Can the Information Commons Be Saved?: How Intellectual Property Policies Are Eroding Democratic Culture & Some Strategies for Asserting the Public Interest

Abstract

From introduction: "It is the dark side of the digital revolution: how a variety of new intellectual property policies, in conjunction with new technologies, are greatly empowering sellers at consumers' expense; fostering market concentration over open competition; homogenizing our society's diversity of information and expression; constricting the public domain from which new creative works and business innovations derive; supplanting free access to information with pay-per-use regimes; introducing intrusive new forms of surveillance of individuals' use of copyrighted material; and subverting the open standards and 'gift culture' of the Internet which have been the very engines of our turn-of-the-century information explosion. This memorandum is an attempt to explain how these disturbing trends are remaking our society in pernicious ways."