through reference as more people consume it.[1] The carrying capacity of cultural commons is endless. Cultural commons are non-rivalrous. One person’s use does not interfere with another’s. Unlike eating an apple, my listening of a song does not subtract from another’s use of it. Therefore, cultural commons unveil the inaccuracy of the tragedy of the commons more than any other commons. Propertisation and enclosure in the cultural domain may be a wasteful option by cutting down social and economic positive externalities, particularly in peer-based production environments.
Reviewing the peculiar nature of cultural commons, the academic literature has turned upside down the paradigm of underuse of common resources by developing the idea of the “tragedy of the anti-commons”.[2] The tragedy of the anti-commons lies in the underuse of scarce scientific resources because of excessive intellectual property rights and all of the transaction costs accompanying those rights. David exposed the perverse resource allocation in an anti-commons scenario at the first Communia conference.[3]
By increasing the asset value of copyright interests, copyright term extension is one basic tool of commodification of information and creativity. Copyright term extension may be singled out as the clearest evidence of the progressive expansion of property rights against the public domain. Any temporal extension of copyright deprives and impoverishes the structural public domain. The policy choice has so far privileged private interest over public, and copyright protection over the public domain.
The timeline of temporal extension of copyright protection shows a steady elongation in all international jurisdictions. From the original protection encompassing a couple of decades, copyright protection has expanded to last for over a century and a half. As an example, today the oldest work still in copyright in the United Kingdom dates back to 1859.[4] The Statute of Anne, the first copyright law enacted in England in 1709, provided only for 14 years of protection, which was renewable for a term
- ↑ Lawrence Lessig, “Re-crafting a Public Domain”, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 18 (2006), 56-83 (p. 64).
- ↑ Michael A. Heller, “The Tragedy of the Anticommons: Property in the Transition from Marx to Markets”, Harvard Law Review, 111 (1998), 621-88.
- ↑ See Paul A. David, “New Moves in ’Legal Jujitsu’ to Combat the Anti-commons: Mitigating IPR Constraints on Innovation by a ’Bottom-up’ Approach to Systemic Institutional Reform”, paper presented at the first Communia conference, Louvain-la-Neuve (30 June 2008).
- ↑ See Anna Vuopala, “Assessment of the Orphan Works Issue and Cost for Rights Clearance” (May 2010), p. 10. Report prepared for the European Commission, DG Information Society and Media, Unit E4, Access to Information.
