Page:The digital public domain.pdf/58

Rh "In a digital environment where distribution costs are very small, the primary costs of engaging in amateur production are opportunity costs of time not spent on a profitable project and information input costs. Increased property rights create entry barriers, in the form of information input costs, that replicate for amateur producers the high costs of distribution in the print and paper environment. Enclosure therefore has the effect of silencing non-professional information producers."

Amateur production has been the driving force of the Internet informational revolution. Blogs, listservs, forums, and user-based communities re-calibrated the meaning of diversity and freedom of expression toward a higher standard. Non-professional information production empowered the civic society with the ability to produce truly independent and diverse speech. Any policy intervention should not underestimate the decreased production by organisations using strategies that do not benefit from copyright expansion. Increased copyright protection and public domain enclosure, in fact, may “lead, over time, to concentration of a greater portion of the information production function in society in the hands of large commercial organizations that vertically integrate new production with owned-information inventory management”.

Ironically, copyright law may end up serving the old enemy against which it was originally unleashed. Widely recognised as a tool to counter censorship so common in the old patronage system, copyright law may turn out to restrict free and diverse speech by its steady expansion and converse public domain enclosure and commodification. Moreover, and more regretfully, an unwise expansionistic copyright policy may empower again that old enemy of any democratic society at the very moment when technological progress may lead us close to its very annihilation.

It is worth mentioning that Communia has also been investigating the problem of the tension between cultural heritage protection laws (CHPLs) and the public domain. In some EU Member States, cultural heritage legislation may impose an additional layer of restrictions over works that are otherwise copyright free. In particular, in some instances, CHPLs may set up a permission system to reproduce cultural resources and monuments. The Communia Working Group 3 gathered in Istanbul in December 2010 to explore the issue and produce a set of recommendations. The policy