COMMONS MAGAZINE
The commons is an important concept and perhaps has no more vital place than in public education. Free education is a basic human right, and yet throughout the world, it remains a challenge. Even in the “developed” world, where free education is largely available, commercial textbook publishers and the politically-driven bureaucracy of education dominates the agenda.
Open education is a potential solution to these complex problems.
As students head back to school, one of the first things they encounter – besides the high tuition costs – are soaring textbook expenses. I blogged about this problem three years ago, but sadly, textbook prices continue to be ridiculous. The average student now spends $700 to $1,000 a year on books – which is about three times more than what students paid in 1986, according to a federal Government Accountability Office report.
By D. Megan Healey
It is Saturday night at the Indian Lake Theater in the small town of Indian Lake, New York. The coming attractions have only been playing for five minutes when the sound slows down and the screen suddenly turns black. I am the projectionist so I rush upstairs and find a tangled pile of film unraveling out of the projector onto the floor.
Ecuador may soon formally recognize that nature has its own inalienable legal rights. A constitutional assembly that is rewriting that nation’s Constitution has approved new articles that would treat ecosystems and natural communities as having fundamental rights to exist and flourish; they could not be treated as mere property. Under the new articles, land owners could still pursue development, but they would not be able to interfere with the rights of ecosystems to exist and flourish.
In a purported news article in today’s business section, the New York Times gave a big wet kiss to the idea of privatizing the nation’s bridges, roads and civil infrastructure. In a nearly 40 column inches, reporter Jenny Anderson casts investors as thwarted social workers ready to do their part in helping to fix America’s crumbling infrastructure.
Patagonia, one of the most distinctive ecological regions of South America, is now threatened by a series of major dams that the Chilean government is planning. The chief purpose of the dams is to supply electricity to copper mines, two-thirds of which are owned by transnational corporations whose allegiances are to international investors and pay little for the copper they extract.
When a corporation wants to privatize a popular phrase or symbol that it thinks will be useful for its business, it usually seizes it as a trademark. The public that popularized the catchphrase in the first place is legally prohibited from using it without authorization. An extra bit of barbed wire prohibits people from “tarnishing” or “diluting” it. After McDonald’s claimed “I’m Loving It” as its trademarked tagline and Wal-Mart claims the “happy face” as its private property, you may need a lawyer to defend your right to use those expressions in certain public ways.
Can a mother post a videotape of her toddler dancing to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” on YouTube without violating the fair use doctrine of copyright law? The “dancing baby” case has attracted some amused attention and outrage in copyright circles in recent months. Now a federal judge has declined Universal Music’s bid to “go crazy” with copyright law, and has instead stood up for the fair use doctrine.
In an important victory for online sharing and reuse of works, a federal appeals court has upheld the legal basis for the General Public License (GPL) for software and Creative Commons licenses for music, film and writings. While the legality of these licenses has long been assumed, the ruling gives “important clarity and certainty” to the legal premises of free public licenses based on copyright law, says Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig.
WALL-E is surely one of the most subversive films to hit the big screen in years. What might easily be mistaken as a kids’ film because it is a feature-length cartoon is in fact a melancholy masterpiece that artfully combines a love story, dark satire and fierce social commentary about our nightmarish consumer culture.
We’re getting back on our trolleys.
An energy-efficient form of transportation that shaped the growth of our communities in the early 20th Century but then deemed hopelessly old-fashioned and demolished in most cities between the 1930s and 1960s, streetcars are now running again or being constructed in Portland, Seattle, Tacoma, Charlotte, Kenosha, Wisconsin, and other cities according to the New York Times.
Boston, San Francisco, Toronto, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and many international cities have never gone off their trolleys.
On The Commons Fellow David Bollier offered these thoughts at the iCommons Summit in Sapporo, Japan, on July 31, 2008. iCommons is an international gathering of people exploring the potential of digital technologies to develop new online commons.
When the idea of the commons comes up— meaning a shared inheritance that belongs equally to each of us—people naturally think first of the basics of life: air, water, the environment, our bodies, language. These are the things that touch us every day.
Many musicians cower at actually using the “fair use doctrine” of copyright law because they know that Big Media has the legal firepower to impose its own definition of the law. Rather than get tagged as a “pirate” and endure huge legal expenses fighting to vindicate their rights, most musicians are inclined to play it safe and keep a low profile when borrowing from a previous artist.
One of the things that most baffles me about America (and I have lived in the middle of it my whole life) is how the word “independence” is so narrowly defined.
People’s economic well-being can be held hostage by oil companies, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, HMOs, and other powerful multinational corporations, yet in political debates independence generally mean just one thing: the absence of government regulation, or any kind of joint citizen effort.
A recently approved desalination plant near San Diego will be the largest in the Western Hemisphere. The plant will suck in 100 million gallons of ocean water a day, supplying up to 10 percent of San Diego’s drinking water.
However, the environmental consequences are likely to be damaging – and the plant, which will be run by Connecticut-based Poseidon Resources Corporation, represents another step towards the privatization of public water supplies for private profit.
Mozilla Labs, the group responsible for the Firefox browser, is asking developers and designers to help them “inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.” In the spirit of open source collaboration, all contributions will be licensed under a Creative Commons license.
Already, several designers have submitted concept videos and screenshots describing how to build a better web browser.
Phone company Openmoko is making cellphones that are open-source and modifiable. By making the phone’s schematics publicly available, anyone has free rein to modify these devices, and add or remove features as they see fit.
The Economist magazine is a tireless—and globally influential—crusader for the free market. Each week it champions privatization and big business in smart, elegant, well-researched articles.
So it’s definitely worth noting when The Economist discovers the commons and declares in a headline, “it still pays to study medieval English landholding and Sahelian nomadism.”
The magazine singles out the work of Syracuse University’s Charlotte Hess in outlining how principles of the commons apply to modern fields such as medicine and information.
For people concerned about the fate of free culture, it is hard to beat the annual iCommons Summit and the wildly eclectic crowd it attracts. I just finished attending this four-day conference in Sapporo, Japan, along with 350 hackers, educators, remix artists, bloggers, do-it-yourself video makers, academics and journalists from dozens of countries. Truly, I have never encountered a more diverse, interesting and action-oriented group of people. Too bad I was also suffering from the mind-corrosion that comes with a thirteen-hour time change (Hartford to Sapporo in 20 hours!).