more sustainable and more just” (Dardot and Laval 2014, p. 97, author’s translation).
While the epicenter of the struggle for the commons concerns the protection of common natural resources, it has also spread to the intangibles of the mind. Starting in the 1990s, the strengthening of copyright, the exponential increase in the number of patents filed and the broadening of their scope were perceived as threats to creative dynamics in the artistic, scientific and intellectual fields. Governments and multinational corporations have regularly joined forces to justify the privatization of different forms of knowledge, on the pretext that it was an essential step in the creation of new markets that would bring renewed and sustainable growth.
The emergence and democratization of the Internet as an unprecedented socio-technical ecosystem has opened up a new field of militant struggle for the protection of new forms of commons – sometimes called cultural, information, knowledge or digital – in the face of the threat of disappearance of the creative and sharing dynamics that have been at work since the beginning: “The desire to propose a ‘knowledge society’ that is shared, equitable and capable of responding to the major crises facing our globalized planet has also mobilized new social actors against the ‘knowledge economy’, which wants to turn all knowledge into commodities and install financial models in cultural and scientific practices” (Le Crosnier 2015, p. 235, author’s translation). Here, the threats of “enclosure” of knowledge come from the desire of certain private companies to extend their field of action or to retain control of their industry. In any case, they are perceived as a potential challenge to the right of universal access to the Internet or the right of access to culture.
Here, as elsewhere, the commons embody a collective will to refound the socio-economic order, based on new regulatory principles and other forms of value and wealth creation. In this respect, these militant movements have made intangible resources, such as free software or the Wikipedia encyclopedia. In different fields, these collaborative communities (Rifkin 2016) are the manifestation of the new conditions of production, circulation and consumption of knowledge made possible by the digital ecosystem. They are new ways of writing, memorizing and reading, which, attached to the process of digitizing the sign, converge towards the promise of seeing the emergence of conditions favorable to collective intelligences (Juanals and Noyer 2010). These commons are also based on a conception of shared ownership and community and decentralized governance, symbolizing a pragmatic utopia embodied by the possibility of seeing a new socio-economic system, a new face of capitalism, unfold in the digital ecosystem.
This book proposes to meet these intellectual movements, most of them militant, which have contributed to the emergence of a real thought on the cultural commons in the digital ecosystem. This path will lead us to identify the different intellectual “places” where this thought has emerged, to identify the socio-economic, technical and political stakes associated with it and finally to highlight the conceptual framework that is proposed for this notion, which is still highly nomadic and polysemic. This exploration is an essential prerequisite to shed light on the foundations of this emerging cultural commons economy.
This thinking of cultural commons in the digital ecosystem is plural. While it is possible to bring about a chronology with pioneering figures, a map with places symbolizing its different manifestations, it is pointless to see it as the expression of one and the same current of thought. This will be the guiding thread of the first part of this book, which will lead us to highlight the importance in the genesis of this thought of the commons of two major intellectual movements. The first movement brings together militant American intellectual figures, most of them university jurists, gathered at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and recognized for their battle against the enclosure of the intangible commons of the mind since the end of the 1990s. This movement has had a strong resonance and now has many ramifications, particularly in Europe. The second movement also started in the United States, but in a completely different place: at Indiana University, where the economist Elinor Ostrom, recognized for her research demonstrating the sustainability and effectiveness of land commons, started a research program in the mid-2000s on the question of commons in the field of knowledge. She is credited with helping to open up a research front on the issue of scientific knowledge commons and its articulation with a related but independent movement, open access. Her thinking has also resonated beyond her own Bloomington school, as other scholars in other places have taken up the path of her introductory reflection.
This attempt to reconstruct the various intellectual movements also aims to isolate, in the creative, artistic and scientific fields, the criteria likely to identify resources eligible for the status of cultural commons in the digital ecosystem. Indeed, while this thinking of the commons claims to refound the socio-economic order, it is a question of being able to identify the resources that can claim such a status and then to study the conditions of deployment and survival in complex digital ecosystems.
Thus, in a second part, we will extend this reflection by exploring the conditions of deployment of this cultural commons economy in a specific digital ecosystem, that of the book, relying in each case on the eligibility criteria previously highlighted. The following will be explored in two consecutive chapters, digital library projects as well as common heritage projects, and then self-publishing platforms as illustrations of written commons. At the heart of this empirical analysis is the thorny question of the cohabitation of these cultural commons with the actors of the traditional cultural economy. What guarantees that this emerging cultural commons economy will not be swept away by the force of capitalism’s vague “proprietarist” tendencies? Or, conversely, does it not have the intrinsic strength to gradually transform the foundations of cultural capitalism to become the rule rather than the exception? Regardless of the horizon, the cultural commons economy leads to a renewal of the political economy of culture.
PART 1
The Intellectual Movement of the Cultural Commons
Introduction to Part 1
In the cultural field, our investigation into the origins of this notion of the common has led us to identify its birthplace on the other side of the Atlantic. It is indeed there, at the heart of a movement of revolt against certain identified misdeeds of contemporary cultural capitalism, that the notion of the common has been reactivated. This movement was initiated by a group of American jurists gathered at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society (BCIS), founded in 1998 at Harvard University, a unique meeting place for academics and activist experts of the digital world. Among these jurists, all specialists in intellectual property, some, more than others, positioned themselves at the forefront of the scene, such as James Boyle, Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig1.
The target of their critique was the “proprietarist” evolution of information and cultural markets, symbolizing a drift of the neoliberal economy and a fundamentalist vision of the market. In particular, the evolution of the institutional ecology of cultural markets in the digital ecosystem is, in their view, a major obstacle to free culture, which, after being supplanted throughout the 20th century by a hegemonic commercial popular culture, found a new space for expression. Free creative practices do not fall directly within the scope of copyright, but, for all that, they were quickly condemned by the cultural2 industries. They symbolize a willingness to share in an ecosystem that facilitates and democratizes popular expression. The notion of the commons was then mobilized by these jurists to account for these transformations. It embodies the possibility of a free cultural economy that is not intended to replace the commercial cultural economy, but rather to find ways of balanced cohabitation.
The notion of the common was not chosen by chance; it has an ancient history. In the economic domain, it has long been disqualified, evoking the subsistence of forms