The word “public good” begs to be defined. My 1983 Public Finance text by David Hyman defines public goods as(I quote) “goods whose benefits are shared by large groups of consumers and… the most common means of making public goods available is through political interaction among persons who benefit from the good.” Furthermore, to be a truly public good it has to be “nonrival” i.e. “a given quantity can be enjoyed by more than one without decreasing the amounts enjoyed by others. It also must be “nonexclusive” meaning that “it is too costly to develop a means of excluding those who refuse to pay from enjoying the benefit of a given quantity of a public good”

Siva mentions police, fire fighters, and soldiers. Economically, they are classic examples of public goods; they are nonrival and nonexclusive. Hence they are provided byu a central mechanism, usually government and “through political interaction among persons who benefit from the good.”

The problem with copyrighted works, which were traditionally private goods, and the internet, is that the internet has made them nonrival and nonexclusive. They have become public goods. As a culture we sense this intuitively. Sensing this we feel that instead of having these goods allocated by private economic actors, their allocation and availability should be determined “through political interaction among persons who benefit from the good.”

Again, I don’t see your accurate complication of the limits that librarians must work with as “mixed motives.”

I am guilty of idealizing librarians. But that’s pretty damn easy to do. I also idealize fire fighters, police officers, public school teachers, and soldiers. The point of invoking such idealizations in a policy argument is to appeal to core principles. If we have to choose a custodian to manage OUR information, should it be an institution that has a core principles that reflect republican civic virtue? Or should we entrust our collective riches to one with core principles that include massive consumer profiling and extensive trade secrets in the service of quarterly returns to investors?

I would make an argument for the Army and against Blackwater based on the same framework. Wouldn’t you? Or would criticisms of Blackwater land me in some boat with Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky?

It’s about how WE allocate OUR resources. It’s not about corporations being bad. It’s about a particular corporation and its specific attributes, actions, policies, and relationship with essential issues like privacy.

Please don’t flatten out complicated debates (not in quotes) by jacking a few quotes out of newspaper and Web site articles. You know this is not that simple.

As for my own motives, if there is an unjustified amount of idealization worth deflating, it’s certainly attached to Google. Just take a look at how our copyright allies declare it to be the Great Savior of fair use and open access.

The problem is not one of vocabulary here. We are dealing with a 25-year degradation of everything public. I am proud and justified to defend things public when appropriate.

“Another characteristic of the social-economic-institutional struggle is an alliance between a large number of commercial actors and the social sharing culture. We see this in the way that wireless equipment manufacturers are selling into a market of users of WiFi and similar unlicensed wireless devices. We see this in the way that personal computer manufacturers are competing over decreasing margins by producing the most general-purpose machines
that would be most flexible for their users, rather than machines that would most effectively implement the interests of Hollywood and the recording industry. We see this in the way that service and equipment-based firms, like IBM and Hewlett-Packard (HP), support open-source and free software. The alliance between the diffuse users and the companies that are adapting their business models to serve them as users, instead of as passive consumers, affects the political economy of this institutional battle in favor of openness.”

Holding out for the ideal on terms of public access may delay (narrower) access to a wide but imperfect range of materials. For example, I’d love to house my papers in a true non-profit public archive hosted and managed by my university, or by a university-based consortium. I make do with SSRN and Bepress, because my university has no resources to commit to such an enterprise. I’m not necessarily down on SSRN or Bepress; I’m not automatically suspicious of people who are trying to make money. But I’ve met enough altruists in my life not to be skeptical, at times, of everyone.

What are the librarians’ “deeply mixed motives”? I need to read the whole NYT piece, but I think one might be reassured that they are trying to get a digital archive that is a true public resource, rather than a property of one company.

You and I agree on this. My question (issue? challenge?) is to describe the upside of what we see without (i) ignoring the costs or (ii) inviting the conspiratorial critique. Is it possible to pull this off?

Mike

Seriously, the “Tolerated Use” issue gets replicated all over the place in law. You don’t need a conspiracy theory to explain it. Ellickson’s cattle ranchers, in being subjected to the vicissitudes of the concept of negligence rather than their preferred bright-line rule of “open-range” vs. “closed-range”, were not simply the victims of an insurance company/judicial system “public choice” plot.