WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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They hang the man and flog the woman that steal the goose from off the common
But let the greater villain loose that steals the common from the goose.
That’s a folk poem from the mid-eighteenth century, but somewhere some corporation is probably trying to copyright it as theirs, according to David Bollier, a policy strategist and journalist whose work focuses on reclaiming the commons. The idea of “the commons” is the concept of public resources that are owned by EVERYone and not by SOMEone…like folk tales, or even the Internet. Bollier studies how digital technologies are changing democratic culture and how citizen action can stand against the excesses of intellectual property law. Bollier was the keynote speaker at this past weekend’s local conference on reclaiming the commons, a WFHB exclusive.
