Sections:

• There Is an Alternative, and Its Rising
• Protecting Nature's Gifts
• Building the Hometown Commons
• Sharing Knowledge and Culture
• Assuring Security for All
• Reclaiming Our Time and Quiet 
• A Path Ahead - CURRENT PAGE

Let the world know what we know:
the commons belongs to everyone.

 A family purchases

light rail tickets in Portland,

Oregon.

W H AT  Y O U  C A N  D O

Take a walk in your neighborhood. Notice what’s missing: a community garden?
A bike path? A wi-fi hot spot? A food buying club? Make it happen!

If there’s a river, creek or wetland near you, fall in love with it. Learn everything about it. Then join or build an organization to restore it.

Like the tide, the commons ebbs and flows over time. In our time,
it’s rising again. Not in its ancient form, but in new, 21st century forms.

The first swells can be seen around us. The models exist. The possibilities are endless. Now, we need to scale up.

To do this right, we first need a large vision. In that vision, the commons is as strong and vibrant as the corporate sector. It’s managed according to its own rules and in the interest of its own beneficiaries, future generations and all living citizens equally.

Second, we need to create common property rights that protect many of nature’s gifts. These rights should be managed and defended by trustees, bound as much as humanly possible to future generations.

Third, we need to build commons management institutions at every level, from local to regional to global.

Fourth, we need to dedicate steady revenue streams to art, science, public spaces and public transportation. We need these streams to create zones of knowledge, culture and daily life that are shielded from corporate intrusion.

A strengthened commons sector can tackle several major problems long unsolved by corporations or government:

-   Protecting the atmosphere, the ocean and other threatened ecosystems;
-   Ensuring that, in the richest country on earth, no one is destitute;
-   Providing simple, affordable health insurance for people of all ages.And there’s no end of work to do locally.

The key is this: wherever you are, claim your birthright to the wealth we jointly inherit or create. Claim it in living rooms, at church, in chat rooms and hair salons. Let the world know what we know: the commons belongs to everyone!

And when times are dark, remember that there is an alternative. It’s rising now, and we can lift it faster.

 the commons, n., gifts of nature and society; the wealth we inherit or create together and must pass on, undiminished or enhanced, to our children; a sector of the economy that complements the corporate sector.

Sections:

• There Is an Alternative, and Its Rising
• Protecting Nature's Gifts
• Building the Hometown Commons
• Sharing Knowledge and Culture
• Assuring Security for All - CURRENT PAGE
• Reclaiming Our Time and Quiet 
• A Path Ahead 

Private savings aren’t enough. We need universal trust funds and ways to share risk. In pre-industrial days, common pastures, streams and woods provided food and fuel for all. Then, the commons were enclosedand people moved to cities.

Writing at the time of these enclosures, Tom Paine argued that, since loss of the commons meant loss of sustenance, displaced citizens ought to be compensated. To do this, he proposed a ‘national fund,’ financed through a tax on private land, that would pay yearly dividends of roughly $2,000 (in current dollars) to everyone.

Paine’s prescription remains remarkably relevant today. Not just land, but water, air and other gifts of nature are being claimed by private corporations. At the same time, people need more dollars than ever just to survive. Why not use nature’s wealth to augment everyone’s wealth?

Instead of a ‘ownership society’ in which everyone looks out only for themselves, America could be a ‘co-ownership society’ in which many assets and risks are shared. The following models show how and why.

Since the Alaska Permanent Fund began paying equal dividends to each Alaska resident in 1982, the state’s population has risen by about 50 percent, the Permanent Fund has grown from $4 to $30 billion, and Alaskans have received more than $13 billion in dividend checks. Because distributions are based on 5-year average earnings, dividends are still depressed by the dot-com crash and 2002–03 recession.

The Alaska Permanent Fund

Under Alaska’s constitution, the state’s natural resources belong to its citizens. Jay Hammond, Republican governor of Alaska in the 1970s, took this provision seriously. When oil began flowing from state lands on the North Slope, he pushed for the royalties to be shared among Alaska’s citizens. Many battles later, the legislature agreed to a deal: 75 percent of the state’s oil revenue would go to the government as a replacement for taxes. The remaining 25 percent would flow into a Permanent Fund, which would be invested on behalf of all Alaskans equally.

Since 1980, the Permanent Fund has grown to $30 billion and paid equal dividends to all Alaskans (including children) out of the income earned from its investments. Annual dividends have ranged from $800 to nearly $2,000 per person, depending on the performance of the stock market. In effect, the Permanent Fund is a giant mutual fund managed on behalf of all Alaskan citizens, present and future. Even after the oil runs dry, it will continue to benefit everyone. Economist Vernon Smith, a Nobel laureate and libertarian scholar at the Cato Institute, has called it ‘a model governments all over the world would be well-advised to copy.’

An American Permanent Fund

Entrepreneur and author Peter Barnes has taken Alaska’s model a step further. He’s proposed an American Permanent Fund which would pay dividends to all Americans, not just those who live in Alaska. Revenue for the nationwide fund would come from several sources, the most significant of which is the auction of permits to emit carbon dioxide. Gas, oil and coal suppliers would be required to buy enough permits to cover the CO2 emitted by the fossil fuels they sell.

‘Just like oil for Alaskans,’ Barnes explains, ‘the air is a shared inheritance of immense value to all of us. At present, we let polluters dump their trash into our asset for free. The result is far too much pollution. If, instead, we charged polluters for diminishing our common wealth, we’d gain in two ways: first, there’d be less pollution, and second, there’d be income for everyone.’

For the average person, dividends from the fund would offset the higher prices they’d pay for fossil fuels; people who use car-pools or public transit would come out ahead. Everyone would gain from cleaner air, a more stable climate, and less dependence on foreign oil.

I T ’ S  O U R  W E A LT H
Nature’s gifts, wrote Tom Paine in 1790, are ‘the common property of thehuman race.’ When they are privatized, citizens must receive payment in exchange.

E M P O W E R M E N T,  N O T  D E P E N D E N C Y

The late John Rawls, one of America’s leading philosophers, distinguished between predistribution and redistribution of income. Under redistribution, money is taken from‘winners’ and transferred to ‘losers.’ Under predistribution, the playing field is leveled byspreading ownership of property. The property itself then distributes income to all.

According to Rawls, while redistribution creates dependency, predistribution empowers. Tom Paine would have agreed.

B R I TA I N ’ S  T R U S T  F U N D  B A B I E S

Every child born in Great Britain after 2002 has a trust fund. The government kicks in $440 to start the funds (children in the poorest 40 percent of families receive $880). It makes an additional gift at age 7. All interest earned by the funds is tax-free.

Parents, family and friends can add up to $2,000 a year to children’s accounts. At age 18, the children can decide how to use their funds.

YA N K E E  W E A LT H  R E C Y C L I N G

If wealth recycling sounds un-American to you, consider professional baseball, football and basketball. Each league shifts money from the richest teams to the poorest, and gives losing teams first crack at new players.

Even George Will, the conservative columnist, sees the logic in this. ‘The aim is not to guarantee teams equal revenues, but revenues sufficient to give each team periodic chances of winning if each uses its revenues intelligently.’

A grubstake for every child

Though America thinks of itself as a land of opportunity, not everyone gets the
same chance to succeed. One out of five children is born into poverty, while afew inherit millions. One way to even life’s odds is to give every baby a trustfund. Britain has done this, and America should do it, too. Here are two ways.

Senators Rick Santorum (R-PA) and Charles Schumer (D-NY) have sponsored legislation to create tax-free savings accounts for all newborns. The federal government would deposit $500 into each account ($1,000 for children in
low-income households). When they turn 18, the children could use their savings for further education, home purchase or continued investing.

Yale professors Bruce Ackerman and Ann Alstott have gone further, proposing
‘stakeholder grants’ of $80,000 to nearly all American children when theyturn 18. Use of the money would be unrestricted, but there’d be two conditionsfor receiving it: a high school degree or equivalent, and the absence of acriminal record. The grants would be financed by a small tax on existing wealth.In effect, wealth would be recycled from those who have succeeded to thosejust getting started.

Sharing life’s risks

Nowadays, people face a multiplicity of risks: suffering a costly illness or disability,
losing a job, failing in business. These and many other calamities can strikeanyone more or less randomly. Even longevity can become a misfortune if oneoutlives one’s savings.

There are two ways we can approach these risks: one is to individualize them, the other is to share portions of them so that no one is destitute. The first says,
‘Every person for him or her self.’ The second, as embodied in Social Security, says, ‘We’re all in this together.’

Social Security was America’s answer to one of the harshest side-effects of industrialization: millions of unemployable older people who couldn’t rely on their families, as they had in the past. Franklin Roosevelt’s ingenious solution was.....

........an intergenerational compact in which one generation of workers supports a
previous generation’s retirement, and in turn is supported by the next. Thanksto this pact, America has all but eliminated extreme poverty in old age.As it turns out, pooled risk sharing — sometimes called social insurance —has several advantages over individualized risk. One is universality:everyone is covered and assured a dignified existence. Another is efficiency:social insurance costs less than private insurance. The reasons includeeconomies of scale, simplicity of options, and lower costs for marketing,claims management and profit.

Health care, Canadian style

Nothing better illustrates the advantages of pooled risk sharing than a comparison of Canada’s health insurance system with America’s. The 1984 Canada Health Act guarantees pre-paid medical care to all Canadians. Every province now runs its own insurance program in accordance with five principles:

–  Each plan is not-for-profit.

–  All medically necessary services are covered.

–  All residents are covered.

–  Premiums are affordable.

–  Coverage continues when a person travels.

Canada also bans extra billing by medical practitioners. As a result, the system is incredibly simple. For routine doctor visits, Canadians need only present their health card. There are no forms to fill out or bills to pay. The system is supported by a combination of federal and provincial funds. The bottom line is indisputable: Canadians enjoy better health care than Americans, at about half the cost and a fraction of the hassle.

Public spaces: America’s new frontier

We humans are social creatures. And for eons, our settlements reflected this. We built houses close together, and used public spaces to connect with neighbors.

Over the last half century, this social ecology has been disrupted. Development has taken forms that keep people isolated in cars. Big, box stores have ended the familiarity between shoppers and merchants. Political debate has shifted from town squares to the costly enclosures of television.

Volunteers in Portland, Oregon, pause while turning a city intersection into a work of home-spun art that invites passers by to slow down and interact with one another.

C I T Y R E PA I R .ORG

A revival of public spaces and local commerce is underway in America.

From Bryant Park in New York to Pioneer Square in Portland and Copley Square in Boston, urban plazas are coming back to life. Even Detroit, which was built by the automobile, is reviving its downtown by rerouting autos around a new publicsquare called Campus Martius Park. The park bustles with life in both summer andwinter (when there’s a skating rink), and has attracted some $500 million in newinvestment to the area.

Not all the place-making is by government. In Portland, Oregon, informal groups of neighbors have reclaimed street intersections. They paint vivid designs on the pavement to mark the place as their own. They also add rustic structures, such as produce exchange stands, play areas, and even a 24-hour tea stand.

In Boston, people in the Dudley Street neighborhood formed a land trust in1988 to buy vacant land and determine how it could best serve the community. Today there are 600 new and rehabbed homes — all with a cap on resale prices — plus gardens, a common, parks and playgrounds. These efforts revitalized the neighborhood without displacing local residents, as would have happened through gentrification.

Now Americans are pushing back. They’re building community gardens and farmers’ markets, reviving public spaces, and demanding that public buildings not be named for corporations.

Wi-fi for all

The Internet is the sidewalk of the 21st century; it’s where people and businesses
connect. So it’s not surprising that cities are starting to build high-speed wirelessnetworks the way they once built streets.

Many operate wireless ‘hot zones’ that offer free access over dozens of blocks. Others, like Philadelphia, are rolling out low-cost service city-wide. In San Francisco and New Orleans, city-wide access may even be free.

As of early 2006, nearly 150 U.S. cities were deploying or planning public wi-fi networks. That’s a 50 percent rise over 2005. And it excludes countless hot spots set up voluntarily by citizens and local businesses.

Meanwhile, in Washington,
a bi-partisan group of senators hasintroduced legislation to open unusedTV channels for wireless broadbandaccess. These vacant channels reachfarther and penetrate buildings betterthan the ‘junk band’ currently allottedto wi-fi. If they are made available,urban and rural wi-fi networks couldbe set up quickly and at low cost.

B R I N G I N G  D E M O C R A C Y  T O  M A L L S

Local merchants aren’t the only ones hurt when a Wal-Mart comes to town — civic life
suffers, too. When people congregate in private shopping centers, the First Amendment no longer applies. Owners can — and do — ban leafleting, petition drives, and other forms of grassroots democracy.

But California, New Jersey and Colorado have ruled that shopping malls are like public squares, and must be open to free speech, even if they are private property. Voters in other states are demanding similar rights.

Two friends enjoy wireless Internet access in Bryant Park in New York City, one of many free hotspots around the country.

A berry good day at a farmers’
market in Seattle, Washington.

Democracy grows hollow if citizens don’t have places to rub shoulders with one another.

— J AY  WA L L  J A S P ER

A renaissance of farmers’ markets

Until the Civil War, most American cities had public markets. In the 1940s, therewas a brief resurgence, as farmers sought better prices and shoppers soughtfresher food. Then came interstate highways, and the market for seasonal localproduce collapsed.

Now the tide is turning again. From Union Square in New York to San Francisco’s Ferry Building, city-dwellers are rediscovering the pleasures of meeting each other and the people who produce their food.. There are now nearly 4,000 farmers’ markets in all 50 states, double the number ten years ago.

For many, a visit to the local farmers’ market (like this one in Madison, Wisconsin) is a festive activity.

Raising community along with tomatoes

Economists say people will care only for what they own. If that’s so, how do they explain the green oases that have risen from vacant lots in New York City? Rubble became garden plots. Street sculptures and shrines appeared. People built sheds for tools they shared — all of this on land they didn’t own or lease. Today New York is dotted with 700 community gardens. About 150 of these will eventually give way to housing, but the rest will stay.

And it’s not just New York. The American Community Gardening Association counts 70 major cities with community gardens. In Seattle alone, more than 1900 families raise food in these neighborhood spaces.

These gardens yield significant amounts of food. In Philadelphia, gardeners save an estimated $700 per year on food bills. The Food Project in Boston produces over 120,000 pounds of vegetables on 21 acres; most of it goes to people in need. Just as importantly, the gardens turn strangers into neighbors.

Is it Willie’s field, or AT&T’s?

In America, sports stadiums used to bear names that told you where you were.Today, stadium names are sold to the highest corporate bidders. But many fans are fighting back. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, the Packers wanted to sell the name of famed Lambeau Field. After a public outcry, the effort died.

In San Francisco, voters approved a referendum banning the sale of naming rights to Candlestick Park, where the Forty-Niners football team plays. Now they’re battling to name the stadium where the baseball Giants play. First it was PacBell Park, then SBC Park. When SBC became AT&T, many fans had enough: they’re asking the city in its signs to call it Willie Mays Field, henceforth and forever.

A group digs space for a pond in Greene Acres Community
Garden, one of many in Brooklyn, New York.

 The corporate name of the San Francisco Giants ballpark has changed so many times that fans are naming it Willie Mays Field once and for all.

Sections:

• There Is an Alternative, and Its Rising
• Protecting Nature's Gifts
• Building the Hometown Commons
• Sharing Knowledge and Culture
• Assuring Security for All
• Reclaiming Our Time and Quiet - CURRENT PAGE
• A Path Ahead 

Fishing off a pier in Liberty State Park in New Jersey.

Our mental environment is a commons like air and water.

We need to protect it from unwanted incursions.

—  K A L L E  L A S N

Americans are tired of corporations’ demands on their time and attention.

When markets began, they were discrete events in time and space. Most of life occurred outside them, by different rules and for different ends. Until the middle of the last century, most stores closed in the evening and on Sunday. Families had time after work for Cub Scouts, PTA meetings and the like.

Today we move to the metronome of the market. Its needs demand our attention nearly every waking moment. Not surprisingly, that’s making many people overloaded. They’re telling corporations,
‘You can’t have everything. We need time for life!’

Hold the marketing!

Common space is freedom space. It’s there for us to inhabit, so long as we don’t interfere with anyone else. It’s not a space we have much of any more. We’re barraged by ads — over 3,000 a day and growing. Buses, airports and a host of other public places have become theaters for corporate want-creation. But a backlash is stirring.
–  The State of Maine bought out all billboards in the state, beginning in 1981. Vermont, Alaska and Hawaii also ban billboards.
–  Within three months after it was launched, the FTC’s ‘Do Not Call’ list had already enrolled 50 million Americans, and now includes half of eligible U.S. phone lines.
–  The future of TV ads is murky because a growing fraction of viewers use recording devices such as TiVo to fast-forward through commercials.

Got a minute?

Democracy requires a temporal commons, a pool of time available for community concerns. The market, however, claims so much of our time — both as workers and consumers — that we have little left for our families, let alone for our communities.

Americans work longer than medieval peasants, either at jobs that demand long hours, or at second and third jobs needed to make ends meet. They spend additional hours wrestling with the complexities of medical insurance and cell phone plans.

Now citizens are claiming more non-market time.

–  Hundreds of communities hold Take Back Your Time Day events to recognize the day in October on which Americans could stop working if they had as much time off as Europeans. TBYTD’s agenda includes paid leave after childbirth, limits on compulsory overtime, and making Election Day a holiday.
–  The Massachusetts Council of Churches, with support from the Atlanta-basedLord’s Day Alliance, has made the reclaiming of time a major focus.
–  The Slow Food Movement has become a force to protect traditional ways of growing, preparing and eating food. Founded in Italy, it has thirty-five chapters in California, six in Texas, and one in Alabama.

Putting time in the bank

Helping neighbors is a great American tradition. But as people relocate more frequently, it’s harder for them to trust that favors they do will be repaid.

Time Dollars you can bank are one solution. When you help a neighbor for an hour, you earn one Time Dollar. Then, when you need help yourself, you can spend your saved Time Dollars.

Some communities have harnessed Time Dollars for special projects. In Chicago, Maine and Florida, nearly 5,000 low-income kids have earned computers by tutoring younger peers for a hundred hours apiece. And in New York, members of an HMO for the elderly contribute 15,000 hours annually to help each other with home repairs, transportation and simple companionship.

Q U I E T, P L E A S E !

A wave of modern devices has turned our once-tranquil soundscape into a sea of noise. Now, people are demanding quiet.

–  Chicago, Cleveland and Pittsburgh have cracked down on boom box cars.

–  Suburbs across the country have restricted leaf blowers.

–  New York City has banned cell phones in theaters.

–  Amtrak added Quiet Cars on its northeast corridor trains. 

Americans have less paid time off work than citizens of any other industrialized nation, with barely two weeks annually.

Sections:

• There Is an Alternative, and Its Rising
• Protecting Nature's Gifts
• Building the Hometown Commons
• Sharing Knowledge and Culture - CURRENT PAGE
• Assuring Security for All
• Reclaiming Our Time and Quiet 
• A Path Ahead

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia written and edited entirely by users. In four years, it has amassed nearly one million entries and become one of the Internet’s most visited sites.

Citizen journalism is getting a try-out in Minneapolis and St. Paul, where the online Twin Cities Daily Planet mixes contributions from community newspapers, independent journalists and engaged citizens.

Corporations want to own ideas and melodies. People want to share them freely. A fundamental battle is raging.

The commons of knowledge and culture are as old as humanity, and almost as vital to us as air. They rest on the fact that free exchange ofideas is indispensable to creativity. As Isaac Newton put it, ‘If I have seen further, it is because I’ve stood on the shoulders of giants.’

But our creative commons are under siege. Entertainment companies want to encrypt their content to prevent sharing. Drug companies want to lock up research. And media oligopolies want to charge tolls on the Information Highway.

The good news is that citizens are fighting back. They’re creating open source software, weblogs, online news sites and other freely shared content.

Extra! Extra! Read and write all about it!

While corporate ownership of TV stations and newspapers has been concentrating, there’s been an offsetting explosion of ‘citizen media.’ Weblogs, or blogs, that feature personal musings, reporting and commentary, have proliferated wildly. Some are among the first to report breaking news, such as the South Asian tsunami. Others correct errors and biases in the mainstream media. Still others focus on local news.

Cultural and social networks are also spreading. Ourmedia and the Internet Archive allow people to post and share their own films, writing and other creative works. Friendster, with 13 million monthly users, connects people with similar interests.

These efforts draw upon a wide array of talent at low cost, giving them an edge over commercial media. It’s unclear how all this will evolve, but trends suggest the biggest threat to corporate media isn’t ‘pirated’ works, but citizen-generated content.

Free and Open Source Software

Open source software is written by volunteers; anyone can read, modify andredistribute the code. The Linux operating system and Firefox web browserare prominent examples. So are many of the core programs running the Internetand the World Wide Web.

Much of this activity depends upon a legal innovation, the General Public License, sometimes known as copyleft. This license, created by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, gives everyone rights to freely use, modify and redistribute a software program as long as any derivative programs are disseminated just as freely. In this way, it enables people to participate in collective efforts without fear that anyone will profit from their donated labor.

Creative Commons: share and share alike

To address this problem, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig and his colleagues devised a system that allows non-commercial users to share and modify creative works freely. Creators can affix a Creative Commons symbol to their works and thereby alert others that the works can be shared in specific ways — for example, only in non-commercial settings, or only if the author is properly credited. This helps creative works circulate more freely, while protecting creators from piracy.

Since 2002, creators have assigned CC licenses to more than 50 million works, and the CC logo itself has become a symbol of the sharing culture.

K E E P I N G  T H E  W E B  O P E N  T O  A L L

Tim Berners-Lee was a programmer at CERN, the European high-energy physics lab, when he had an idea to greatly simplify the Internet. Instead of typing commands to fetch information from another computer, readers would simply click on a link and a new page would appear. The world’s computers would become one seamless information space, freely accessible to all.

Berners-Lee wrote the codes for Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). More importantly, he persuaded CERN to release them into the world with no patents, licenses or other strings attached. As a result, anybody could adopt them without fear of lawsuits or owing a penny in royalties. Within a few years, the World Wide Web was ubiquitous. Berners-Lee then moved to MIT to lead an international consortium dedicated to preserving the Web as a non-proprietary space.

At numerous points along the way, Berners-Lee could have started or joined a business, and he probably would have earned millions. Each time, he declined. ‘I wanted to see the Web proliferate, not sink my life’s hours into worrying over a product release,’ he explained.

We’re so used to patents that we forgot ways to discover drugs in the public domain. We need to rediscover them.

— S T E P H E N  M A U R E R ,

C O - F O U N D E R , T R O P I C A L  D I S E A S E  I N I T I AT I V E

Crazy for Craigslist

Craigslist began in 1995 as Craig Newmark’s informal effort to keep his circle of acquaintances abreast of events in San Francisco. It soon expanded to cover jobs, apartments and household goods, and became an underground hit. Now <craigslist.org> attracts more than 10 million users a month in over 100 cities.

Except for job listings in some cities, posting to Craigslist is free. Many observers wonder why Newmark hasn’t tried to wring more profit out of his site or sell out for millions of dollars. He isn’t interested. ‘We’re both a community service and a business,’ he says. ‘We don’t take ads — no banners, no pop-ups — basically as
an expression of values.’

Is it live? Or is it vinyl?

Sixty years ago, when radio stations started playing pre-recorded music on theair, musicians had reason to fret. Not only were their livelihoods threatened;so was the future of live performance.

To assuage these fears, the musicians’ union and the record industry created the Musical Performance Trust Fund. For every record and CD sold, record compa- nies pay a small royalty into the trust, which uses the money to sponsor free per- formances. Musicians get paid to play, and the public gets to hear live music.

In 2004, the Fund supported over 11,000 free concerts in parks, schools and hospitals, and paid more than $8 million to musicians. It’s a brilliant model of how commoditized, copyright-protected art can support free and living art.

Enjoying a concert in Chittenden Locks Park in Seattle, Washington.

Now, open source science

Until recently, science was a ‘gift economy’ in which scientists pursued basic knowledge and freely shared their findings and ideas. Then, patents became the rage, and with them came secrecy and a tilt of research toward profit-making products. In response, many scientists are creating new scholarly commons.

–  The international effort to sequence the human genome placed all its results in the public domain.

–  The Public Library of Science publishes freely accessible, peer-reviewed journals in biology and medicine.

–  OneWorld Health, a not-for-profit pharmaceutical company, brings scientists and capital together to create low-cost drugs for the developing world.

–  The Tropical Disease Initiative, a Web-based community of laboratories, collaborates on research for similar drugs.

New ways to pay our pipers

Every civilization needs culture — statues and paintings, myths and stories, music and dance. But cultural workers need to eat, and if they share their work freely or cheaply, how will they make a living?

In many countries, national governments proudly support the arts. But in America, federal funding was never great, and recently it has declined. Fortunately, there are other mechanisms through which people can pay their pipers.

The Music Performance Trust Fund is one model: sales of copyrighted reproductions support live public performances. The San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund is another: it underwrites scores of community arts institutions, from the symphony to the Mime Troupe. Here are two other ideas:

–  For creators of music and videos shared on the Internet, Harvard law professor William Fisher proposes a system that compensates artists with public funds based on how frequently their works are downloaded.

–  Economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research proposes a tax-credit-funded voucher system for paying artists who put their works in the public domain.

Big pharmaceutical companies say patents and high prices are needed to fund cutting-edge research. In fact, most basic research is funded by government and non-profits, with private firms often walking off with key patents.

T H AT  I D E A S  S H O U L D  F R E E LY  S P R E A D . . .
...from one to another , for the moral and mutual instruction of man, seems to have been benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space.— Thomas Jefferson