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Reclaiming the Commons 



Why we need to protect our public resources from private encroachment.*

David Bollier 



They hang the man and flog the woman

That steal the goose from off the common,

But let the greater villain loose

That steals the common from the goose.

-English folk poem, circa 1764



 ne of the great questions of contemporary American political economy is,
who shall control the commons? "The commons" refers to that vast range of
resources that the American people collectively own, but which are rapidly
being enclosed: privatized, traded in the market, and abused. The process of
converting the American commons into market resources can accurately be
described as enclosure because, like the movement to enclose common lands in
eighteenth-century England, it involves the private appropriation of
collectively owned resources. 

Such enclosures are troubling because they disproportionately benefit the
corporate class and effectively deprive ordinary citizens of access to
resources that they legally or morally own. The result is a hypertrophic
market that colonizes untouched natural resources and public life while
eroding our democratic commonwealth. 

The commons and enclosure are archaic, unfamiliar terms. But this
strangeness is appropriate. We currently lack a vocabulary for identifying a
wide range of abuses that harm public assets and social ecology. When such
abuses are acknowledged, they tend to be viewed as isolated and episodic,
rather than systematically related. A discussion of the commons and
enclosure helps bring into sharp focus a dramatic but largely unexamined
phenomenon of contemporary American society: the forced privatization and
marketization of large swaths of shared wealth and social life. We already
have a familiar and sophisticated language for talking about economic
exchange, focused on market efficiency. We need to develop a similarly rich
body of knowledge about the commons, in order to appreciate the value of our
civic patrimony and to develop strategies that will help us fortify and
extend it.

Varieties of commons 

The American commons comprises a wide range of shared assets and forms of
community governance. Some are tangible, while others are more abstract,
political, and cultural. The tangible assets of the commons include the vast
quantities of oil, minerals, timber, grasslands, and other natural resources
on public lands, as well as the broadcast airwaves and such public
facilities as parks, stadiums, and civic institutions. The government is the
trustee and steward of such resources, but "the people" are the real owners.


The commons also consists of intangible assets that are not as readily
identified as belonging to the public. Such commons include the creative
works and public knowledge not privatized under copyright law. This large
expanse of cultural resources is sometimes known as the public domain or-as
electronic networking increases its scope and intensity-"the information
commons." In addition, our society has dozens of "cultural spaces" provided
by communications media, public education, and nonprofit institutions.
Another large realm of intangible assets consists of scientific and academic
research, much of which is supported by the public through government
funding. The character of these spaces changes dramatically when they are
governed as markets rather than as commons.

No less important and vulnerable are what might be termed the "frontier
commons": features of the natural world that have historically been too
large, too small, or too elusive for any market regime to capture and that
have often been regarded as parts of a common human heritage. Yet
entrepreneurs and corporations are now developing ingenious ways to turn
these natural commons into exploitable property. Several multinational
companies are, for example, seeking to transport huge supplies of freshwater
in Northern countries to "thirsty" regions in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and
southern California. Biotech companies are trying to gain proprietary
control over agricultural seed-lines that have long been regarded as
community assets-for example, by seeking patents for a common yellow bean
grown widely in Mexico, as well as for basmati rice and neem plants in
India. The human genome is a target of property claims and landowners
fighting environmental regulations insist that they "own" wildlife and that
the regulations amount to an unconstitutional "taking" by government. 

A last category of threatened commons is that of so-called "gift economies."
These are communities of shared values in which participants freely
contribute time, energy, or property and over time receive benefits from
membership in the community. The global corps of GNU/Linux software
programmers is a prime example: enthusiasts volunteer their talents and in
return receive useful rewards and group esteem For the most part, no money
changes hands, yet economically valuable work occurs. 1 Gift economies are
the animating force behind scientific research communities, blood donation
systems, New York City's community gardens, and Alcoholics Anonymous.

What unites these highly disparate commons-from natural resources to public
domain to gift economies-is their legal and moral ownership by the American
people. The commons comprises not just marketable assets, but social
institutions and cultural traditions that help define our common life as
Americans. In virtually every case, the market price for a resource does not
begin to capture its actual value to the larger community. But generally we
have no rigorous way to speak about such shared assets, or about the costs
of enclosing them. 

Learning to see the commons 

In an age of market triumphalism and economic myopia, it is an open question
whether the notion of "commonwealth"-that we are a people with shared
history, common values, and control over collectively owned assets-has
practical meaning. As private interests have quietly seized the American
commons, we have lost sight of our heritage as a democratic commonwealth. A
society in which every human transaction is increasingly mediated by the
market, in which everything is privately owned and controlled, may come to
resemble a network of medieval fiefdoms, in which every minor
property-holder demands tribute for the right to cross his land or ford his
streams. This balkanization is bound to impede the flow of commerce and
ideas-and the sustainability of innovation and democratic culture. 2
Furthermore, such extreme market dominance tends to undermine the civic
trust and shared commitments required by any functioning society.

There is a growing sense that a useful tool in promoting material progress
may have become a sorcerer's apprentice, at least in the United States. Do
we really want market forces deciding what sorts of radically new species
shall be unleashed into the ecosystem? Do we really regard the market as an
adequate vehicle for expressing our democratic aspirations, as today's
"market populists" urge us? When even our democratic process is seen as
controlled by the highest bidders and our cultural values as the modeling
clay for media, film, and computer game conglomerates, it should not be
surprising that people regard the fate of the commons with apprehension. 

Of course markets also generate important benefits. The question is how to
achieve a more humane and productive balance between commons and markets-to
set equitable and appropriate boundaries so that the market and the commons
can each retain its integrity while invigorating the other. That equilibrium
is now out of balance as businesses appropriate more and more available
resources, including those that everyone owns and uses in common. 

The creative tension between democracy and business interests is nothing
new. 3 Such tension helped shape the Constitution, numerous Progressive era
campaigns, the labor movement, and the New Deal and Great Society
initiatives. But today we live in a troubling new stage of this struggle, of
unprecedented scope and ferocity. The market's role in American society has
increased exponentially, reaching into nooks and crannies of daily life to
an extent that was unimaginable a generation ago. 

This encroachment has been ignored in part because of the legacy of the Cold
War. Our hostility to communism foreclosed more honest discussions about
cooperation and collective ownership as organizing principles. But we have
also been imprisoned by the tenacious myth that a commons invariably results
in "tragedy"-a view popularized by Garrett Hardin in his famous essay, "The
Tragedy of the Commons." Drawing on the example of herders using a common
meadow, Hardin describes how a scarce resource open to all comers is
depleted and left to ruin. 4 The commons falls apart because every herder
enjoys direct benefits from over-exploiting the commons, while suffering
only indirect costs. Eventually, over-use destroys the resource. 

Although Hardin's own focus was overpopulation, the metaphor soon took on a
life of its own in public policy circles. In the hands of conservatives and
economists, it began to serve as an all-purpose metaphor to denigrate
collectively managed property and champion the efficiencies of
private-property regimes. The "tragedy of the commons" narrative "invoke[s]
an image of helpless individuals caught in an inexorable process of
destroying their own resources," writes political scientist Elinor Ostrom. 5


This pessimism persists, in part, because the commons is frequently confused
with an open-access regime-a free-for-all in which a resource is essentially
open to everyone without restriction. An open-access regime lacks an
identifiable authority and recognized property rights; the common resources
are taken for sale on markets. In contrast, a real commons has a "social
infrastructure" of cultural institutions, rules, and traditions, and the
resources are restricted to personal (non-market) uses by members of the
community. Without that infrastructure, the only operative social value is
private profit for the most aggressive appropriators. 6 Hardin's essay might
more appropriately have been titled "The Tragedy of Open Access." 

Absent from this "tragedy of the commons" argument-and related concerns
about free riders-is an acknowledgment that trust, reciprocity, a history of
shared commitment, and a robust community can overcome many of the alleged
failures of the commons-and sometimes they do. 7 While "tragic" failures of
the commons and free-riding on public commodities certainly do occur, they
do not represent the final word, or even an accurate generalization, about
the capacity of individuals to pursue common goals. 

The fact that people volunteer their time to work on community gardens, or
that scientists openly share their research results with trusted colleagues,
or that people post useful information on the Internet for free, seems
aberrational or at least marginal in terms of conventional economic
thinking. But while cooperation may not conform to the general rule of
rationally self-interested behavior, the efficacy of social negotiation and
cooperation can be seen in dozens of smaller-scale commons. 

Finally, the commons has lived in the shadows because of the limited
assumptions of conventional economics, which prefers to focus on the
individual and not the collective. A market-based perspective also shows
relatively little interest in "externalities" (pollution, social
disruptions, costs borne by future generations), and it discounts the power
of "exogenous" variables such as moral and social norms. Intangible and
historical context is generally ignored. Our market discourse, therefore,
tends to ignore such vital species of common wealth as:

* government-owned property, including public lands, government research and
development, and information resources; 

* natural systems such as the atmosphere, water, local ecosystems, and
genetic structures of life;

* user-managed regimes for conserving land, managing community gardens,
developing software, and controlling access to fisheries and other natural
resources; 

* gift economies, or social networks based on gift exchange, which create
economic and social values within academia, Internet communities, and
geographic localities;

* shared, inherited knowledge such as scientific research, historical
knowledge, and folk wisdom, all of which contribute to the public domain; 

* cultural traditions and norms, which serve as a set of common moral
presumptions and expectations for managing daily life.

In many cases, these resources have no officially recognized value, let
alone the legal definition and protection enjoyed by private property. But
commoners realize all too well that community structures and social
relationships are vitally important in creating wealth, not to mention a
humane society. 

Modern enclosures

Market enclosures range across a wide spectrum of American life. They can be
seen in the conversion of Main Street into shopping malls and in the
consolidation of local organic agriculture into national food-processing
enterprises. Enclosure also occurs when government-managed resources are
given away to private interests and when corporations superimpose market
regimes on robust social communities. Enclosure occurs when content
industries try to turn the Internet into a pay-per-use vending machine; when
sports teams commodify the folk culture of fans by auctioning off the naming
rights to sports arenas; and when companies disrupt the openness and
collegiality within scientific disciplines by privatizing research and
imposing non-disclosure agreements.

What follows is the story of market enclosure in four distinct domains:
federal drug research, the broadcast airwaves, the Internet and public
knowledge, and childhood experience. Each of these stories has been told
elsewhere. What is now essential is to see them as pieces of a larger
pattern.

Free-riding on federal drug research

Drug expenditures in the United States have doubled since 1993 and are
expected to double again by 2004-a troubling phenomenon that has prompted
politicians to quarrel about how to make prescription drugs more affordable.
8 Strangely, the hand-wringing over exorbitant drug prices has ignored the
federal government's policy of giving away its most promising drug research
for a fraction of its actual value. James Love, director of the Consumer
Project on Technology and a leading drug-pricing activist, describes the
standard pattern: "The taxpayers pay to invent a promising drug, then give a
monopoly to one company. And the company's role? To agree to sell it back to
us." 9 

Some of the most important drug breakthroughs of the past fifty years have
been generated by the National Institutes of Health and other
government-funded researchers. These include the development of drugs to
treat cancer, HIV-AIDS, genetic disorders, depression, and diabetes. Public
science pays the bills for the breakthroughs while private players are
allowed to rush in and acquire patent monopolies that raise prices, stifle
competition, and inhibit future research. 10 This longstanding arrangement
in drug R&D is now replicating itself in genetic research. 

When government performs the preclinical testing for a new drug-the most
difficult and risky aspect of drug development-it shoulders some 65 to 70
percent of the total development costs. The key responsibility left to
industry, when using federally sponsored research, is to meet the
requirements of an FDA New Drug Application (NDA) before it can market the
product. While this can be a costly process, it pales in comparison to the
cost of the research already covered by the taxpayers. 

Numerous studies have confirmed the paramount role of government research in
developing medically significant drugs. A 1995 study found that eleven of
the fourteen new drugs that the industry identified as the most medically
significant of the past quarter century had their origins in
government-sponsored work. A Senate Joint Economic Committee study of
thirty-two innovative drugs introduced before 1990 found that approximately
60 percent of these drugs would not have been discovered or would have had
their discoveries markedly delayed without federal funding. 11 The
invaluable role of public science is reflected as well in medical patents.
According to a study commissioned by the National Science Foundation, "more
than 70 percent of the scientific papers cited on the front pages of U.S.
industry patents [were products of] public science"-government or
academia-while only 17 percent were industry sponsored. 12 

A study by James Love and Ralph Nader on the government's role in developing
new cancer drugs found that the federal government was involved in the
preclinical development of twenty-eight of thirty-seven drugs developed
since 1955. 13 For cancer drugs that reached the clinical stage of research,
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) was involved in thirty-four of the
thirty-seven cancer drugs developed. 14 

One of the most lucrative new drugs on the market has been paclitaxel, also
known as Taxol, which is used to treat breast, lung, and ovarian cancers.
Using Pacific yew trees on federal lands, the NCI spent fifteen years and
$32 million to develop Taxol, before giving Bristol-Myers (now Bristol-Myers
Squib) exclusive access to the government-funded research, including raw
data and new studies. 

Although the government requires companies to agree to a "fair pricing
clause," the NCI has no clear standards to enforce. 15 The cost of
manufacturing Taxol, according to Love, is about $500 per patient for an
eighteen-month treatment regimen. Bristol-Myers Squibb charges more than
twenty times that amount, thus earning between $4 million and $5 million a
day on Taxol. 16 In 1999, the drug generated an estimated $1.7 billion in
sales for the company. 

Bristol-Myers Squibb claims that it spent $1 billion to bring Taxol to
market. But in light of the federal government's significant role in
discovering and developing the drug, that claim seems dubious. 17 The
government did most of the drug development, the company bought the yew bark
at discount prices from the government, and the NCI itself reports that
Bristol-Myers Squibb was primarily selected for its expertise in marketing
cancer drugs. 18 Three other drug companies were interested in bringing
Taxol to market, which suggests that an exclusive license for Taxol was
probably unnecessary. 

We find a similar story with Xalatan, an eyedrop-administered drug for
glaucoma that was initially developed at Columbia University using $4
million from the NIH. The Pharmacia Corporation bought the patent to the
drug from Columbia for no more than $150,000 and a share of future
royalties. Pharmacia claims it then spent tens of millions of dollars to
bring the drug to market. 

When Xalatan finally reached consumers, Pharmacia charged $45-50 for a tiny
bottle of medication that lasts six weeks. Given that the key ingredient
costs only 1 percent of the revenue it generates, Xalatan represents "liquid
gold" for Pharmacia. 19 In 1999, company sales of the drug amounted to $507
million, of which Columbia University received about $20 million in
royalties. Not only does the federal government receive nothing, Xalatan
(and dozens of other taxpayer-developed medications) has been removed from
the commons.

The story is the same with such drugs as Prozac, Capoten (for hypertension),
and a variety of HIV and AIDS-related drugs such as AZT, ddI, ddC, d4T,
Ziagen and Norvir. 20 They were all developed with federally funded
research, and then sold by private companies for handsome prices. That
companies have charged high prices for such drugs, despite the government's
primary role in shouldering R&D costs, has naturally stirred great
resentment among patients.

The political power, however, clearly belongs to the pharmaceutical
industry, which actually tried to eliminate "notice and comment"
requirements for exclusive drug licenses in 1999. Current law allows the
public to obtain basic financial information about a drug's development and
sale, such as royalty rates paid on licenses, subsequent development costs,
sales figures, and so forth. The government must disclose such information
and allow the public to object to the approval of a company's license.
Fortunately, the industry's attempt to throw a veil of secrecy over the
granting of exclusive drug licenses failed-a small victory against the
modern enclosure movement.

Controlling the airwaves

The loss of a public commons in broadcasting must be counted as one of the
twentieth century's great civic and cultural losses. Broadcasting, after
all, is an essential vehicle for social communication. The loss of the
airwaves to market enclosure-initiated by legislation in 1927 and 1934, and
significantly extended through sweeping deregulation in the 1980s and
1990s-substantially expanded the role of commercial values in the evolution
of our culture.

Broadcast spectrum was originally so plentiful that the government granted
radio licenses to anyone upon request. But by the 1920s, the proliferation
of broadcasters was producing signal interference, which prompted a debate
about how to allocate control of the electromagnetic spectrum. 

As RCA, General Electric, and other corporations that owned commercial radio
networks sought to gain exclusive control of the airwaves, educators,
organized labor, religious groups, and politicians argued that their rights
to free speech in the new medium would be compromised. Accordingly, they
proposed a system of common carriage, which would require broadcasters to
sell airtime to any buyer at nondiscriminatory rates. Broadcasters stoutly
resisted this idea, arguing that it would diminish their editorial control
and commercial opportunities. 21 

The conflict ended with a compromise: broadcasters would receive free use of
the public's airwaves in return for providing public service. Broadcast
licenses would not entail ownership or property rights over the airwaves,
and licenses could be terminated for a breach of civic responsibilities. 22 

The idea was that broadcasters would serve as "public trustees" of the
airwaves. "It is as if people of a community should own a station and turn
it over to the best man in sight with this injunction: 'Manage this station
in our interest,'" declared the Federal Radio Commission. 23 The Supreme
Court later elaborated that a licensee must "share his frequency with others
and conduct himself as a proxy or fiduciary with obligations to present
those views and voices which are representative of his community and which
would otherwise, by necessity, be barred from the airwaves." 24 

Unfortunately, the public's end of the bargain has been more of a useful
fiction than a meaningful dividend. From the start, Congress gave no
particular definition to the "public interest, convenience and necessity."
Some scholars considered the "public interest" standard to be an expedient
gesture to make the government's licensing powers constitutional. After all,
the federal government was assigning preferential free speech rights to some
people-broadcasters-over others. 

In the 1960s and 1970s, Congress and the FCC enacted a number of specific
requirements to help assure political and public access to the airwaves.
Candidates for federal office were granted the right to buy airtime to reply
to their opponents. The public was given nominal access to the airwaves
through the Fairness Doctrine. And FCC guidelines stipulated that stations
provide diverse programming, children's programming, and local public
affairs programming.

In practice, however, most of these attempts to enforce a muscular standard
of public trusteeship on broadcasters failed. Standards were vague,
enforcement was irregular and legalistic, and political pressures on the FCC
to coddle broadcasters were constant. 25 Over the past sixty-eight years,
fewer than a half dozen licenses have been revoked. The political power of
the broadcasting industry and the profits to be reaped from broadcast
advertising ensure that public service is a low priority in Congress and on
the airwaves.

The industry consolidation authorized by the Telecommunications Act of 1996
has made broadcasters even less willing to pursue public service goals. A
series of deregulatory moves in the 1990s eviscerated the practical meaning
of the "public trust" in broadcasting, and made virtually any sort of
programming synonymous with the public interest. 26 (Some broadcasters have
claimed in formal submissions to the FCC that The Jetsons constitutes
"educational programming." 27 

Of course, television has its moments; never before has there been as much
high-end news, arts, and public affairs programming-at least on cable
television. But cable subscribers pay for these services, and they are not
available to all Americans. Broadcast television was developed to serve all
Americans, largely because station owners use the public's airwaves for
free. The question is, what are broadcasters giving the American people in
return?

By the early 1990s, a regulatory regime that originally cast broadcasters as
conscientious stewards of the public interest had effectively granted them
outright ownership of the spectrum. Since then, programming has become a
race to the bottom-with leering talk shows, tabloid news, salacious dramas,
and incessant station promos-and the fiction of broadcasters serving as
civic trustees has grown embarrassingly thin. 

Broadcasters now consider even the most basic sorts of public service, such
as in-depth coverage of political elections, too expensive a burden. Issue
coverage of the 2000 presidential race on the nightly news declined by 27
percent from 1996 levels, and two of the four major networks chose not to
air the 2000 presidential debates live. In the month before the 2000 "Super
Tuesday" primaries, the national networks and their local affiliates aired
just thirty-six seconds a night of candidates addressing issues. 28 Fewer
than 7 percent of the nation's 1,300 stations agreed to attempt to provide
five minutes a night of candidate-centered discourse in the thirty days
before the election. Even fewer stations met that goal. 29 Only 0.3 percent
of total commercial time in twenty-four broadcast markets during a typical
two-week period in 1990 was devoted to local public affairs programming. 30 

Airtime has become so lucrative that broadcasters simply will not surrender
it for purposes that do not generate maximum revenue. TV stations sold
between $600 million and $1 billion in paid political advertising in the
2000 election season-more than six times the political ad revenues collected
in 1972. Much of this windfall came from old-fashioned price-gouging. The
Alliance for Better Campaigns found that "local television stations across
the country systematically gouged candidates in the closing months of the
2000 campaign, jacking up the price of their ads to levels that were far
above the lowest candidate rates listed on the stations' own rate cards.
They did so despite a thirty-year-old federal law designed to protect
candidates from such demand-driven price spikes." 31 

The enclosure of the public's airwaves was extended with the broadcast
industry's successful appropriation of another six-megahertz slice of
spectrum for digital television. In the early 1990s, broadcasters lobbied
Congress to give them new spectrum so that free over-the-air television
could develop high-definition television (HDTV) to compete with cable and
satellite television. The idea was that better video and sound quality,
along with many more channels, would usher in the next generation of TV. As
part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Congress agreed. It gave
existing broadcasters a large new slice of spectrum space-with an estimated
value of $70 billion-for free, with no additional public-interest
obligations. 32 As Senator John McCain pointed out, "[i]t is one of the
great ripoffs in American history....They used to rob trains in the Old
West, now we rob spectrum." 33 Moreover, Congress allowed broadcasters to
hang on to both portions of their spectrum-analog and digital-until 2006, or
until 85 percent of American households had digital TVs, whichever came
later. 

It could be a long wait. By 2000, TV manufacturers had sold only 50,000
digital TV sets, at $5000 or more apiece, broadcasters were providing little
high-definition video programming, and the industry was effectively stalled
by this Catch-22. The HDTV market is not developing very quickly, nor are
broadcasters especially aggressive about moving ahead with HDTV. (Congress
conveniently did not require the spectrum to be used for HDTV.) In October
2000, FCC Chairman William Kennard likened the situation to each broadcaster
having two rent-controlled apartments on Manhattan's Upper East Side, with
one left empty. To force a more productive use of the public's assets, he
proposed a "spectrum squatter's fee" that would "escalate yearly, [starting
in 2006] until broadcasters complete their transition to digital and return
the analog spectrum to the American people." 34 

Meanwhile, broadcasters' lockup of this valuable bit of spectrum could
seriously affect the nation's long-term economic competitiveness. The U.S.
wireless industry, one of the most robust sectors of the economy, is
clamoring for spectrum space in order to develop new markets and catch up
with European and Japanese technology. But the congressional giveaway of
digital spectrum now precludes such a move, and a political firestorm would
ensue if Congress were to try to reclaim spectrum from broadcasters. 

Privatizing public knowledge

It is no exaggeration to say that there has never been a commons as big,
robust and socially creative as the Internet. Since its emergence as a
popular communications medium in the mid-1990s, the Internet has unleashed a
remarkable explosion of knowledge, commerce, and virtual community on a
global scale. 

Much of this growth has stemmed from the commercial development of the
Internet platform since 1994, particularly with the emergence of the World
Wide Web. But this unprecedented boom in public communications owes a
critical debt to the system's open, end-to-end technical architecture. By
allowing the "intelligence" of the network to be placed at the user level-in
applications rather than in the network itself-the Internet has enabled
individual creativity to emerge and flourish in unprecedented ways. Millions
upon millions of decentralized users can interact in an open and stable
public space, which itself has the structural capacity to grow and
accommodate previously unimaginable innovations such as the Web, streaming
audio and video, and wireless appliances.

With so much focus recently on electronic commerce, we tend to forget that
the Internet started out as a government-sponsored project that only
developed and flourished through its gift-exchange ethos. Much as Silicon
Valley financial pundits may like to claim the Internet as the brainchild of
Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and other entrepreneurs, the Internet's success
has at least as much to do with its structural architecture as a commons and
its incubation in the (non-market) academic milieu. 

The commercialization of the Internet since the mid-1990s certainly helped
to extend the infrastructure rapidly to millions of new users. But it also
set in motion new commercial forces that may also threaten the Internet's
vitality. The dark side of the digital revolution can be seen in the
aggressive efforts of businesses to enclose the cyber-commons by erecting
new proprietary barriers of control over infrastructure, information, and
users. 

In terms of the Internet infrastructure, attempts to impose proprietary
standards on key hardware and software protocols used by the Internet are
intensifying. Privately owned standards can constitute a kind of monopoly
power in the e-marketplace. So far, Internet standards have functioned as a
common resource, accessible to and modifiable by all users. But in a number
of areas-instant messaging, the new Windows XP/.Net platform and
eBooks-individual companies are seeking to capture the standards and
effectively "own" the information commons. 35 Worse, vendors of e-books are
seeking to use contract restrictions and encryption systems to prohibit
users from re-selling or sharing digital content, or buying it anonymously.
In some cases, e-books may be available for only a specified number of
readings or period of time. 36

Media consolidation is another way that companies are enclosing the
information commons. With a handful of companies jockeying to gain control
over access to the Internet via cable broadband services, the Internet
itself may remain a commons while access to it could be controlled by
oligopolies-a substantial contrast to the 1990s when there were over 4,000
Internet service providers. This consolidation of access is reducing
diversity of expression and Internet vitality. Companies such as AOL Time
Warner are striving to corral Internet users into "walled gardens" of
proprietary content and to discourage them from venturing out on to the
larger Internet. Content that generates revenues for service providers may
soon enjoy preferential treatment-through selective access to user-friendly
software and transmission. 

Finally, the Internet commons is threatened by a new governance structure
that aspires to privatize control over domain names. Ostensibly a technical
matter, control of domain names is a highly political issue that affects
free expression, privacy, and national sovereignty.

For example, dozens of sites use "sucks" in their domain name, as in
"walmartsucks.com." Should companies be allowed to use trademark laws to
shut down web sites that criticize them? Should commercial enterprises have
first claim to own domain names with common words or place names? A
corporate consortium recently tried to shut down a nonprofit site called
canada2.com; Etoy.com, an online retailer, attempted to shut down an online
artists' forum, eToy.org; and Madonna succeeded in shutting down a
madonna.com pornography site. 

In 1993, just as the Internet was beginning to experience significant
growth, the National Science Foundation gave away one of the most important
equity assets of the Internet, the right to manage most domain name
registrations. Without even a competitive bidding process, the NSF gave a
private company, Network Solutions Inc. (NSI), exclusive control over sales
of domain names to the public. It should not be surprising that NSI used its
monopoly control to charge exorbitant registration fees for the .com suffix
and other valuable domain names. Bought a few years later for $3.9 million
by a company called SAIC, NSI's market capitalization later soared to $2.5
billion as Internet usage took off. Not only did the company reap a huge
windfall from its control of a public asset, it used its monopoly power to
lobby Congress and the executive branch (unsuccessfully) to prevent the
creation of any domain-name registration rivals. In the classic dynamics of
enclosure, NSI also commodified the resource it had captured-millions of web
names and related data-by selling it to marketers, resulting in new privacy
invasions and advertising intrusions. 37 

Today, selling web domain names represents a revenue stream of up to $875
million a year, based on the 25 million addresses currently registered at a
standard rental price of $35 per year. 

Beyond this financial giveaway, however, are larger issues of legitimacy and
due process in governing the Internet commons. The Internet is a powerful
communications platform created by the U.S. government, so the governance of
speech on the Internet raises serious questions about the First Amendment
and democracy. In 1998, however, the government washed its hands of this
issue by creating a private-sector, not-for-profit corporation to administer
the Internet name and number system. The new organization, the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), was charged with
managing the domain name system and encouraging competition in domain name
registration.

For an organization that elects fewer than half its board members from the
general public, and which will likely never have any meaningful consumer
representation, such powers raise serious questions of legitimacy. With no
clear legal limits to its authority, dubious democratic safeguards, and a
board skewed to represent e-commerce interests, ICANN is a perfect
governance vehicle for transforming the Internet commons into a privatized
commercial infrastructure.

Private control of the Internet infrastructure is not the only risk to the
information commons. Unprecedented expansions of copyright law are starting
to lock up "public knowledge" that has long been open and accessible to
everyone. Under a 1998 law that extended the term of copyright law for
another twenty years, tens of thousands of works from the 1920s that were
due to enter the public domain-including Mickey Mouse, works by Robert Frost
and Sherwood Anderson, the musical Show Boat and the novel The Great
Gatsby-were kept in private hands. In the years to come, Americans will pay
millions of dollars for cultural works that rightfully belong to them
already.

Content industries are also taking aggressive technological and legal steps
to acquire "perfect control" over their works, essentially overriding
copyright law. Copyright's primary purpose is to serve the public and, in
the words of Congress, "to facilitate the flow of ideas in the interest of
learning." The primary objective of our copyright laws is not to reward the
author, Congress has declared, "but rather to secure for the public the
benefits from the creations of authors." 38 Copyright protection is granted
to authors chiefly to fulfill that purpose. 39 Traditionally, the public has
enjoyed "fair use" rights to share, excerpt, and copy portions of a creative
work for personal or educational purposes. But with the rise of "digital
rights management" software that encrypts electronic texts, the public's
stake in copyright law is swept aside by technologies designed to favor
sellers. 

Passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998 served to
give statutory sanction for the abrogation of the "cultural bargain" of
copyright. Historically, the public has granted copyright owners monopoly
rights for their works and in return received ownership of those works after
a limited term -as well as access, or fair use rights, in the meantime. Now
the public's end of the bargain is essentially being superseded by
"shrink-wrap" licenses that dictate one-sided contract terms, encryption
technologies that prevent users from accessing content, and legal
prohibitions such as the DMCA, which authorize prosecution of anyone who
circumvents these systems.

Unfortunately, the enclosure of public knowledge is a highly abstract and
incremental process; it is not easy to observe and understand. But it
deserves far more attention. At stake is nothing less than the free
expression, capacity to innovate, and free flow of information that lies at
the heart of our democratic culture.

Branding children

"There's been a shift in the predominant way our society thinks of
children," argues Gary Ruskin, director of Commercial Alert, an advocacy
group that fights an array of commercial excesses in American life. "Not
long ago we considered children vulnerable beings to be nurtured. However,
today, we increasingly see kids through an economic lens. In our business
culture, children are viewed as an economic resource to be exploited, just
like bauxite or timber." 40 

Having discovered that children are one of the most under-exploited market
segments, marketers in the 1990s developed all sorts of ingenious ways to
persuade impressionable youngsters to become avid consumers. Marketers have
identified a "primary market" (the $24.4 billion a year that kids directly
spend), an "influence market" (the $300 billion of adult spending that kids
directly or indirectly influence), and a "future" market (the lifelong
spending that kids will do based on brand loyalties they develop while
young). 41 

"Branding kids for life," is how Mike Searles, the president of Kids-R-Us,
sees it. "If you own this child at an early age, you can own this child for
years to come....Companies are saying, 'Hey, I want to own the kid younger
and younger.'" 42 Businesses were once satisfied with market share; today's
companies realize that the real payoffs come from owning mind share-the
personal attitudes and loyalties of children. 43

This motivation to insinuate brand names in the formation of children's
identities has brought commercials into every imaginable aspect of a child's
daily life. Video games plug Pepsi and McDonald's. McDonald's has produced
children's "entertainment" videos as Mac and Me, and McTreasure Island, a
crude adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Content and
advertising are now inextricable, and have generated elaborate new
techniques of crypto-marketing. Back to the Future II integrated more than
two dozen brand-name products into the story, and Space Jam, a star vehicle
for basketball star Michael Jordan, himself a brand-name, set a new
benchmark for the shameless fusion of entertainment and advertising. 44

Commercial tie-ins between movies and toys have existed since Mickey Mouse
was first licensed in 1934. But commercial substitutes, most notably Disney
films, have virtually replaced the folk characters of classic literature.
Cross-media promotion now spans a spectrum that includes film, toys, video
games, fast-food restaurants, action figures, and books. With an average
weekly diet of forty hours of media per week and 20,000 commercials per
year, American children are caught up in a ubiquitous web of commercialism.
45 

Public schools are an obvious target for innovative marketers. Where else
can they find such a large, age-specific cohort of children in one place, as
mandated by law? Because outright advertising would be blatantly
unacceptable in a public institution dedicated to learning, marketers have
developed a variety of clever subterfuges. 

One of the most ambitious projects to turn public education into an
advertising venue has been Channel One, the pseudo-news program for
teenagers founded by Chris Whittle in 1989. By "donating" satellite dishes,
VCRs, and TV sets for every classroom in participating schools, Channel One
wins the right to show a daily twelve-minute video program containing two
minutes of ads. Through this novel strategy, the company has created a whole
new marketing platform geared to a captive audience of nearly 8 million
teenage students in 12,000 public and private schools. 46

An equally ingenious scheme was hatched by ZapMe!, a company that offered a
package of free computers, software, and Internet access to schools in
exchange for the right to show online advertising to students. They also
tracked children's every move on the Web, correlating the results with age,
gender, zip code, and other identifying information. Despite this systematic
invasion of students' privacy, some 5,000 financially beleaguered school
districts signed up with ZapMe! in 1999 to receive some $90,000 of
equipment. While some schools used the rationalization that kids are already
exposed to plenty of advertising-why quibble about a little bit more?-others
objected to public education being so crudely commandeered for commercial
purposes. Due largely to agitation by Gary Ruskin's Commercial Alert and
prominent congressional critics, ZapMe! abandoned its free equipment
giveaways in November 2000, effectively scuttling the venture.

But such failures are unusual in the annals of corporate marketing via the
public schools. Dozens of companies distribute "educational" materials that
give generous space to corporate logos and political propaganda. Shell Oil
waxes eloquent about the virtues of the internal combustion engine, and
Exxon congratulates itself for its role in restoring the ecology of Prince
William Sound (while omitting mention of its role in the Exxon Valdez oil
spill). 47 Textbook publishers have used brand-name products in math books,
supposedly to make the examples more relevant to students. 

Fortunately, public concern about commercialization in the schools is
growing, and has prompted the U.S. General Accounting Office to conduct a
survey of how well states and local school boards protect students from
marketers. The answer: not very well. Only nineteen states have any statutes
or regulations that deal with school-related commercial activities, and in
fourteen of those states the restrictions do not address the full range of
marketing strategies being pursued in schools. 48

Protecting the commons

A reckoning of what belongs to the American people is a first step to
recovering control of common assets and protecting them for public purposes.
When we argue for the American commons, we assert the right to public
control over public resources, without necessarily triggering the familiar
dichotomy of free markets ("good") versus regulation ("bad"). Too often,
attacks on regulatory shortcomings have been used to justify a return to the
era when business wasn't regulated at all. Talking about the commons in
American life can help the public recognize its distinct interests as well
as policy options that include, but go beyond, traditional regulatory
regimes. 

Moreover, the idea of the commons helps us identify and describe the common
values that lie beyond the marketplace. By insisting that citizenship trumps
ownership, we can begin to develop a more textured appreciation for the
importance of civic commitment, democratic norms, social equity, cultural
and aesthetic concerns, and ecological needs. A language of the commons
helps restore humanistic, democratic concerns to their proper place in
public policy-making. 

The significance of the commons is not only moral but also pragmatic. Any
sort of creative endeavor requires space for experimentation and new
construction-for the freedom to try new things. Market enclosure typically
serves to regiment and control such freedom. While we need markets, we also
need room for the visionary ideas, accidental discoveries, and embryonic
notions that germinate into real breakthroughs, if only they have the space
to grow. 

The challenge that recurs is how to retain the surplus value generated
within a commons. How can members of a commons prevent the appropriation of
community-generated value by proprietary interests? Below are some of the
more promising legal strategies and institutional mechanisms for achieving
these goals.

Stakeholder trusts

One of the more imaginative and effective ways that government can
revitalize the commons is through stakeholder trusts that give all citizens
a personal stake in public assets. The idea is to give individual citizens
identifiable economic stakes so that they can reap personal dividends from
certain public assets. Linking property and citizenship in this way may help
foster social equity. Alternatively, stakeholder trusts can elect to use
their funds for important public purposes-conservation of land, public
education, and so on-rather than distributing those funds to individual
citizens. 

Perhaps the most successful stakeholder trust has been the Alaska Permanent
Fund, a state-run investment savings account that pays equal annual
dividends to every Alaskan citizen. Created in 1976 by a voter-approved
amendment to the state's constitution, the Alaska Permanent Fund is a public
trust for oil revenues from drilling on the state's North Slope. With some
$27 billion in assets, the fund is one of the hundred largest investment
funds in the world. In 1999, it generated $1 billion in dividends for the
state's residents, or about $1,770 per person. 49

The Alaska Permanent Fund has inspired proposals for a "Sky Trust," an idea
developed by social entrepreneur Peter Barnes to give all Americans a stake
in the "scarcity rents" that polluters would pay for being allowed to
release carbon emissions into the atmosphere. 50 

Instead of allowing the government to give away emission permits to
polluters, the Sky Trust proposal would set-up auctions in which companies
buy a limited number of emission permits. This process would probably
elevate prices for gasoline and other products that use burnable carbon. But
it would also be a means to force companies to begin to shoulder the actual
costs of their pollution, a change which global warming makes imperative.
Furthermore, the Sky Trust would be a means of offsetting the higher fossil
fuel prices that consumers would face as a result of the auctions. All
citizens would receive dividends from the Sky Trust, derived from the
revenues raised by the auction of emission permits. 

"The formula driving the [Sky Trust] machine," writes Peter Barnes, "is,
from all according to their use of the sky, to all according to their equal
ownership of it. Those who burn more carbon will pay more than those who
burn less. And, since every American receives the same dividend, households
will come out ahead if they conserve, but lose money if they don't. This
isn't only fair; it's precisely the incentive needed to reduce pollution."
51

Innovations in private law 

The GNU General Public License is a contractual provision for software that
has preserved programming code as part of an electronic commons. 52
Sometimes called "copyleft," the GPL stipulates that anyone can use the code
and improve it, but no one can then "take it private" through copyright or
patent law. This solves the problem of free riders and assures that the
commons can retain the benefits it generates. Inspired spinoffs of the GPL
are now being explored in a variety of areas, most notably the Creative
Commons project that plans to issue legal licenses for placing works in the
public domain.

Local commons for finite resources

There is a growing awareness that local commons provide feasible
alternatives to traditional regulatory approaches. Michael M'Gonigle, a
cofounder of Greenpeace, has proposed government chartering of regional or
local "ecosystem trusts" to get local stakeholders to come together and
manage natural resources in sustainable ways. If such a legal vehicle
existed, he writes, "native and non-native fishers, tourist operators and
local forestry operations would have a reason to talk. After all, if
something could be worked out among members of the community, they could
act-and the government would be required to support them. And what could be
the objection if ecosystem sustainability and community health terms are set
out in the provincial trust charter, thus ensuring that local action
protected the 'public interest'?" 53 

Preserving the information commons

If the information commons is going to survive and flourish, it is vitally
important to roll back the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which threatens
the public's fair-use rights in digital content), the Copyright Term
Extension Act (which extends copyright terms by twenty years), and the
Trademark Anti-Dilution Act (which gives brand names legal protections at
the expense of free expression). New initiatives must also be launched to
ensure that the public gets a fair return on private use of its airwaves,
that media concentration does not stifle diversity of expression or access
to the Internet, and that technical standards for the Internet do not become
tools for new monopoly powers.

The synergy of commons and markets

The rise of generic drugs, whose ingredients are commonly available to
everyone, has created a new kind of market based on a commons that
complements a traditional market based on proprietary knowledge. It allows
consumers to buy drugs at 25 to 50 percent less than the brand-name
equivalents, while encouraging proprietary companies to develop vital new
drugs rather than simply profit from the existing array of health products.
Just as common standards for telephony and computers forced innovation after
the AT&T and IBM monopolies were dismantled, so common standards, rigorously
enforced by government, can invigorate marketplace competition.

The value of taxpayers' resources 

It's time to stop granting private entities free access to and use of public
resources. Although this idea is conceptually simple, it presents a large
political challenge. In case after case, this reckless privatization of
public resources has resulted in demonstrable harm to taxpayers, consumers,
and the environment. While these costs are well-documented, political
resistance to meaningful reform continues in Washington, aggravated by our
corrupt system of campaign financing. But press exposure and citizen
mobilization can go a long way toward reclaiming the public assets that our
government is mismanaging.

Reclaiming our common wealth

The idea that human beings share a moral and civic inheritance that cannot
be alienated, commodified, or sold is part of an American tradition that has
its roots in the Declaration of Independence. Americans have a long
tradition of creating innovative vehicles to ensure a fair return to the
public on resources they collectively own. This tradition has galvanized
conservationists, land reformers, and advocates of municipal ownership of
transport, water, and energy systems. It motivated the architects of urban
planning, the TVA, garden cities, and the land-grant colleges that produced
world-class universities in Ithaca, Urbana, Madison, Minneapolis, and
Berkeley. It inspired the health, safety, and environmental programs of the
1960s and 1970s, the Land and Water Conservation Fund, the Alaska Permanent
Fund, and the public rollout of the Internet. 

It is time to revive this tradition of innovation in the stewardship of
public resources and to recognize its appropriate role in the economy and
civil society of the twenty-first century. The silent theft of our shared
assets and civic inheritance need not continue. But first we must recognize
the commons as such, name it, and understand the rich possibilities for
reclaiming our common wealth. < 






David Bollier is author of Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common
Wealth and co-founder of Public Knowledge, a public-interest advocacy group.



* This essay is based on material included in David Bollier, Silent Theft:
The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth (New York: Routledge, 2002).


1There is a small corps of paid GNU/Linux programmers in academia and
corporations.

2See Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a
Connected World (New York: Random House, 2001).


3The constitutional dimensions of this theme in Jennifer Nedelsky, Private
Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism: The Madisonian
Framework and Its Legacy(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).


4Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons," Science 162 (1968): 1243-8.


5Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for
Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 12.


6The Ecologist, Whose Common Future? Reclaiming the Commons (Philadelphia:
New Society Publishers, 1993), 13.


7Ostrom, Governing the Commons, 12. Ostrom adds: "The key to my argument is
that some individuals have broken out of the trap inherent in the commons
dilemma, whereas others continue remorselessly trapped into destroying their
own resources. This leads me to ask what differences exist between those who
have broken the shackles of a common dilemma and those who have not. The
differences may have to do with factors internal to a given group. The
participants may simply have no capacity to communicate with one another, no
way to develop trust, and no sense that they must share a common future."


8Jeff Gerth and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, "Medicine Merchants: Birth of a
Blockbuster; Drug Firms Reap Profits on Tax-Based Research," The New York
Times, 23 April 2000, A1.


9James Love and Ralph Nader, "Looting the Medicine Chest," The Progressive,
February 1993, 26-8.


10See Merrill Goozner, "Patenting Life," The American Prospect, 18 December
2000, 23-5.


11Cited in Ian Cockburn and Rebecca Henderson, "Private-Public Interaction
and the Productivity of Pharmaceutical Research," Journal of Industrial
Economics 46 (1998).


12CHI Research, Inc., "Industry Technology Has Strong Roots in Public
Science," CHI's Research Newsletter, March 1997,
<www.chiresearch.com/nltv1.htm. > [30 May 2002].


13James Love and Ralph Nader, Federally Funded Pharmaceutical Inventions,
testimony given before the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging, 103rd
Cong., 1st sess., 24 February 1993, 7.


14Ibid., 3.



15Daniel Newman, "The Great Taxol Giveaway," Multinational Monitor, May
1992, 17-21. 


16According to James Love, Bristol-Myers Squibb "quoted $6.09 per milligram
as the Red Book average wholesale price for Taxol" on September 19, 2000,
while "a generic producer reported that his costs of making Taxol were $.07
per milligram." See Consumer Project on Technology, Disputes involving
Paclitaxel, <http://www.cptech.org/ip/health/taxol>; [30 May 2002].


17See Consumer Project on Technology,
<http://www.cptech.org/ip/health/taxol; [1 July 2002].


18This account draws on Nader and Love, "Looting the Medicine Chest," and
Merrill Goozner, "The Price Isn't Right," The American Prospect, 11
September 2000, 25-9. See also, Newman, "The Great Taxol Giveaway."


19An extensive account of Xalatan's development can be found in Gerth and
Stolberg, "Medicine Merchants."


20Consumer Project on Technology, "Additional notes on government role in
the development of HIV/AIDS drugs," <http://www.cptech.org/ip/health/
aids/gov-role.html; see also James P. Love, Pharmaceutical Drug Pricing,
testimony given before the U.S. Senate Committee on Government Affairs,
103rd Cong., 2nd sess., 27 July 1994.


21An excellent history of this struggle over the public's airwaves is Robert
W. McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for
Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1995).


22Office of Communication of United Church of Christ v. FCC, 359 F. 2d 994
(D.C. Cir. 1966), 1003.


23Shaeffer Radio Co. (FRC, 1930), quoted in John W. Willis, "The Federal
Radio Commission and the Public Service Responsibility of Broadcast
Licensees," Federal Communications Bar Journal 5 (1950): 14.


24Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, 395 U.S. 367 (1969), 389.


25See Barry Cole and Mal Oettinger, Reluctant Regulators: The FCC and the
Broadcast Audience (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Company, 1978).


26Under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, licensing periods for TV were
extended from five years to eight years, the bar for FCC non-renewal of a
license was raised, the ability of third parties to challenge license
renewals was restricted, and station ownership limits were relaxed. In a
separate action, the Fairness Doctrine was formally rescinded. 


27Newton N. Minow and Craig L. LaMay, Abandoned in the Wasteland: Children,
Television and the First Amendment (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996).


28 Alliance for Better Campaigns, "Broadcast Television and Campaign 2000:
Millions from Ads, Seconds for Discourse,"
<http://bettercampaigns.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=7>; [30 May 2002].


29Paul Taylor, Alliance for Better Campaigns, testimony before the Federal
Communications Commission, 16 October 2000.


30Benton Foundation, Market Conditions and Public Affairs Programming, 27
March 2000, <http://www.Benton.org/Television/lpa.pdf>; [30 May 2002].


31Alliance for Better Campaigns, "Gouging Democracy: How the Television
Industry Profiteered on Campaign 2000," 6 March 2001,
<http://www.bettercampaigns.org/reports>; [31 May 2002].


32Congress forfeited any political leverage in dictating public interest
requirements for digital broadcasters, leaving that task to a federal
advisory panel, The Gore Commission, which was politically divided and whose
recommendations were a mishmash of modest proposals that have gone nowhere.
See National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Charting the
Digital Broadcasting Future: Final Report of the Advisory Committee on
Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters, 18 December
1998, <http://www.ntia.doc.gov/pubintadvcom /piacreport.htm> [31 May 2002].


33Christopher Stern, "Mixed Signals: Broadcasters' Promise of a Digital TV
Age Has Not Been Met, And Now Congress Is Having Second Thoughts About Its
Role," Washington Post, 17 December 2000, H1. 


34William Safire, "Spectrum Squatters," The New York Times, 9 October 2000,
A21. 


35David Bollier and Tim Watts, "Saving the Information Commons: A New Public
Interest Agenda in Digital Media," (Washington, D.C.: New America Foundation
and Public Knowledge, 2002), 26-32.


36Clifford Lynch, "The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the
Digital World," First Monday 6 (2001), <http://
firstmonday.org/issues/issue66 /lynch/index.html; [1 July 2002].


37Thomas E. Weber, "Network Solutions Sells Marketers Its Web Database," The
Wall Street Journal, 16 February 2001, B1. 


38U.S. House, Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988, 100th Cong., 2nd
sess., 1988, H. Rept. 609, 23. 


39An excellent review of the history of copyright law and its current biases
can be found in L. Ray Patterson and Stanley W. Lindberg, The Nature of
Copyright: A Law of Users' Rights (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press,
1991). 


40Gary Ruskin, "Why They Whine: How Corporations Prey on Our Children,"
Mothering Magazine, November/ December 1999.


41James U. McNeal, "Tapping the Three Kids' Markets," American Demographics,
April 1998.


42Brian Bennett, "Uniforms Aid Student Performance, Academics: Not Only Do
Uniforms Eliminate Status Wars, They Help Students Concentrate on
Schoolwork," The Los Angeles Times, 10 December 1989, A2.


43See Bruce Horovitz, "Targeting the Kindermarket: Family-friendly retailers
try to attract parents, build loyalty." USA Today, 3 March 2000, A1.


44Joseph Pereira, "Kids' Advertisers Play Hide-and-Seek, Concealing
Commercials in Every Cranny," The Wall Street Journal, 30 April 1990, B1.


45Janet Maslin, "Like the Toy? See the Movie," The New York Times, 17
December 1989, B1. 


46Constance L. Hays, "Channel One's Mixed Grades in Schools," The New York
Times, 5 December 1999, C1. 


47Steven Manning, "Students for Sale," The Nation, 27 September 1999, 17. 


48U.S. General Accounting Office, "Commercial Activities in Schools,"
[GAO/HEHS-00-156], 14 September 2000, <http://www.gao.gov/new.items/
he00156.pdf; [30 May 2002]. 


49For more information on the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation, see
<http://www.apfc.org; [30 May 2002]. 


50For a full exposition of the Sky Trust proposal, see Peter Barnes, Who
Owns the Sky? Our Common Assets and the Future of Capitalism (Washington,
D.C.: Island Press, 2001). The Corporation for Enterprise Development in
Washington, D.C., is also involved in producing analyses and studies in
support of the Sky Trust proposal. 


51Peter Barnes and Rafe Pomerance, Pie in the Sky: The Battle for
Atmospheric Scarcity Rents(Washington, D.C.: Corporation for Enterprise
Development, 2000), 9. 


52The GPL was developed by the GNU Project, <http://www.gnu.org;, which is
the brainchild of software programmer Richard Stallman, founder of the Free
Software Foundation. 


53Michael M'Gonigle, "Where There's a Way," Yes!, Summer 2001, 30. For more
on "ecosystem-based community forestry," see
<http://www.forestsandcommunities. org; [30 May 2002]. 




Originally published in the Summer 2002 issue of Boston Review