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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. In Silent 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 our ability 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 Theft is a bold attempt
to develop a new language of the commons and, in the face of a market that knows
no bounds, to outline an ambitious new project for reclaiming our common wealth.
David Bollier has worked for twenty years as a journalist,
activist, and public policy analyst. He is Senior Fellow at the Norman Lear Center
at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Director of the Information
Commons Project at the New America Foundation. He is also cofounder of Public
Knowledge, a public-interest advocacy organization dedicated to defending the
commons of the Internet, science, and culture. |
