Editorial 5.9, October 2003, by Deirdre Helfferich The Survival of the Commons Amidst the rampant privatization of just about everything to do with anything, there is a small and growing movement to preserve the commons. This idea, that of the common area held in trust for all by all, is infused not only in the historical commons, the common green pasture where all could take their sheep or horses or cattle to graze, but in ideas like public domain, the environment, and public radio and televsion. The infamous “problem of the commons” is one of responsibility. If all are responsible for the care and upkeep of the commons, then, conversely, none are—somebody else can take care of it, right? This is a fallacy, of course: just because someone else could do it, that doesn’t abolve each of us of our own responsibility. It just means that everyone is responsible a little bit. Or should be. Interestingly, this common responsibility is often depicted or seen as a chore, an unpleasant burden—as though it would be easier on us if just a few people took that awful, nasty responsibility off our shoulders and took care of it for us. There. Isn’t that better? Now, when our commons are privatized, we don’t have to worry about it, right? We don’t have to feel that icky sense of pride, that bothersome sense of control over our own lives and communities. Somebody else can manipulate it much better than the group of us, and make it turn a profit for themselves, which is, after all, the best way to determine and develop value, right? We aren’t pestered by the knowledge that all of us have a share in such things as the home team, the air we breathe and the water we drink, the radio waves and TV bandwidth, even our cultural heritage. It is owned by somebody else, somebody responsible, somebody politically favored. We’re out of it. Ownership of the commons by the public is an important—a vital—key to our pursuit of happiness and health, both physical and political. In future issues, I will be publishing a series of articles by different authors dealing with the subject in depth. For now, however, I am providing a brief overview of different arenas in which issues of the commons affect us. The Home Team The Green Bay Packers are the only National Football League team in the entire country that is owned by their community—and the only team that enriches that community directly. According to an article in Mother Jones, the NFL now requires that teams have a single majority owner so they cannot be publicly traded—nor publicly owned. This enables team owners to move their teams as they wish, such that “home town” is a whim of the financial moment, or to essentially blackmail cities into coughing up public funds to build new stadiums or provide other perks in order to keep their home team in place. And it prevents other cities or groups from benefitting as Green Bay has—or as the limited number of persons who currently own football teams do. Oligarchy in the world of professional sports! Information and the Public Domain Copyrights don’t always reserve all rights. At creativecommons.org, a website devoted to preserving the cultural and creative commons, several different types of copyright language can be found. Creative Commons provides languge for twelve different types of copyrights, including six variations of attribution licenses, two types of licenses proscribing only derivative works, a noncommercial reproduction license, two types of licenses for sharing the work, and something called a founder’s copyright, which releases the creative work to the public domain after only fourteen to twenty-eight years. What’s the point of all these different copyright licenses? To protect your creative work (say, a novel or a piece of music or an article) but allow others to use it for free in greater or lesser degree—without risking their copyrighting it out from under you. This way, the information or artwork is kept in the public domain, available for anyone’s fair use, and yet your ownership is protected. Copyleft and Open-Source Software In the 1980s, Richard Stallman initiated work on a freeware version of Unix, which he called GNU (for GNU’s Not Unix). This software was later developed into Linux, based on work by Linus Torvalds. The idea of open-source software has the software giants such as Microsoft not a little nervous, because, well, the software is free, and if you don’t like what it’s doing, you can go into the guts of the program and change it. (Of course, this also results in software that evolves to fit the situation and is more stable, as programmers fix bugs and improve code.) Arising from the work of these two and others came the Free Software Foundation and the ‘copyleft,’ a copyright that, instead of making the software proprietary, protects if FOR the public domain. This is done by first copyrighting the software and then allowing others to use and change it freely—but not copyright it, as the rights are already reserved. As the GNU website, www.gnu.org, says, “Copyleft says that anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change it. Copyleft guarantees that every user has freedom.” The Drug Scam The knowledge provided by research into drugs and other products that is funded with public money belongs to the public, right? Wrong. Increasingly, the public pays for federally funded research into drug development, and then again when purchasing prescription drugs—patented by for-profit companies benefitting from federal research funds and discoveries at public institutions made by state and federal employees. Water Wars The November/December 2002 issue of Mother Jones focused on the privatization of water utilities, and described how this trend to put water supplies in the hands of for-profit companies has produced dismal results around the world: poor water quality, poor service, and soaring costs—and in some places, corruption, deaths, and epidemics. Yet, privatization is not necessarily going to fail—often, it is quite successful. On the small scale, with competition, it works. The question remains, however: should a resource essential for life, such as water, be controlled by entities out to make a profit from it, or by entities legally bound to provide for the common good, i.e., governments? Genetically Modified Foods One of the drawbacks and advantages both to GM foods is that the markers in them are patented. This means that no one but the patent holder can reproduce them—poof! There goes the right of the farmer to grow their own seed from a genetically modified plant. But the threat from genetically modified foods is both one of the moral questions surrounding ownership of life forms and one of contamination of other life forms: inadvertant cross-breeding, herbicide-resistant weeds, and more. According to a recent article in the Independent, hybridisation and transfer of modified genes into the wild is not only likely, it is inevitable. What will Montsano do then? Sue Ma Nature? Media Monopoly Our right to the pursuit of happiness and our obligation to be members of an informed citizenry are in dire danger. Corporate ownership of media sources is not the problem—monopoly is. Varied sources of information are vital to keeping the national dialogue open and free—but the media giants have powerful friends. The recent change in and subsequent overturning of the FCC rules on ownership are a case in point: Tom DeLay and Dennis Hastert are preventing Congress from voting on the new rules (which will surely be overturned) by keeping it from getting out of committee. (This is the same Tom DeLay who has been helping jerrymander Texas, by the way.) The current flap about corporate control of the airwaves is connected to this: bandwidth of radio and television and other electromagnetic ranges is supposed to be a public trust—yet our government has been steadily selling it off, bit by bit over the years. Public radio and television encounter steadily more resistance from funding sources, and more pressure to advertise or otherwise sell in order to stay “in business”—something they aren’t really supposed to be involved in the first place. | ||
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