mandarine

The wealth of the world does not come from our material labour. This is becoming more and more obvious each day. Look around and count how much of your stuff is more than thirty years old: you will agree that what really matters is not the accumulation of material wealth from the commercial labour of past generations, but the legacy of intellectual riches from the volunteer contribution of our elders.

Let us pick a few examples from the public domain:

• washing one’s hands (the biggest life-saving practice of all times)
• quantum physics (which made the internet revolution possible)
• democracy (Athenian, American, French, …)
• crumpets, muffins, pancakes
• soccer, football, baseball, basketball, golf,…
• the English language

In fact, as soon as we are considering ideas, concepts, inventions, or intellectual production at large (except books, songs and movies), it is actually harder to find something that is not in the public domain than something that is.

However, I am worried. The public domain has seldom had powerful advocates. For the past couple of centuries, works have generally ‘fallen’ into the public domain inadvertently, instead of being given as offerings to the world. And the insane divergence of recent capitalistic greed in staking claims over things which should (and used to) belong to the common good (molecules, genes, seeds, theorems) is ominous. In my nightmares, I see large auctions in which Universal buys exclusive rights for Elizabethan theater, Monsanto buys corn (any variety), Apple buys Beethoven, Intel buys quantum physics and HSBC mathematics, and so forth, so that everything is now owned, making things so much simpler…

Meanwhile (from a very-well researched economics paper on the value of the public domain):

Older [copyrighted] works gathering dust in vaults or even rotting away (as has occurred with a large amount of early film in the United States (Lutzker et al 2002)) generate no revenue or value for society, and represent a tragedy for any nation’s cultural heritage.

On the other hand, there are also encouraging signs that mentalities may be changing. The internet is an ideal medium in which the public domain can thrive, as it considerably reduces the cost of exchanging and duplicating intellectual production. The uptake of Linux and open-source software, the growing number of GPL or other Creative-Commons-licenced content on the web, the rise of wikibooks and other books directly published in the public domain are unprecedented phenomena. My belief is that if we lean to the right side, we can sway the balance in favor of the public domain, and private owership of ideas will nicely return to its original minority niche.

If, like many, your are making a list of resolutions for the new year, let me suggest you added a line for one thing you could contribute to the public domain. The good thing about contributions to the public domain is that you never have to keep up. The cumulative nature of intellectual production is such that what is done will never have to be done again. Whereas reducing chocolate intake in the new year is an everyday’s endeavour, if you give something to the public domain just once, it will be forever: what you give will be available for people all around the world and in all future generations.

Below is a list of activities that everyone should contemplate at least once in a lifetime:

• Proofreading public-domain e-books for Project Gutenberg
• Creating, editing, completing, commenting Wikipedia articles or any wikibook
• Recording, proof-listening, editing public-domain audio-books for LibriVox
• Contributing to open-source software projects (code, documentation, support forums)
• Uploading your pictures to flickr and specifying ‘no rights reserved’
• Collecting copyrighted material for the time it goes out of copyright (be a library/vault)
• Recording public-domain music and uploading it to musopen.org
• Dropping the copyright notice on your blog
• Exchanging seeds
• Publishing and exchanging cooking recipes
• Inventing something and just publishing it instead of filing a patent
• Writing a novel and publishing it over the internet instead of running the obstacle course of finding a publisher and then having your book out of print after one year and until 70 years after your death
• Bookmooching and bookcrossing (from Dew)
• Writing quality content and making it available (if not necessarily public-domain) on a website or blog (from Dew)

If you have other suggestions, please leave a comment: I’d like this list to grow to outrageous proportions to show just how much anyone can do.

After my recent diatribe against scientism, maybe this is the right moment to write a little something about Jules Verne, the archfather of scientism in literature. I used to love Jules Verne novels when I was a child, although the red cover of the hardback editions had always intimidated me. Then I had almost forgotten all I’d read until some years ago when I delved into ‘De la Terre à la Lune’ for a physics class I was giving: I ripped all space mechanics references from the book and made a very funny physics test out of them (providing that units were properly converted). The one question I remember best was an illustration of Michel Ardan’s head, where I had drawn a downward arrow with a legend ‘m.gamma’ representing the apparent weight of the head on the neck during the acceleration phase of the shell in the cannon. Students were expected to show that even with the hydraulic cushion below the cabin floor, there was no way Ardan & co. could come out alive from an acceleration of 21,000g (you can check for yourselves: the cannon is 900 feet long, the liberation velocity was and still is 11000 m/s), as the head would have appeared to weigh more than 30 tons, i.e. the weight of twenty midsize cars. [more]

You may by now know that I am very fond of audio-books in general, and of free audio-books in particular. Among those, I have a clear preference towards the public-domain audio-books which the LibriVox volunteers offer as unconditional gifts to the whole world and all future generations.

What you do not know is that I have come to worship one specific LibriVox voice. Warm and crystalline at the same time, this voice is the ideal bedside storytelling mother’s. If I’d been born to an English-speaking family, my dreams of being read Peter Pan, Narnia or Harry Potter to would feature that very voice.

My greatest luck is that I have had the privilege to edit some of the recordings in which this dream voice had been preciously collected, for subsequent release on LibriVox. Even if it was easy work (there are hardly any bits that need to be edited out), I am proud to have contributed to these priceless presents for humanity.

Dear Cori, I am in love with your voice.

I get angry when I see theories and schemes which do not acknowledge failure and justify an eternally delayed success by trying to turn the guilt on me. They tell me that I did not try enough, that it will work only if I do more, that if I do not do exactly as they say, if I make but one false step, it will fail and be worse than if I had done nothing. These are totalitarian theories. Generally, they do not deliver.

Below is a list of such theories, which have consistently failed in the past but keep asking us for more:

• capitalism will reduce poverty
• communism will improve people’s lives
• GMs will feed the third world
• preventive war will stop terrorism
• increasing agricultural yields will abolish hunger
• vaccines will eradicate infectious disease
• the telethon will find a cure against myopathy
• science is good

If you look around, you can find such theories by the dozen. They always have the same modus operandi: an unchallengeable basis relying on circular logic, unquestionable dogma or good intentions. Let us quickly flip through the list above. [more]

If you are not sure you are ready to come into my world with the podcast below, click this link for a really good starting point in the shape of a cartoon (thanks to Charlotte). It’s funny, it’s extremely eloquent, and it is so true before christmas.

In case you can spare one hour of wasted time (commuting, washing up, walking the dog, working out), I invite you into my world:

‘What will we eat when the oil runs out?’. Lecture by Richard Heinberg. (From The Soil Association)