[governance] Speaking of property rights...

[Willie Currie]

Hi Milton

This is a v insightful paper and raises important points about 
informational property rights.

I think that the notion of info-communism is a red herring, (excuse the 
pun) and can't be taken seriously - there is a some kind of radical chic 
at play there in the iconography - Che Guevara has become a mainstream 
icon used ironically by all comers, including business advertisers for 
their own purposes.

While the claims of freedom, the individual and constitutionality are v 
important, they do need to be balanced with the claims of the social. 
This is a key faultline in contemporary gloabl politics that is at play 
in all sectors of society and the economy at present - particularly in 
the crisis around global financial markets. Freedom, individual property 
rights and extreme deregulation led to the crisis in which the whole 
system of global finances was threatening to become severely unhinged, 
leading the state representing the social interest in a stable financial 
market to intervene. In the space of intellectual property rights there 
is a similar extremism at play in the maximalist regime for IPRs that 
was, until challenged by social forces, willing to let masses of people 
in developing countries die of HIV/AIDS, aided and abetted by 
neo-conservatives like Thabo Mbeki in South Africa (to our shame). 
Microsoft is obviously an egregrious example  in the world of software 
that could not be effectively restrained by social forces in the US, the 
centre of (extreme, suicidal) liberalism in the world. It is little 
wonder that the FOSS movement has taken up the issue aggressively, nor 
coincidental that it should be Gates who cast the first stone of 
info-communism around.

In the sphere of access to infrastructure, there has been ten-fifteen 
years of market liberalism at play which has had some successes but is 
not able to address the social needs of  people who have little income, 
the bottom of the pyramid arguments notwithstanding. Here is a space for 
a commons to be created that can co-exist with a competitive market in 
access where citizens can pay for services. But the dice are loaded 
against such solutions - wireless municipal broadband whatever its 
problems is under severe threat in the US, for ecxample. So I think 
there needs to be a paradigm shift in which claims of the individual to 
property rights and social claims for a commons can be balanced 
coherently. The fall out from the financial crisis is likely to 
facilitate this rebalancing process and it has nothing to do with the 
dead 20th century ideology of communism. but rather with issues of 
justice, equality and the assertion of the social.

willie


 Milton L Mueller wrote:
> ...some on this list may be interested in a piece I just published in
> First Monday, the online journal. 
>
> It's called, "Info-communism? Ownership and freedom in the digital
> economy"
> http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2058/
> 1956
>
> Milton Mueller
> Professor, Syracuse University School of Information Studies
> XS4All Professor, Delft University of Technology
> ------------------------------
> Internet Governance Project:
> http://internetgovernance.org
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