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Bad GNUs - The Tragedy of the Creative Commons
(Or, The Tragedy of the Common Gift Economy)
This is not to argue about modern ‘copyright’ and ‘copyleft’ approaches to intellectual property--this is to provide a profitable alternative.
The Tragedy of the Commons is a scenario used to describe people who try to take advantage of a situation for selfish gain. And this is what has happened in the Internet realm. The early days of the Internet spoiled people with the false notion of getting valuable services, even products like computers, for ‘free’ even as they personally bought the hardware, software and ISP connection services for online connectivity. The good news is, people are wearying of the hassles and wising up to the real costs and risks of ‘free’ stuff.
Meanwhile, there is another trend that should also be reversed and that is the growing Digital Divide between a new type of haves and have-nots. The Haves value and retain their Copyrights and other Intellectual Property (IP) rights, while the Have-Nots throw their equity into a vast cauldron hoping for a taste of the soup. The Have-Nots forfeit their rights and opportunities by posting copyrightable, unique articles or comments on sites or blogs--but copyright-hostile Terms of Use disenfranchise them of any hope of royalties from those site publishers, paying them nothing. And with any such public posting, the market value of that particular article goes from zoom to zilch.
The notion of the online Gift Economy, where everyone gives gifts and survives on tips and donations, sounds very nice--but as millions of Open Source Software programmers and bloggers and online community members can attest, site traffic and downloads and blogrolls and comments and reputation points haven’t automatically put bread on the table. Until Now. Join us in our crusade to protect copyrights, royalties and Intellectual Property.
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