The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation hosted a forum today to discuss a paper by Milton Mueller: Info-Communism? Ownership and Freedom in the Digital Age.  I will do my best to correctly characterize the speakers comments below, but the reader should be aware that these are rough descriptions of things they have said, not direct quotes.  The speakers on the panel included…

• Rob Atkinson, ITIF (Moderator)
• Milton Mueller, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University
• Patrick Ross, Copyright Alliance
• Jef Pearlman, Public Knowledge

Professor Mueller opens by discussing the “movement” that arose around areas like free/open source software, Creative Commons, commons-based peer production, network neutrality, open radio spectrum and patent resistance.  Whether called the “commons movement”, “free culture” or “openness movement”, it has become a “coherent movement”.   Mueller says you can look at it as a modern liberal economy – a “voluntary commons” – or as a communist economy.

Mueller notes that “property” and “commons” are often described as mutually exclusive.  This is a mistake.  In fact, they can be mutually complementary.   If you try to totalize either, you end up with bad results.   Our theories of political economy don’t explain the interactions between the two very well.  The question is to figure out how and where they interact.

The deontological case for “commons” leads to all-embracing communism…..”which (to put it scientifically) sucks.”

Exclusivity can also be taken too far – i.e., preemptive bans on technology, the tragedy of the anti-commons, patent trolls, p2p file-sharing and DPI surveillance.

It is important to look at the interactions between property and commons.  Theory rarely looks at the interrelationships between the two.  There are understood reasons for developing property rights – e.g. the physical-economic characteristic of the resource, or transaction costs.    There are also reasons to explain the development of commons – e.g., contention for resources.

After Mueller speaks, the panel has a chance to respond.

Jef Pearlman, Public Knowledge: Says it doesn’t help the dialogue to talk about “communism”, and it doesn’t apply to what these groups actually do.  He agrees that there needs to be a mix of property and commons – the copyright abolitionists are rare – and the question is where the balance is found.  He says the Constitution took a consequentialist approach to copyrights (to promote the sciences and arts), so he believes we should adjust copyright law to maximize public good.

In cases, as with net neutrality, when somebody who is running the commons “decides they want to change the rules”, we need to determine what the public good is and whether we need to step in to enforce a “commons”.

Patrick Ross, Copyright Alliance: There is a tension between outcome-oriented commons goals and the means necessary to achieve them (government).  Ultimately, the commons movement may have good intentions, but they are utopian.  The utopian socialists tried and failed to overcome social inequality through a physical commons.  Digital utopians seek to overcome social inequality through a digital commons.   Even if there is not a scarcity of bits, there is a scarcity of creativity and creative people. We are not protecting the digital good, but the creative good.