Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth

by Bollier,David

• ISBN13: 9780415944823
• ISBN10: 0415944821
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2003-02-07
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Until a 1998 federal court decision, a Minnesota publisher claimed a monopoly on access to all federal court decisions. A Texas company recently filed a patent on a kind of rice grown in India for centuries. Other businesses now claim ownership of mathematical algorithms embedded in software, valuable public lands acquired for five dollars an acre, and icebergs that they plan to transport and sell as fresh water. InSilent Theft, David Bollier argues that a great untold story of our time is the staggering privatization and abuse of our common wealth. Corporations are engaged in a relentless plunder of dozens of resources that we collectively own-publicly funded medical breakthroughs, software innovation, the airwaves, the public domain of creative works, and even the DNA of plants, animals and humans. Too often, however, our government turns a blind eye-or sometimes helps give away our assets. Amazingly, the silent theft of our shared wealth has gone largely unnoticed because we have lost ourability to see the commons. Spooling out one outrageous story after another, Bollier skillfully weaves together debates about the Internet, the environment, biotechnology, and the communications revolution. His fresh and compelling critique illuminates a rarely explored landscape in our political and cultural life. Crisp and revelatory,Silent Theftis a bold attempt to develop a new language of the commons and, in the face of a market order that knows no bounds, to outline an ambitious new project for reclaiming our common wealth.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(14)
I. The Commons, Gift Economies, and Enclosure
Reclaiming the Narrative of the Commons	15	(12)
The Stubborn Vitality of the Gift Economy	27	(16)
When Markets Enclose the Commons	43	(16)
II. Varieties of Market Enclosure
Enclosing the Commons of Nature	59	(10)
The Colonization of Frontier Commons	69	(16)
The Abuse of the Public's Natural Resources	85	(14)
Can the Internet Commons Be Saved?	99	(20)
The Privatization of Public Knowledge	119	(16)
Enclosing the Academic Commons	135	(12)
The Commercialization of Culture and Public Spaces	147	(16)
The Giveaway of Federal Drug Research and Information Resources	163	(12)
III. Protecting the Commons
The Commons: Another Kind of Property	175	(14)
Strategies for Protecting the Commons	189	(22)
Notes	211	(36)
Bibliography	247	(4)
About the Author	251	(2)
Name Index	253	(2)
Subject Index	255