The Grassy Commons

Boyle is interested in the potential of creative, collaborative groups or communities (such as those that grow around open-source projects) to expand or serve as the structural model for social and political communities. One thing he in fact needs to assert to run his argument is that immaterial goods such as an MP3 file are non-rival and non-excludable. I think it might be worth running these assumptions up against Comcast’s (alleged) throttling of P2P users. This is worth pointing out for two reasons I think. One, it is an example of the legal system governing IP, as restricted as it might, being worked around. Boyle gets so caught up with the power of the formal legal framework and the power it has to “throttle” information, he neglects the possibility of such cases as Comcast, which is arguably more totalitarian than the legal, albeit superfluous, regulation through legal methods. The second point is the realization that, again, there is an infrastructure under the immaterial, giving it life. Boyle is so quick to draw distinctions between “the grass commons” and the “informational commons,” I think it’s worth pointing out there will always be a grassy commons relevant to that of the informational. Google’s server farms take up space and use resources, finite resources.