Silke Helfrich, the editor of the book, who formerly headed up the Heinrich Boll Foundation’s office in Mexico, is a leading thinker and writer about the commons. She also blogs about the commons (in German) at www.commonsblog.de. In November 2006, Helfrich hosted a major international conference in Mexico City, “Citizenship and Commons,” which focused on the commons in Latin America and inspired the creation of this book.

Who Owns the World? has been well-received since its launch last month. For those who can read German, a website about the book – with ordering information — can be found here. A free download of the book – under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license – can be found here.

Another international book on the commons has just come out. The Italian publisher Bruno Mondadori has released Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice, by Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom. (The Italian title is La Conoscenza Come Bene Comune: Dalla Teoria alla Pratica.) More information can be found on the publisher’s website. English-readers can learn more about the book from MIT Press.

This approach to reducing global warming, formulated by On The Commons co-founder Peter Barnes, employs a commons-oriented strategy based upon the principle that the sky belongs to all of us. Carbon emissions will be reduced under the Van Hollen Cap and Dividend Act of 2009 through the auction of permits for companies to release carbon into the atmosphere. The money will be returned to American citizens on an equal per capita basis.

The legislation is designed to significantly cut carbon emission by 2020 at the same time as helping American households cope with rising energy prices and boosting development of clean energy sources.

For more information, see the Cap and Dividend website

Photo by Joe Gratz under a Creative Commons License, no commercial use or alterations

Here’s how the day is previewed:

“A dominant concept of British and American civil law is that everything is based on property rights, and it is the lawyer’s job to protect and exalt those rights. This program will offer attorneys a different set of glasses through which to view the traditional property-based legal structure. Although legal concepts of ‘property,’ overlaid on fundamental concepts of ‘common law,’ have antecedents that long predate the U.S. Constitution, in the 21st Century, these ‘common law’ antecedents, together with science and computer technology, have developed along a new legal trajectory that many attorneys and judges still do not have the experience or knowledge to appreciate.”

The program will focus on such themes as personal and communal property as it plays out in science, technology, culture, natural resources and civil rights. Among the distinguished speakers planned: Peter Linebaugh, a history professor at the University of Toledo and author of the Manga Carta Manifesto talking about “Magna Carta and the Commons: the Ultimate Stare Decisis”; Eben Moglen, a law professor at the Columbia School of Law and the long-time general counsel of the Free Software Foundation and founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center, talking about “Free & Open Software: Paradigm for a New Intellectual Commons”; Beth Elpern Burrows “Research, Technology Transfer and the Theft from the Commons”; and Laura Nader, an anthropology professor at the University of California Berkeley, talking about “The Law of the Commons, or Lawyers against the commons.”

For the full program, visit the conference website here.

It all started on February 4, when Facebook changed the legal “terms of service” that users must agree to when they sign up for Facebook. The TOS is that dense legal language that no one really reads but which everyone nominally consents to by clicking the button, “I agree.” Now that Facebook has more than 175 million members (a population that would make it the sixth largest nation in the world), the company apparently felt that it could quietly change the TOS to expand its rights with impunity.

Photo by Bryan Veloso, via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, No Derivatives license.

Essentially, the new TOS said that anything that you upload to Facebook becomes the property of Facebook, even if you close your account. So your photos, your writings, your music, your blog (if re-posted to your Facebook page), would belong to Facebook. Facebook could even choose to sub-license your content if it so desired. It presumably thought that it might make money by selling a viral hit or letting advertisers use amateur content or people’s likeness for commercial purposes.

The changes were not trivial. Facebook was claiming “broad, permanent and retroactive rights to users’ personal information,” in the words of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. EPIC also noted that the modifications were made without any meaningful notice to Facebook users.

While Facebook understandably didn’t call attention to the changes in the terms of service, the Consumerist, a blog associated with Consumers Union, did. It pored through the fine print, discovered the “content grab” and publicized it on its site. Soon Julius Harper, a Los Angeles video game producer, joined others in organizing a Facebook group called People Against the New Terms of Service, which quickly attracted 136,000 people. After a New York Times article publicized the controversy, the Facebook rebellion truly exploded.

Noting that the unilateral transfer of rights to Facebook was an unfair and deceptive business practice, EPIC announced it was planning to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. A dozen consumer and privacy organizations planned to join EPIC. Within hours of the planned filing, on February 18, Facebook decided to restore the former terms of service.

What’s surprising is that Facebook thought it could get away with its brazen content grab. Don’t they realize that their business model depends upon respecting the community, and that the community has 175 million eyes? MySpace’s attempted ban on external software widgets once provoked an uproar, and MySpace backed down. Facebook itself once instituted a new feature that many users considered a violation of their privacy.

If the new TOS was a “mistake,” as Facebook later claimed, someone in the legal department or executive suite should be fired for endangering the company’s franchise so casually. More likely, the move was a deliberate and calculated choice. Facebook wanted to enjoy broader legal rights over a massive collection of user-generated content, and thought it could unilaterally achieve this change without attracting attention.

Once the controversy flared out of control, however, Facebook wisely beat a hasty retreat. It invited Facebook users to help formulate a “bill of rights” for users that would cover their “freedom to share and connect,” “fundamental equality” and “ownership and control of information.” The Facebook community will be able to review, comment on and ultimately vote on the “bill of rights” in “a virtual Town Hall” that will last for thirty days.

“This is really a move we’re making because we trust our users,” Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said. “If we have a good, open dialogue, we feel this will strengthen the community and strengthen trust and loyalty.” The company also wrote, “We apologize for the confusion around these issues. We never intended to claim ownership over people’s content even though that’s what it seems like to many people. This was a mistake and we apologize for the confusion.”

It’s healthy for powerful institutions to be insecure. It makes them more responsive. It focuses the corporate mind when it learns that a stupid decision may trigger mass defections of users and serious damage to a company’s brand equity. Facebook is actually a stronger company now. Facebook’s chief asset — its users — will be a more stable population as a result of the open, deliberative process and the forging of governance norms that are openly debated and accepted. Bravo. Given Facebook’s preeminence, I have to believe that this episode will set some powerful new precedents for enlightened online governance.

It sounds improbable, but could something similar be done with the procedures of the World Trade Organization? Could a treaty apparatus designed to serve multinational corporations be exploited in a new way so that it does not just promote free trade in private goods and services, but enables countries to collaborate to create public goods?

That is precisely what James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, recently proposed at the World Forum on Science and Democracy, held in Belém, Brasil, an event that is affiliated with the World Social Forum. Love is the hard-driving and sophisticated Washington-based activist who has done so much to fight strict drug industry patents and lower the cost of drugs for developing countries.

Love’s brilliant idea is to re-purpose the portion of the WTO agreement that deals with the market for services, and try to use it as a procedural platform that would let different nations cooperate in the creation of such public goods as open source software, shared scientific research on drugs and global warming solutions, the translation of works into other languages, and much more.

Here is how Love explained the proposal at the World Forum on Science and Democracy on January 26, 2009:

The world is confronted with a vast under-supply of public goods. Part of the problem is that the current trade system lacks the sufficient incentives and structures to address the free riding problems associated with the supply of public goods. There are increasing calls for a larger supply of public goods and a variety of proposals that involve government commitments to increase the supply of global public goods in specific areas, including but not limited to major projects such as the Kyoto Protocol to the International Framework Convention on Climate Change, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, the proposed WIPO Treaty on Access to Knowledge, and the proposed WHO Biomedical R&D Treaty.

Our goal is to create a new option that will allow governments to make binding offers and commitments for the supply of heterogeneous global public goods, involving in particular knowledge goods.

One of the objectives is to shift from the current WTO focus on trade liberation for private goods and the private enclosure of knowledge through mandatory standards for intellectual property and its enforcement (an area some believe has been over emphasized), to a more balanced agenda that also includes public goods and attention to pressing social needs.

One proposal is to model such an agreement in part on the WTO agreement on services – the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). The GATS in the WTO is designed to privatize and liberalize trade in service, in part though a system of binding “offers.” These offers are not uniform among countries. Offers by one country depend upon their specific willingness to liberalize a specific sector, and the interest of other countries that they do so. Liberalization commitments are traded in a WTO environment where “asks” and “offers” cover a wide range to topics, including changes in tariffs or agricultural subsides, or requests for support of new intellectual property norms. What is key to the services agreement is its ability to accommodate a diverse set of offers, in a multilateral negotiation, where consensus on uniform norms is unlikely.

There is much criticism of the GATS itself, much of it we share. However, as a model for creating binding commitments for a diverse set of obligations, it is quite interesting. Hence, the earlier reference to the “hack” of the WTO. We are interested in borrowing from the GATS the structure of accepting binding heterogeneous offers to supply — in this case, not liberation of services, but the supply of public goods.

If such an agreement existed with the WTO, several countries could propose a collaboration to fund open source research on malaria. Countries could bind government agencies to require government funded research to be made available, for free, on the Internet, as was recently done by the U.S. NIH and in some other government research agencies. Like-minded countries could agree to make binding commitments to support the development of open source software, fund new databases, share the costs of hosting Wikipedia servers, pay for translations of scientific works into other languages, or for the creation of more accessible formats of books and articles for persons who are blind or have other reading disabilities. The lists of things that could be expanded and supported under such an agreement are endless.

In theory, all of these things could be done without a WTO agreement. The benefits of the WTO agreement would be several, however. First, it is quite costly to set up a separate treaty or agreement, particularly one that can so effectively enforce commitments, as can the WTO. Second, by introducing public goods into the WTO environment – the culture of the WTO would be profoundly changed. “Asks” and “offers” in the WTO negotiations would not longer be exclusively about the private goods market, or about the privatization and enclosure of knowledge itself. There would be an immediate shift to consider the competing benefits of greater openness, and a larger global commons. Knowledge that was produced to be “free” would have a new value, as a trading chip in the WTO environment.

What strikes me as so exciting about Love’s proposal is its attempt to use the WTO apparatus to contractually construct commons that would generate and share knowledge as a public good. Over time, this new the commons vector working under WTO auspices could begin to compete with and complement the market system as now constituted!

Love’s same presentation also describes previous proposal that the nations of the world adopt a a new incentive system for generating drugs. Under a new system of “medical innovation inducement prizes,” patent monopolies would be eliminated entirely and replaced with a system of large cash prizes to drug developers. The shares of a prize that companies would receive would be based on “the impact of their products on actual health outcomes over time, benchmarked against the state of technology that existed before the introduction of the new product.”

While the proposal is certainly visionary, it is extremely well thought-out and specific. The challenge now is moving it forward in international councils of policy and public opinion.

We are proud to introduce the Forum Organizing Project, a joint project of On the Commons and the Institute for Policy Studies. The Forum Organizing Project supports local forums with information resources, tools and tips for events-organizing, and a central place for organizers to network.

Check out our new website at ForumOrganizing.org for resources and tips for holding great events on the Economic Crisis, and other issues. To contact us with questions or comments, please email Andree at forumorganizing at gmail.com, or call her at 617 541 0500 ×302.

Danny Williams, a wealthy and unabashedly pro-business politician, blocked the AbitiBowater company from continuing to use public assets after it announced plans to shut down a paper mill that employed 900 in one of Canada’s poorest provinces.

p(photo-credits).photo of Danny Williams by John Jeddore from flickr.com, under a creative commons license

The company, which intended to sell timber rights and hydroelectric capacity it had been granted upon opening the mill in Grand Falls-Windsor, will appeal the decision under the North American Free Trade Agreement, according to the Bullet, a Canadian socialist website.

Williams told CBC radio, “We need to make sure we properly safeguard our natural resources…I’m the first one to say that businesses should earn a profit, and make a handsome profit if they’re able to run their businesses effectively.

“But don’t take, take, take from Canadians, not reinvest, suddenly close down operations, and think you’ll walk away with the goodies.”

For more information, see http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet179.html

LittleSis, still in beta, describes its mission as “profiling the powers that be.” It is “an involuntary facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited and maintained by people like you.” The site doesn’t just provide the usual “Who’s Who” biographical data about a person. It enumerates the key relationships that powerful people have with other powerful people and institutions. It identifies the other people who serve on the same corporate boards and institutions, and shows what charities and political candidates they give money to.

From the LittleSis homepage.

The information on LittleSis is all publicly available, but it is usually scattered around hundreds of different websites, books and documents. LittleSis is an ingenious attempt to pull all this data together on one site, so that the connections among the power elite can be made more visible.

As of today, the site claimed to have 305,165 data citations, mentions of 114,722 relationships and 16,119 addresses on 27,041 persons. LittleSis has date on 11,133 lobbyists, 8,373 organizations, 3,795 political fundraising committees, 3,055 businesses, 2,700 political candidates, 1,918 individual campaign committees and 1,740 elected Representatives. In addition, LittleSis has lists of prominent people such as Forbes magazine’s list of the 400 richest Americans, The Hill magazine’s “Top Hired Guns” and GQ’s “50 Most Powerful People in DC.”

All this, and the site is still in a beta release!

A few months ago, I wrote about how digital technologies are empowering people to undertake their own “sousveillance” of people in power. LittleSis is a creative new example of this phenomenon. Or as LittleSis puts it:

The site is an answer to Big Brother: citizens surveilling the country’s leadership in the interest of transparency, accountability, and the public good. No nefarious tactics, no trillion dollar budgets, just open, collaborative research with the purpose of turning the page on an era of failed leadership, cronyism, and corruption.

Ordinary Americans have never felt more shut out from all levels of government, more excluded from economic gains, and more powerless to remedy the problems facing their communities and the world. Meanwhile, the powerful networks of individuals who’ve enjoyed unprecedented influence, wealth, and access while steering our country towards its present crisis continue to elude responsibility in the public spotlight.

We all know that the need for fundamental change is urgent. Americans everywhere are pushing back against a broken system that bankrupts and disempowers them. But to effectively push back, we have to study and document the social networks that have our democracy in a stranglehold. We have to expose the individuals and institutions that abuse their power to enrich themselves and their cronies. And we have to make common cause and share this information freely.

LittleSis is an invitation for fed up citizens to do just that.

The other interesting website, Spot.us, is a brave new experiment in “community funded reporting” for San Francisco and the Bay Area. The project, hosted by the Center for Media Change and funded by the Knight Foundation, is an attempt to invent a new sort of commons collaboration and marketplace for serious journalism. David Cohn is the founder of Spot.us.

Here’s how it works. The site invites the public to submit “tips” about potentially good stories, and registered freelance journalists can submit story “pitches.” Visitors to the site can then pledge money (tax-deducibly!) to see a particular story reported, written and published. Once the pledges for a given story reach the target sum – most seem to range from $500 to $1,500 – the pledges are called in and the story is assigned to a reporter. Spot.us editors oversee its completion and quality.

Among the current pitches seeking adequate funding:

• “How is the recession hitting the SF sex industry?” ($380 raised toward the $500 goal)
• “Will Oakland survive the next earthquake?” (Only $50 raised.)
• “The Flow of Energy in the Bay” (Where does the electricity in your house come from? At what cost environmentally, economically and socially? And who reaps the profits?) ($125 raised toward a $1,500 goal)

I like how the site identifies the people who have made pledges toward a story, and provides a roster of “almost funded stories” – an inducement to get others to donate. A commercial news organization can buy temporary, exclusive rights to a Spot.us story, in which case donations are refunded to the donors. Otherwise, Spot.us stories are made available through a Creative Commons license.

LittleSis and Spot.us – two great experiments in crowd-driven citizenship and journalism. May they both live long and prosper!

The President of the United Nations General Assembly, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, announced the appointment during the 60th anniversary celebration of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Barlow — the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians and founder of the Blue Planet Project – will establish a new task force on water as a human right.

On December 10, Barlow gave a speech to the United Nations urging a change in international law “to settle once and for all the question of who controls water. It must be commonly understood that water is not first and foremost a commercial good, although of course it has an economic dimension, but rather, a human right and a public trust.” A full copy of the speech (pdf file) can be read here.”:http://www.canadians.org/about/Maude_Barlow/UN/NOTES_FOR_UN_PANEL_ON_EME.pdf

In her speech, Barlow told the UN General Assembly:

What is needed now is binding law to codify that states have the obligation to deliver sufficient, safe, accessible and affordable water to their citizens as a public service. While “water for all, everywhere and always” may appear to be self-evident, the fact is that there are many powerful forces, some private, some governmental, that have resisted this notion fiercely. So groups around the world are mobilizing in their communities and countries for constitutional recognition of the right to water within their borders, and at the United Nations for a full treaty that recognizes the right to water internationally….

Is water a common good like air, or a commodity like Coca-Cola? Who is being given the right or the power to turn the tap on or off – the people, governments, or the invisible hand of the market? Who sets the price for a poor district in Manila or La Paz – the locally elected water board or the CEO of a transnational corporation? The global water crisis cries out for good governance and good governance needs binding, legal bases that rest on universally applicable human rights.

At a press conference, Barlow was blunt in declaring that Coca-Cola’s claim to be water neutral is not credible, and that the UN’s Global Compact is little more than “blue-washing.” She also called Coke, Pepsi and Nestle “water hunters” who take water from aquifers and “put it in plastic and sell it all over the world.”

As regular readers of OTC may know, the basic idea behind cap and dividend is to auction “pollution rights” to companies that sell carbon-based fuels and put the money in a trust fund owned by all citizens (because we all own the sky). Then the money is distributed in annual dividends to everyone. The auctions use market forces to discourage C02 pollution, but the trust dividends help everyone meet the higher costs of using carbon-based fuels. The system also rewards those who reduce their energy consumption.

The “Cap’n Dividend” animation was recently released by Cap and Dividend, a project of On the Commons. For more, go to http://www.capanddividend.org.