Our shrinking commons

Today quoting from music or literature has come to be seen as theft. [18aug10]

In reviewing "Common as Air", a new book by Lewis Hyde, MacArthur Fellow and professor at Kenyon and Harvard, a story on Minneapolis's Star Tribune explains that «...we've moved radically far in a long process of intellectual enclosure, privatizing and shutting down a vigorous cultural commons».

Mark Kramer adds that «The United States' Founding Fathers supported far less restrictive commons than have come to pass... Copyrights and patents originated as brief trade-offs, minimal, transient monopolies granted to stimulate and reward invention».

While highlighting such path throughout US history and questioning these recent restrictions, "Common as Air" provides a «brilliant and absorbing account of the development of restrictive and enduring private ownership of shared experience. This new book develops, in Hyde's own words, "a model and defense of our 'cultural commons,' that vast store of unowned ideas, inventions and works of art that we have inherited from the past and that we continue to create.»

Read full review here.