There have been a number of stories on Techdirt recently about governments diminishing the public domain - not just by extending copyright for future works, but also by putting works currently in the public domain back under copyright, both in the US and EU. Reversing that trend – by pushing back copyright's term closer to the original 14 years, say – will be challenging, to put it mildly.

But there's another way to fight back against that loss, as this Wikimedia Foundation project shows:

Wiki Loves Monuments was a crazy idea: ask people to get out of their houses and take a picture of the cultural heritage around them, of monuments and buildings! In September 2010, however, the idea proved far from crazy – 250 people participated in the Netherlands and submitted 12,500 photos. Last month, during the pan-European 2011 contest, we crushed that number.

In the past few months, volunteers throughout Europe have worked hard to organize this public photo contest in 18 countries throughout Europe – from Portugal to Estonia – and with great success. More than 5,000 people participated, submitting an amazing 165,000 photos– all available under a free license, and usable on Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia and other places on the internet.

The key part is the "free license" required: judging by this rules page (in German), that seems to mean cc-by-sa. Strictly speaking, that's not public domain, but images released under this license can still be used very widely (including commercially.)

The Wiki Loves Monuments competition was a clever way to get people to contribute to this corner of the digital commons; but many people are happy to do that even without incentives. Flickr has just announced that over 200 million photos on its site have been released under a Creative Commons license. Now, it's true that 145 million of these permit only non-commercial use, but that still leaves 18 million under cc-by-sa, and 25 million under the even more liberal cc-by license.

Even if they don't compensate for what is effectively the government-sanctioned theft of the public domain around the world, these growing stores of cc-licensed images on Flickr and elsewhere show how it is possible for everyone to fight back, simply by creating and releasing works under permissive licenses – including, of course, placing them fully in the public domain.

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Cross posted from Open....

The oceans belong to everyone - well, more or less. That is, they form a classic commons. But of course, that fact doesn't stop people from claiming that they own stuff even here:

Molecules derived from marine resources and used for medical applications were worth over $1 billion in 2005, and heat-stable enzymes obtained at undersea vents were worth $150 million. Not surprisingly, the business community has responded by patenting genes derived from marine organisms; the authors were able to identify over 8,500 sequences derived from a total of 520 species in a US gene patent database.

This is a double insult to humanity. Genes are part of the DNA commons and "belong" to everyone or to no one, but certainly not to any one entity. Those genes were extracted from marine animals, which form part of another commons, the oceans' ecosystems, that also belong to everyone or to no one.

But instead of simply recognising those commons, and letting everyone benefit from them directly, the best the patent maximalists can come up with is a cartel, a.k.a. patent pool:

they also suggest that, in the case of marine materials, a patent pool organized within this framework might improve access to genetic information and distribute the risk and profits broadly among far more nations, rather than limiting it to the few countries that can afford high-throughput DNA sequencing.

The logic here seems to be that, of course we need patents, otherwise nobody will go to the trouble of sequencing all of these interesting organisms. What this overlooks is that the cost of sequencing genomes has come down from a billion dollars (for the first human genome) to a few thousand. Next year it will probably be under $1000, and the year after that a few hundred. In a decade, sequencing will cost almost nothing.

What this means is that, once more, intellectual monopolies are being given away needlessly - no quid pro quo is in fact necessary because practically anyone will be able to do this for very low cost. And, once again, it's you and me who lose out, as knowledge is sent to the intellectual equivalent of Davey Jones' Locker....

Justin Levine points us to a column in the New York Review of Books by Harvard's Robert Darnton (based on a speech he gave) questioning why there is no work on a national digital library in the US. There is, obviously, the Google book scanning effort, but as lots of folks are worried about putting all that info in the control of Google, Darnton wonders why others aren't working on similar efforts as well, pointing out that what Google has really done is shown that it is possible to do.

As for the reasons why, Darnton quotes extensively from our founding fathers on the importance of access to knowledge. They talk up the importance of open access and sharing knowledge -- and even highlight technology's wonderful role in making that possible. And yet, today, rather than using technology to continue that tradition, many have fought against what the technology allows -- quite the contrary of what our founding fathers were excited about. It's rather unfortunate.

Behind the creation of the American republic was another republic, which made the Constitution thinkable. This was the Republic of Letters--an information system powered by the pen and the printing press, a realm of knowledge open to anyone who could read and write, a community of writers and readers without boundaries, police, or inequality of any kind, except that of talent. Like other men of the Enlightenment, the Founding Fathers believed that free access to knowledge was a crucial condition for a flourishing republic, and that the American republic would flourish if its citizens exercised their citizenship in the Republic of Letters.

Of course, literacy was limited in the eighteenth century, and those who could read had limited access to books. There was an enormous gap between the hard realities of life two centuries ago and the ideals of the Founding Fathers. You could therefore accuse the Founders of utopianism. For my part, I believe that a strong dose of utopian idealism gave their thought its driving force. I think we should tap that force today, because what seemed utopian in the eighteenth century has now become possible. We can close the gap between the high ground of principle and the hardscrabble of everyday life. We can do so by creating a National Digital Library.

That said, I'd argue that focusing on a centralized method of doing so, whether it's Google or a university or Congress may still be the wrong way of doing it. Why not distribute the work. I would imagine that many people would be quite willing to contribute their time, their technology and their bandwidth in assisting the creation of a truly distributed, open and free digital library.

Well respected author and professor Lewis Hyde, who has done tremendous work in the past on the concept of "gift economies," apparently has a new book out that sounds quite interesting -- though may cover some well-tread ground for folks around here. It's all about how the bastardization of intellectual property law has locked up and diminished our common cultural heritage, and why that's a problem. The book is called Common as Air.

The review, linked above, explains that the book goes through the history of how cultures used to be about sharing, and how the originators of our intellectual property laws were quite concerned about it being used to lock up culture:

The United States' Founding Fathers supported far less restrictive commons than have come to pass. Hyde writes about "John Adams attacking the Stamp Act as a tax on knowledge, Benjamin Franklin encouraging skilled artisans to smuggle technical expertise out of England, James Madison explaining why unlimited copyright undermines civic and religious liberty, and Thomas Jefferson trying to get a prohibition on patent monopolies written into the Bill of Rights." Copyrights and patents originated as brief tradeoffs, minimal, transient monopolies granted to stimulate and reward invention.

Hyde charts corporate interests' erosion of these views, restricting sharing of even long-iconic creativity, the prolonging of copyright terms and the widening boundaries of exclusive ownership. These days, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, lobbied for by major media companies, assures personal copyrights for life plus 70 years and corporate rights typically enduring from 95 to 120 years.

Frankly, it sounds like an excellent companion book to James Boyle's The Public Domain. The one complaint in the review is that Hyde does a great job explaining the problem, but does little to suggest a way to fix things. The reviewer points out that this leaves the reader "saddened -- and frustrated -- by his demonstration of what's been taken." Of course, considering how frequently I hear similar feelings from folks reading this blog, I would imagine many of you might find the book quite interesting.

By the way, if you'd like to see a lecture of Hyde talking about some of the concepts in this book, the following hour-long video discusses some of the concepts that are also covered in the book:

With the Nobel Prize in Economics being awarded to Elinor Ostrom (as well as Oliver Williamson) this year, plenty of people are noting that Ostrom's seminal work has to do with how the concept of "the tragedy of the commons" isn't really true in many cases, and how that "commons" can often self-regulate itself. And, Ostrom definitely recognizes how this applies to the "commons" that is the public domain. I didn't want to comment right away on this. While I've read Ostrom's work in the past, I wanted to revisit some of it, to refresh myself on it.

But what comes out in reading through her work is that she recognizes that government intervention -- such as with monopoly rights -- really doesn't make sense in many situations of "public goods." In a recent discussion on this site, people pointed to the concept of a "public good" as something that needs government intervention -- and I noted that more recent economic analysis showed that wasn't true at all. Ostrom's work is much of what kicked off that line of analysis (Coase deserves credit as well...). Her key finding was that in commons situations, the players can often work out perfectly reasonable solutions on their own, that don't involve regulatory efforts to put up fences or restrictions. The idea that a commons will automatically get overrun simply isn't true in practice. And that's exactly what we've seen in areas where there isn't intellectual property protections. The supposed fear of a "tragedy of the commons" never seems to show up. Instead, the markets adjust.

What struck me as really interesting, however, is that this is the second time in three years that the Nobel committee has awarded someone whose research highlights this point. In 2007, the award went to Eric Maskin, who has done work showing why patents can often be harmful (his focus was on software) -- again, suggesting that government intervention can be harmful in cases of "public goods." And, while it's less tied to the reasons why he got his Nobel or his core areas of research, last year's award winner, Paul Krugman, has recently come around to recognizing that "infinite goods" or public goods aren't a problem, but a potential opportunity as a market shifts.

It's nice to see the Nobel committee helping to get these ideas out there -- and highlighting the research that debunks the old wisdom that the answer to any public good is to create a gov't regulated monopoly system, rather than letting the market work out a solution on its own.