300137408
Length 315 pages
PDF (PDF)
PDF (PDF; updated on 2012-8-7)
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Peter Linebaugh: The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · commons, history, law, liberty
This remarkable book shines a fierce light on the current state of liberty and shows how longstanding restraints against tyranny–and the rights of habeas corpus, trial by jury, and due process of law, and the prohibition of torture–are being abridged. In providing a sweeping history of Magna Carta, the source of these protections since 1215, this powerful book demonstrates how these ancient rights are repeatedly laid aside when the greed of privatization, the lust for power, and the ambition of empire seize a state. Peter Linebaugh draws on primary sources to construct a wholly original history of the Great Charter and its scarcely-known companion, the Charter of the Forest, which was created at the same time to protect the subsistence rights of the poor.
Publisher University of California Press, 2008
ISBN 0520247264, 9780520247260
352 pages
Keywords and phrases
Magna Carta, E. P. Thompson, estovers, Granville Sharp, U.S. Supreme Court, Runnymede, habeas corpus, Silvia Federici, King John, England, Charters of Liberties, Mowgli, Richard Mabey, pannage, John Warr, C. L. R. James, Italian American, Edward Coke, common lands, William Morris
PDF (updated on 2014-9-5)
Comment (0)Matteo Pasquinelli: Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, commons, filesharing, free culture, media culture, pornography
“After a decade of digital fetishism, the spectres of the financial and energy crisis have also affected new media culture and brought into question the autonomy of networks. Yet activism and the art world still celebrate Creative Commons and the ‘creative cities’ as the new ideals for the Internet generation. Unmasking the animal spirits of the commons, Matteo Pasquinelli identifies the key social conflicts and business models at work behind the rhetoric of Free Culture. The corporate parasite infiltrating file-sharing networks, the hydra of gentrification in ‘creative cities’ such as Berlin and the bicephalous nature of the Internet with its pornographic underworld are three untold dimensions of contemporary ‘politics of the common’. Against the latent puritanism of authors like Baudrillard and Žižek, constantly quoted by both artists and activists, Animal Spirits draws a conceptual ‘book of beasts’. In a world system shaped by a turbulent stock market, Pasquinelli unleashes a politically incorrect grammar for the coming generation of the new commons.”
Published by NAi Publishers, Rotterdam / Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, December 2008.
ISBN 9056626639, 9789056626631
240 pages
Reviews: Luciana Parisi (Mute, 2009), Willem van Weelden (Open, 2009), Jussi Parikka (Leonardo, 2009), McKenzie Wark (Public Seminar, 2015).
PDF (updated on 2012-7-15)
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