DISADVANTAGES — CONSUMER/INTERNET — KILLS THE INTERNET 431

IMPACT: HUMAN CREATIVITY

THE INTERNET HAS RELEASED POWERFUL NEW FORCES OF CREATIVITY IN THE NEW ELECTRONIC COMMONS

PAUL STARR, The American Prospect, March 27, 2000 - April 10, 2000; Pg. 30 TITLE: The Electronic Commons; THE PROMISE OF THE NEW PUBLIC DOMAIN // acs-VT2001

Indeed, the Internet has generated an outpouring of public goods that conventional economic models cannot readily explain. According to the usual logic, goods and services should be underproduced if those who invest in them do not have the proper incentives for individual gain -- and in a public domain, they don't. "Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all," wrote Garrett Hardin in his influential 1968 essay "The Tragedy of the Commons," which used a village's overgrazed public land as its paradigmatic case. Hardin was right about the environmental problems that he was primarily addressing. But the story of the Internet has been more like "The Triumph of the Commons." Rather than inhibiting productive energies, the electronic commons has released them. It has enabled many people to find a public for their work that they could never have found through earlier channels of distribution. New markets are being created on the Net; so are new public spaces.

THE INTERNET HAS PROVEN TO BE A POWERFUL SEEDBED FOR INNOVATION

PAUL STARR, The American Prospect, March 27, 2000 - April 10, 2000; Pg. 30 TITLE: The Electronic Commons; THE PROMISE OF THE NEW PUBLIC DOMAIN // acs-VT2001

* And, fourth, far from serving merely as a passive conveyance for messages and transactions, the Internet has proved to be a seedbed of innovation. Many of the traditional public sources of information, such as libraries, have been limited in flexibility and slow to innovate. The Internet and online digital libraries are more dynamic, adaptable to different modes of communication, and amenable to innovation in public as well as private goods and services. Nowhere has the innovative potential of the new public media been better demonstrated than in open-source software -- programs whose source code has been openly distributed on the Net and improved through numerous independent contributions. The development of the Internet itself exemplifies that process and its advantages [see Lawrence Lessig, "Innovation, Regulation, and the Internet," page 26].