Information Commons

All Americans are joint owners of a trove of hidden assets. These assets - natural gifts like air and water, and social creations like culture and the Internet - constitute our shared inheritance. They're vital to our lives and make our economy run. Though it's impossible to put a precise value on them, it's safe to say they're worth trillions of dollars.

Recently, Peter Barnes, David Bollier and Michael Calabrese served on an

We all see the Internet as a place of freedom, where new technologies, business innovation and competition flourish. This freedom has always been at the heart of what the Internet community and its original innovators celebrated.

Commissioner Michael J. Copps, of the Federal Communications Commission, contends that this openness is at risk. He will discuss the threat posed by a regulatory movement to replace open networks with closed systems and the impact this will have on… more

It's a political tale as old as Capitol Hill: A lumbering industry selects a certain corporate-friendly party to be its Beltway patsy. In exchange for the requisite campaign donations and other perks, members of said party use their clout to push through the industry's legislative agenda--an agenda that would rip off consumers and harm the overall economy but enrich the corporate string-pullers immensely. Pundits and public-interest types grumble over the bald-faced cronyism, but as long as the money keeps flowing,… more

The nation’s airwaves are the most precious natural resource of the Information Age, highly sought after by a range of commercial firms—from broadcasters to cell phone companies and taxis—that use them as an input to production. The airwaves, more technically called the radio spectrum, are also a publicly owned asset like the navigable waterways, the atmosphere and the mineral wealth under federal land. As with these other public resources, policymakers need to find a way to ensure that citizens receive… more

It's almost human nature: if you're allowed the use of something for enough time, you begin to think you have a right to it, even that you own it. Take broadcast television. Its signals travel by means of the electromagnetic spectrum, specifically that segment known colloquially as the airwaves. The spectrum is a fact of the physical universe. Capital didn't create it. It can't be improved by way of adding value. It's inherently a public resource.

Yet broadcasters treat it… more

Even amidst the burst of the "dot com" bubble, many believe that new information technologies are having a dramatic impact on the way we live, work, learn, and communicate with each other. One of the applications of information technology that has attracted the most attention is "e-learning." Technology has the potential to transform education and lifelong learning. In the future, learners of all ages will be able to tap in to vast digital libraries and online museums,… more

Sweeping changes triggered by digital technologies have raised questions about how to understand the public interest in copyright law and digital infrastructure. Join us for a one-day conference, Protecting the Information Commons, which will include the release of several major reports and explore some key questions: How is the public domain being threatened by new technologies and copyright law? What are the implications of current patent policies and digital innovations for science and the public domain? … more

In Silent Theft -- a new book by New America's Public Assets Program -- David Bollier describes America's vast "common wealth" and the increasing threat of commercial enclosure that is denying a fair return to taxpayers and eroding shared cultural values. The American Commons encompasses both tangible assets and resources that are neither private nor public property in a conventional sense including natural systems, such as the atmosphere, the airwaves and the human genome, but also resource management regimes,… more

At the dawn of the 21st century in the United States, our culture and economy are so steeped in an unqualified belief in the power of entrepreneurial innovation that, ironically, we tend to disregard the enormous investment previous generations have made toward the nation’s shared research infrastructure. We like to think that the inventions upon which we increasingly rely have sprung up like weeds. But the truth is that these inventions owe more than we often acknowledge to cultivation and… more

Sweeping changes in our nation’s communications infrastructure and markets over the past twenty years have radically changed the topography of the public sphere and democratic culture. But the mental maps which many people use to conceive “the public interest” in communications hark back to circa 1975, a time when the traditional broadcast model dominated and there were only three commercial television networks, cable TV consisted of “community antennae” to reach rural areas and even the VCR had not yet been… more