Governing the Commons

The caption in the Washington Post feature on June 14th read, “Elinor Ostrom, first woman to receive Nobel Prize in economics, dies at 78.

Alfred Nobel was able to read his own obituary, which led him to think of the Nobel Prize.

If Elinor Ostrom had been alive to read it, how would she have reacted, was the thought that came to my mind.

Would she have agreed to be categorized as a ‘woman’, and as an ‘economist’ and should we remember her as a Nobel Prize winner? This award was a surprise decision by the Nobel Committee, which has always been politically motivated, to award the prize to a person who promoted the concept, that “people could govern themselves better without government interference”. (The best example of the political influence on the Nobel committee was awarding the prize for Literature to Winston Churchill in 1953).

Elinor Ostrom was a great human being, from the 20th century, who crossed over to the 21st century.

She was not an economist, but sine we have to compartmentalize all knowledge into various categories, she was called a political scientist. But she was much more than that. She was a humanist, in addition to being an anthropologist, an environmentalist and most of all, we have to admire and respect her for her pioneering efforts on the Commons. ‘Commons’ is used for all the resources which are collectively owned, natural resources, intangible assets like public knowledge and creative works.

In 1990, she published her book, ‘Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action'. She believed that “Ordinary people are capable of creating rules that allow for the sustainable and equitable management of shared resources”, that resources held in common reduces potential over-use, preventing exploitation by a greedy few.

Yet ever since man became the avaricious, vicious beast, a few were able to own or control almost all shared resources, all the ‘commons’, by force or by fraud. The ordinary people had to obey the rules set by the few, whose only interest was increasing their wealth or their power or both. From material resources, the inevitable next step was the control of information resources. In 2003, Ostrom and Charlotte Hess published ‘Ideas, Artifacts and Facilities: Information as a Common-pool Resource'. “Information that used to be ‘free’ is now increasingly being privatized, monitored, encrypted and restricted”. This is called the ‘Intellectual land-grab'.

This ‘land grab’ continues into patenting valuable herbs, which the west tried with Bhasmati, Neem and Turmeric, and in the Far East they tried to patent Indian curry. This is not a new phenomenon, this is the same process which began in pre-history, when one man put up a fence around a piece of earth, claimed it as his own, planted a tree and claimed its fruit. What one lone man did then, today the business mafia is doing on an international mega scale.

In reality, all information, all creative works and intellectual properties should be in the commons, as common public resources.

There have been many creative works, sculptures, paintings, books stolen by the European barbarians who invaded the civilized world of the east. Some of these treasures are in museums in the west, and some are hidden forever in private collections.

The academics and students from the east have to go to these museums and libraries in the west, to study their own history and culture.

We also have the exploitation of the ancient classics by publishers, who make enormous profits on publication of books like Ramayana, Mahabharata, Mahavamsa and even religious books. These books should be in the public domain, available free on-line, or in the case of printed books, should be available at cost plus a reasonable profit.

Instead, there is opposition for this, which happened in our country when the Mahavamsa and other ancient chronicles were made available for free reading by Dr. Kavan Ratnatunge.

Creative Commons was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson and Eric Eldred, and the first set of copyright licenses under CC was released in December 2002.

By the end of 2009 there were 350 million CC licenses issued. CC is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools.

This is different from the Copyleft concept, but is a free, easy-to-use copyright license, where ‘some rights only are reserved'.

Copyleft began among computer software developers, who wanted to share their software freely with others. It uses copyright law, but flips it over to serve the opposite of its usual purpose: instead of a means for restricting a program, it becomes a means for keeping the program free.

On July 1, 2012, the World Bank announced their new Open Access Policy, under Creative Commons Attribution License, and a new open knowledge repository with over 2000 books, articles and reports. Robert B. Zoellick, President World bank Group said, “Knowledge is power.

Making our knowledge widely and readily available will empower others to come up with solutions to the world's toughest problems.”

Probably the first copyleft software was the GNU operating system and the GNU Project (GNU's Not Unix), announced in September 27th, 1983 by Richard Stallman with the goal to develop “a sufficient body of free software and to get along without any software that is not free”. Since then Copyleft and Creative Commons spilled over into all creative works, eagerly embraced by those who believed in sharing and sharing alike, all what they create. Vimeo, the video-sharing website has added CC browse and search capabilities. Flicker has over 200 million photographs, 1.5 million groups and over 70 million photographers who share their photos on Facebook, Twitter and blogs. This is what we should all try to do, with all our knowledge and all our creative work.

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