Has the time come to oppose the third enclosure movement?
The concept of Enclosures refers to the private appropriation of hitherto common goods.
The First Enclosures took part in 15th=18th England, and refers to the loss of the common agricultural lands of the medieval peasantry; which set the stage for the emergence of capitalism: James Boyle has eloquently written about the Second Enclosures of the copyright era; especially its dramatic extension and the impoverishment of the public domain.
But it’s time to give a name to the new processes of appropriation which are more and more common on the free videosharing sites and most recently evidenced in the user agreement of the mashup project of the Washington Post. Let’s calll it the Third Enclosures of self created content! In short, participating in the project means that you are giving your intellectual property to the publisher. This is done because most people, and that includes myself, usually never bother to read the user agreements, or because we think that we can not make money anyway. So we are already happy to be published. This is a dangerous impulse, and we should insist that content creators own their creations, not the platforms, and choose those platforms, like Democracy TV or Ourmedia, which respects this.
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September 26th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
[...] It wasn’t fair to say that MySpace merely exploits, and doesn’t give back anything in return, Kantrowitz argued. So much for it being my data!? I’m not a big fan of the Register but they’re really hit the nail on the head this time: It’s all very much in keeping with the new feudal economics of “Web 2.0″: the serfs must be grateful for the hospitality of the proprietor. As PlayLouder’s Paul Sanders noted last week, plenty of people appear to be profiting from digital music – except the people who create it. This looming conflict has a historical precident though, one that dates as far back the 15th Century. Could this just be another instance of history repeating itself The Enclosures… In a more specific historical definition, it refers to the process of the enclosure of common agricultural land in England between the 15th and 19th centuries. They were fundamentally about bringing realms that had hitherto been exempted into the new and expanding commercial relationships that marked the growth of capitalism. Former ways of providing food and sustenance – strip farming, labour relationships based on obligation and deference, widespread access to, and availability of, common land for grazing, hunting and collection of fuel – were denuded and done away with in the name of efficiency, progress and private property rights. That’s exactly what we’re seeing now. Content generated in and for the commons is being high-jacked by the distribution / service platforms. The P2P foundation is calling this the Third Enclosure Movement. [...]