An MIT publication from 2007, this is actually knowledge from the 2000-2004 timeframe, and it is annoying narrow knowledge written from legal-economic point of view. Well-intentioned, no doubt, this is not the "inter-disciplinary" work that it claims to be, and I demonstrate restraint in not scoring it as a three. Despite references to Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom and Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, these folks are largely out of touch with Web 2.0 to Web 4.0, collective intelligence, wealth of networks, and tao of democracy concepts, authors, and works. This is not a substantive contribution to evolutionary anything (cultural evolution, evolutionary activism, conscious evolution). The index STINKS and there is no consolidated bibliography.

I left it at four in part because this is a very good job on one part of the elephant (the anus or intellectual property of old part) and I really appreciated the six of the twelve contributions by Nancy Kranich, James Boyle, Peter Suber, Shubha Ghosh, Peter Levine, Charles M Schweik.

This is not a book that focuses on innovation as much as on structured processes and conventions.

My fly-leaf notes:

+ This is a political science work with some law and economics thrown in, a superficial but useful pass from an isolated perspective. It runs in the opposite direction from World Brain and Wisdom of the Crowds or Wealth of Networks scholarship and practice.

+ Severely isolated from the larger literature, both multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural, on the concepts of "commons" both physical and mental.

+ A Weberian book, a last gasp from the era of top-down imposed order. Totally from a Western point of view, noting that the commons concept relies on a mix of social norms and legal conventions rather than economic ownership of the whole ideas. Also notes that less than 2 per cent of the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI, DIALOG File 7) comes from the developing world, which I take to be OUR problem, not theirs.

+ Any book that thinks Esther Dyson is the first word on meta-tagging, to take just one example of many, instead of Doug Engelbart and his hypertext innovations from the 1970's, is totally divorced from the real world of information and communication technologies (ICT).

+ The book ignores self-publishing that is validated post publication, and still trapped in the paradigm that thinks peer reviewed publishing is some form of validation--with all that I know about climate change fraud and skeptic suppression within fraud-accessory journals, and medical journal fraud with ghost-written materials from the pharmaceuticals signed by doctors without integrity, this is the final straw in terms of losing the fifth star and almost drove it to three stars.

USEFUL STUFF:

+ Information commons is distinct from the natural commons because the first gains value with more people using the same information, while this is not true of the latter (absent cultural evolution).

+ Most new (corporate sponsored) technologies seek to capture or enclose knowledge rather than liberate it.

+ Average life on the web for an object is 100 days, with citations disappearing over time toward 50% after seven years (OSS.Net has been up since 1993 and will remain up forever as the foundation for Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog--all it takes is integrity).

+ Distinction drawn between libertarian commons (all can partake) and association commons (a contradiction in terms, meaning a commons shared by the group that created it). The book as a whole leans toward homogeneous small communities and is very representative of the balkanization of scholarship (see Web of Knowledge image at Phi Beta Iota, I refuse to post images here since Amazon deleted START TRANSACTION WITH CONSISTENT SNAPSHOT; /* 2123 = 586beb94a1648cf624f74496477e92db