Page:The digital public domain.pdf/41

14 Restricting access to information would increase the inefficiency of the market because perfect information makes the perfect market. A market that commodifies information excessively will be less efficient in allocating resources in our society since key information to facilitate that allocation will be more difficult to find. In addition, by raising the costs of information, we will undermine creativity since the building blocks of future creations will be inaccessible to a portion of our society.

Finally, as we will better detail later, the public domain is an engine of democratisation because it ensures proper access to information for EU citizens regardless of the market power of the players. The value of the public domain as a building block of our capacity for free expression has been immensely enhanced by the ubiquity of the interconnected society and the power of propagation of digitization. Technological advancement makes the public domain the perfect democratic forum.

For the purpose of the Communia project, digitization and the Internet revolution are an extraordinary opportunity to multiply the value of the public domain and exploit humanities’ riches as never before. Several authors have described the Internet revolution as a monumental shift that we are undergoing. David Bollier, speaker at the third Communia conference, notes:

"I believe we are moving into a new kind of cultural if not economic reality. We are moving away from a world organized around centralized control, strict intellectual property rights and hierarchies of credentialed experts, to a radically different order. The new order is predicated upon open access, decentralized participation, and cheap and easy sharing."

Digital networks fuel new forms of user-based creative sharing and collaboration. This mass collaboration may stifle social and economic enrichment to a far greater extent than in the past. Yochai Benkler described the high generative capacity of online commons as the “wealth of networks”. The wealth of networks lies