Viral Spiral Also by David Bollier
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VIRAL SPIRAL ALSO BY DAVID BOLLIER Brand Name Bullies Silent Theft Aiming Higher Sophisticated Sabotage (with co-authors Thomas O. McGarity and Sidney Shapiro) The Great Hartford Circus Fire (with co-author Henry S. Cohn) Freedom from Harm (with co-author Joan Claybrook) VIRAL SPIRAL How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own David Bollier To Norman Lear, dear friend and intrepid explorer of the frontiers of democratic practice © 2008 by David Bollier All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher. The author has made an online version of the book available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. It can be accessed at http://www.viralspiral.cc and http://www.onthecommons.org. Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 38 Greene Street, New York,NY 10013. Published in the United States by The New Press, New York,2008 Distributed by W.W.Norton & Company,Inc., New York ISBN 978-1-59558-396-3 (hc.) CIP data available The New Press was established in 1990 as a not-for-profit alternative to the large, commercial publishing houses currently dominating the book publishing industry. The New Press operates in the public interest rather than for private gain, and is committed to publishing, in innovative ways, works of educational, cultural, and community value that are often deemed insufficiently profitable. www.thenewpress.com A Caravan book. For more information, visit www.caravanbooks.org. Composition by dix! This book was set in Bembo Printed in the United States of America 10987654321 CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Part I: Harbingers of the Sharing Economy 21 1. In the Beginning Was Free Software 23 2. The Discovery of the Public Domain 42 3. When Larry Lessig Met Eric Eldred 69 Part II: The Rise of Free Culture 91 4. Inventing the Creative Commons 93 5. Navigating the Great Value Shift 122 6. Creators Take Charge 145 7. The Machine and the Movement 168 8. Free Culture Goes Global 180 9. The Many Faces of the Commons 203 Part III: A Viral Spiral of New Commons 227 10. The New Open Business Models 229 11. Science as a Commons 253 12. Open Education and Learning 281 Conclusion: The Digital Republic and the Future of Democratic Culture 294 Notes 311 Index 335 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In this book, as with any book, dozens of barely visible means of support conspired to help me.It has been hard work,but any author with sufficient honesty and self-awareness realizes the extent to which he or she is a lens that refracts the experiences, insights, and writings of others. It is a pleasure to pay tribute to those who have been helpful to me. I am grateful to Larry Lessig, a singular visionary in developing the commons as a new paradigm,for helping to make this book pos- sible. He submitted to several interviews, facilitated my research within the Creative Commons community,and, despite our shared involvements in various projects over the years, scrupulously re- spected my independence. It is also a pleasure to thank the Rocke- feller Foundation for generously helping to cover my research, reporting, and travel expenses. I interviewed or consulted with more than one hundred people in the course of writing this book. I want to thank each of them for carving out some time to speak with me and openly shar- ing their thoughts. The Creative Commons and iCommons staff were particularly helpful in making time for me, pointing me to- ward useful documents and Web sites and sharing their expertise. I must single out Glenn Otis Brown, Mia Garlick, Joichi Ito, Heather Ford, Tomislav Medak, Ronaldo Lemos, and Hal Abelson for their special assistance. Since writing a book resembles parachuting into a forest and then trying to find one’s way out,I was pleased to have many friends who recommended some useful paths to follow.After reading some or all of my manuscript,the following friends and colleagues offered many invaluable suggestions and criticisms: Charles Schweik, Elliot E. Maxwell, John Seely Brown, Emily Levine, Peter Suber, Julie viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Ristau, Jay Walljasper, Jonathan Rowe, Kathryn Milun, Laurie Racine, and Gigi Sohn. It hardly requires saying that none of these astute readers bears any responsibility for the choices that I ulti- mately made. For the past seven years, the Tomales Bay Institute, recently re- named On the Commons, has nurtured my thinking and commit- ment to the commons. (On the Commons has no formal affiliation to the Creative Commons world, but it enthusiastically shares its commitments to the commons.) I am grateful to my colleagues Peter Barnes, Harriet Barlow, and Julie Ristau for their unflagging support of my book over the past three years, even when it im- pinged on my other responsibilities. In the early stages of this book,Elaine Pagels was unusually gen- erous in offering her help,and my conversations with Nick Bromell helped pry loose some important insights used in my conclusion. Cherry Alvarado was of extraordinary help to me as she transcribed scores of interviews with unfailing good humor and precision.I also wish to thank Andrew Ryder for resourceful assistance in the early stages of my research. I have dedicated this book to my dear friend and mentor Norman Lear.The zeal,imagination,and grace that he brings to the simple imperatives of citizenship have been more instructive and in- spirational than he perhaps realizes. He has also been of incalculable support to me in my headstrong explorations of the commons. Finally,at the end of the day,when I emerge from my writer’s lair or return from yet another research and reporting trip,it is Ellen and my sons Sam and Tom who indulge my absences, mental and phys- ical,and reacquaint me with the things that matter most.I could not wish for more. David Bollier Amherst, Massachusetts May 1, 2008 INTRODUCTION It started with that great leap forward in human history the Inter- net, which gave rise to free software in the 1980s and then the World Wide Web in the early 1990s.The shockingly open Internet, fortified by these tools, began empowering a brash new culture of rank amateurs—you and me. And this began to reverse the fierce tide of twentieth-century media. Ordinary people went online, if only to escape the incessant blare of television and radio, the intru- sive ads and the narrow spectrum of expression. People started to discover their own voices . and their own capabilities ...and one another. As the commoners began to take charge of their lives, they dis- covered anew that traditional markets, governments, and laws were often not serving their needs very well. And so some pioneers had the audacity to invent an infrastructure to host new alternatives: free and open-source software.Private licenses to enable sharing and by- pass the oppressive complications of copyright law.A crazy quilt of Web applications.And new types of companies that thrive on serv- icing social communities on open platforms. At the dawn of the twenty-first century,the commoners began to make some headway. More people were shifting their attention away from commercial media to homegrown genres—listservs, Web sites, chat rooms, instant messaging, and later, blogs, podcasts, and wikis. A swirling mass of artists, legal scholars, techies, activists, and even scientists and businesses began to create their own online commons. They self-organized themselves into a loosely coordi- nated movement dedicated to “free culture.” The viral spiral was under way. Viral spiral? Viral, a term borrowed from medical science, refers to the way in which new ideas and innovations on the Internet can proliferate with astonishing speed. A video clip, a blog post, an ad- vertisement released on the Internet tumbles into other people’s consciousness in unexpected ways and becomes the raw feedstock 2 VIRAL SPIRAL for new creativity and culture. This is one reason the Internet is so powerful—it virally propagates creativity.A novel idea that is openly released in the networked environment can often find its way to a distant person or improbable project that can really benefit from it. This recombinative capacity—efficiently coordinated through search engines, Web logs, informal social networks, and other means— radically accelerates the process of innovation. It enlivens democratic culture by hosting egalitarian encounters among strangers and voluntary associations of citizens. Alexis de Tocqueville would be proud. The spiral of viral spiral refers to the way in which the innovation of one Internet cohort rapidly becomes a platform used by later generations to build their own follow-on innovations. It is a corkscrew paradigm of change: viral networking feeds an upward spiral of innovation. The cutting-edge thread achieves one twist of change, positioning a later thread to leverage another twist, which leverages yet another. Place these spirals in the context of an open Internet, where they can sweep across vast domains of life and cat- alyze new principles of order and social practice, and you begin to get a sense of the transformative power of viral spirals. The term viral spiral is apt, additionally, because it suggests a process of change that is anything but clean, direct, and mechanical. In the networked environment, there is rarely a direct cause-and- effect. Things happen in messy, irregular, indeterminate, serendipi- tous ways. Life on the Internet does not take place on a stable Cartesian grid—orderly, timeless, universal—but on a constantly pulsating, dynamic, and labyrinthine web of finely interconnected threads radiating through countless nodes.