Property, Services and

Ownerships

Harry C. Merritt
Commons - Oxford Reference 2021-02-08, 5:37 PM

Oxford Reference

A Dictionary of Human Geography

Alisdair Rogers, Noel Castree, and Rob Kitchin

Publisher: Oxford University Press Print Publication Date: 2013

Print ISBN-13: 9780199599868 Published online: 2013
Current Online Version: 2013 eISBN: 9780191758065

commons

A physical space or natural resource that provides materials, goods, or services that benefit most or all members of a
community or the wider public. Commons can assume many physical forms and exist at all geographical scales, from the
local to the global. The original sense of commons derives from medieval Europe. Common fields, pastures, wastes, and
woodlands were accessible to all in a village community according to local customary arrangements. Such commons were
progressively converted into private property through enclosure. In England and Wales, for example, this was both informal
and formal, based on parliamentary acts, especially throughout the 18th century. The transfer of land and resources from
communal to private control was, according to many historians, one of the foundations of capitalism (see POLANYI, KARL).
More recently, such things as the atmosphere and oceans have been conceived as global commons because they are
resources upon which humanity depends but which have no clear ownership. See TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS.

Further reading
Giordano, M. (2003), ‘The geography of the commons: the role of scale and space’, Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 93(2): 365–76.
Find this resource:

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Enclosures - Oxford Reference 2021-02-08, 5:30 PM

Oxford Reference

A Dictionary of British History (3 ed.)

John Cannon and Robert Crowcroft

Publisher: Oxford University Press Published online: 2015

Current Online Version: 2015 eISBN: 9780191758027

enclosures

The process of ‘enclosing’ land into ‘private’ holdings goes back many centuries, and was a development from the system of
open field farming. Enclosure changed agricultural practices which had operated under systems of co‐operation in
communally administered landholdings. Instead, agricultural holdings were created which were non‐communal, and within
man‐made boundaries which separated one farm from another.

In the 16th cent. landlords tried to enclose their land in order to keep more sheep. This process was condemned by the
church and opposed by the government. By the 1630s government opposition was breaking down, and a good deal of ‘by
agreement’ enclosure took place in the period c. 1630–c. 1750.

From 1750 Parliament began to pass bills to allow for the enclosure of the land under certain clearly defined conditions. As a
result, between 1750 and 1830 in England more than 4,000 enclosure Acts were passed. The process continued through the
19th cent. until there were hardly any open fields remaining. Only in the Nottinghamshire village of Laxton does a common
field system continue to operate to this day.

Enclosure in Scotland occurred primarily in the 18th cent., in the Lowlands in the 1760s and 1770s and in the uplands at the
end of the century.

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Digital commons - Oxford Reference 2021-02-08, 5:32 PM

Oxford Reference

A Dictionary of Media and Communication (3 ed.)

Daniel Chandler and Rod Munday

Publisher: Oxford University Press Print Publication Date: 2020

Print ISBN-13: 9780198841838 Published online: 2020
Current Online Version: 2020 eISBN: 9780191877964

digital commons

Digital information and knowledge regarded by the community that created them as collectively owned, managed, and
shared communal resources. See also COMMODIFIED COMMONS; COMMONS-BASED SOCIAL MEDIA; KNOWLEDGE SHARING; NETWORKED PUBLIC
SPHERE; OPEN SOURCE; TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS; USER-GENERATED CONTENT.

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Open source - Oxford Reference 2021-02-08, 5:33 PM

Oxford Reference

A Dictionary of the Internet (4 ed.)

Edited by Darrel Ince

Publisher: Oxford University Press Published online: 2019

Current Online Version: 2019 eISBN: 9780191884276

open source

The process of releasing the program code and documentation of a software product in order to encourage companies and
others to build on the original product. The archetypal open source product is Linux.

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Sharecropping in the Cloud 2021-02-07, 10:37 AM

Sharecropping in the Cloud

BY

HARRY C. MERRITT

Rather than benefiting all, cloud computing's main

innovation will be enhanced control for technological
rentiers.

Members of the contemporary tech industry speak of cloud computing with such
awe and reverence that one might think that they were referring to the Kingdom of
Heaven. “The cloud is for everyone. The cloud is a democracy,” declared Marc
Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, a major business software company, in 2010.

Today, more and more companies are shifting their products and services to the
cloud, most recently including Adobe with the successor to its Creative Suite of
graphic design and editing software. Tech websites fill daily with articles arguing for
businesses and individuals to transfer their data to the cloud. As Steve Jobs once
commented, “I don’t need a hard disk in my computer if I can get to the server
faster. . . carrying around these non-connected computers is byzantine by
comparison.” Few in the industry would argue against the convenience and
opportunities provided by the technology.

This consensus, however, is not without its discontents. Instead of functioning as a

digital democracy, the net activist Jaron Lanier sees the cloud as more of a feudal
kingdom. In his 2010 book, You Are Not a Gadget, Lanier illustrated the
stratification of the digital world into “Peasants and Lords of the Clouds”: the lords
own the digital architecture and are rewarded handsomely for it, while the creative
class forms the peasantry, reduced to providing content for free and hoping for

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patronage.

To extend Lanier’s metaphor further, one might compare the emerging

predominance of the cloud with the economic transition from feudalism to
capitalism. As with their historical counterparts in the countryside during the
emergence of capitalism, economic transition and technological improvements are
transforming digital peasants into sharecroppers who must pay periodic fees under
the lord’s terms for the privilege of utilizing software or viewing content.
Historically, as today, elites used legal mechanisms combined with paeans to rights
and efficiency to justify their new systems of rents and control at the expense of
ordinary people.

The availability and accessibility of information over the past several centuries has,
of course, increased enormously as common people have gained access to print,
broadcast, and online media through new technological developments. Until
recently, as each medium was introduced, it tended to complement rather than
replace its predecessors. Over the course of the twentieth century and into the
twenty-first, newspaper circulation has grown fairly steadily (with declines in Europe
and North America offset by growth in the developing world). Book sales continue to
grow in all markets. Over 80 percent of the US population has a personal computer at
home, and of those 93 percent have broadband Internet access.

Cloud computing seems likely to overturn the personal ownership of those old forms
of media like books, CDs, and DVDs. Instead, individuals use a client on an
electronic device like tablets, smart phones, and e-book readers to access servers that
contain the data they want to retrieve. Under Digital Rights Management (DRM),
which form the technologies used to control access to content for the user, this
includes streaming services for music like Spotify, film and TV like Netflix and Hulu,
books like Kindle and Nook, and computer software and games. Increasingly, the
model of “software as a service” is being adopted by both individuals, as with Google
Apps, and businesses, as with Salesforce. For those with broadband, it’s faster,
simpler, and relies less on the limitations of the hard disk space they possess.

But what does it mean when software is a service, delivering content without physical
ownership for the consumer? Strangely, in 2012, the New York Review of Books, one
of the flagships of print culture, published an essay entitled “E-books Can’t Burn.”
Arguing that the e-book forms a more pure literary experience given the
standardization in appearance and configuration:

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[. . . ] the e-book’s ease of transport, its international vocation (could the

Iron Curtain have kept out e-books?), its indestructibility (you can’t
burn e-books), its promise that all books will be able to remain forever in
print and what is more available at reasonable prices, and it becomes
harder and harder to see why the literati are not giving the phenomenon
a more generous welcome.

All very nice. True, e-books cannot be burned. But to remove content, one does not
have to burn anything — content can simply be deleted from the server. In 2009,
Amazon quietly erased an e-book version of 1984 from its servers and on the Kindles
of customers who had paid for it. The issue in that case was one of licensing from the
rights holder to the book’s copyright, but it illustrates how little recourse the
ordinary customer has in the cloud against tech giants like Amazon.

Physical books can be held essentially in perpetuity, annotated and defaced as the
owner sees fit, loaned to friends, and accumulated into a collection that can be
inherited by one’s descendants. None of this is possible with data controlled centrally
from a server and rented to customers remotely. The growth of personal book
collections coupled with public libraries has given unprecedented access to print
information; now, libraries face proposals to ditch circulating print collections in
favor of loaning out e-books.

And the stranglehold of major book publishers is nothing compared to the power of
e-book platform owners. In July 2013, a federal judge ruled that Apple had colluded
with several major publishers to fix the price of e-books. Amazon’s dominance in the
e-book market — a 90 percent share in 2010, still at 65 percent today — gives it the
power to strong-arm publishers into predatory pricing.

But this is about more than just books — virtually every modern information and
entertainment medium is facing the same pressures of shifting toward the cloud.

Previously, the owner of software like Adobe Creative Suite could use the program so
long as they possessed a computer meeting the system requirements on which the
software is installed. Now, however, Adobe CS has been phased out in favor of Adobe
Creative Cloud, turning users into renters of the software, paying a subscription fee
and periodically updating their operating system (OS) and hardware.

This doesn’t apply just for business software. Consider the 1998 real-time strategy

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game Starcraft. For over a decade after its release, it was enjoyed by gamers around
the world, and effectively became a national sport in South Korea. The sequel,
Starcraft II, is accessed primarily online through a relaunched platform called
Battle.net, requiring users to upgrade their OS and even their hardware to continue
accessing the game — even if they met the minimum system requirements when
they originally purchased it.

In this shift to the cloud, consumers of media are being transformed from effective
owners, still legally subject to licensing restrictions but in physical possession of
media, to renters, held captive by the whims of corporate rentiers backed by a
tightening intellectual property regime. As Peter Frase has argued, this emphasis on
intellectual property and rents has been and will remain a defining feature of
contemporary capitalism.

As societies transitioned from feudalism to capitalism, the relationship of many

peasants to the land was also altered from one of effective control to tenancy.
Previously, even though serfs had obligations to their lords, they also possessed
certain guarantees from them, such as food assistance in case of crop failure or
famine. And despite the overall ownership of lords, many serfs maintained effective
control over their own land and were free to farm as they wished once they had
delivered a certain amount of goods to their own liege lord.

But as modernity dawned in Europe, British peasants lost their use rights as common
lands were enclosed and made private under the Enclosure Acts. Such laws claimed
to be “in the public interest,” but in reality empowered landlords to become
industrial capitalists, using their lands for large-scale agricultural production or
selling them to railroads or other ventures. The dispossessed peasants were left to
work these lands as agricultural laborers. If peasants could not afford the increased
rents after enclosure — typically doubling — they would have to flee to the cities to
work as industrial proletarians.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Russian peasants, too, faced

encroachment on the authority of their self-governing communes (obshchina) from a
modernizing state and profit-seeking landlords. The serfs shifted from people into
commodities, whose “souls” could be cynically bought, sold, and mortgaged, as in
Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. In all cases, the control and influence the aristocratic
class exerted over the legal system enabled them to adapt to the changing economic
situation, while disoriented ordinary people were subjected to new forms of
exploitation. This does not appear to be different for the future of the cloud, as the
tech sector’s increasingly massive lobbying efforts influence Congress to strengthen

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intellectual property laws in their favor.

In time, cloud computing will likely improve access to data for the general public and
facilitate further technological progress. But, even ignoring general questions of data
security and availability of broadband access, all the cloud seems to promise in the
short run is spiraling costs for consumers who will need to update devices and pay
rental fees as profits increase for tech companies that will function more as rentiers
than innovators.

A sentiment some might consider “Luddite,” perhaps. But even mainstream

commentators like Paul Krugman are coming around to the idea that Luddites have
usually been ordinary people acting rationally to maintain their income and avoid
cost increases in consumption, rather than simple technophobes. These days, it
seems better to be a Luddite with an unrestricted physical media collection than a
sharecropper in the cloud, constantly beholden to tech companies for current
hardware and access to software, information, and entertainment.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Harry C. Merritt is a Ph.D. student in history at Brown University.

FILED UNDER

UNITED STATES

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY / TECH INDUSTRY

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http://www.technologyreview.com/review/425141/a-cloud-over-ownership/

Our possessions define us. Yet today the definition of

possession itself is shifting, thanks to cloud services
that store some things we hold dear on distant Internet
servers. When those belongings reside in Netflix’s
video service, Amazon’s Kindle bookstore, or Apple’s
coming iCloud service, they become impossible to
misplace, and easier to organize and access than
before. They also gain new powers over us, and slip
free of powers we once held over them—powers that
have shaped our thinking and behavior for centuries.
One consequence is to give the companies that
provide cloud services tremendous amounts of
unchecked control over these possessions. In some
cases, that control has already been abused.

Despite the supposed revolution wrought by digitization, mass computing has until now left the
fundamental nature of our possessions untouched. Collections of content have adorned the shelves
and walls of our homes, schools, and courts since the Enlightenment. Nearly all of us (who are old
enough) collected vinyl records in the 1970s, videotapes in the ’80s, CDs in the ’90s, and DVDs in the
’00s. Digitization simply morphed our urge to collect atoms into a thirst for curating bits, piled up on
home computers.

In this age of streaming, however, possessing a personal content collection is a logical inconsistency.
The 200 movies in my Netflix instant queue form an aspirational list, not a personal collection. Once I
actually watch a movie, it disappears from the queue—the reverse of what happens on my shelf of
DVDs. Personalizing a cloud-based collection of content is a pale imitation of what physical possession
can offer. Even were I to show dinner guests my Amazon Kindle account, they wouldn’t gain the insight
provided by a glance at a shelf in my dining room or the stack of books on my nightstand. There will
never be a well-worn copy of my favorite digital book.
http://www.technologyreview.com/review/425141/a-cloud-over-ownership/

Dissolving physical possessions into the cloud is certainly convenient. It may even make us less
covetous and more inclined to share. But this new form of property is also shaping up to have more
serious consequences than the loss of a few conversations. One is that those previously inanimate
possessions can now talk about you behind your back. Watch a movie on Netflix or Amazon, and the
company’s servers know who you are and what you watch, when you watch it, where you’re watching
from (more or less), and even when you fast-forward. U.S. law prohibits the release of movie titles that
a person has watched, but cloud providers can do pretty much whatever they want with the other data
they collect.

Today providers use this information to improve their service and make recommendations; tomorrow
your data could travel to third parties. Apple could combine its own data with commercial data banks to
tell Beyoncé the number of men aged 25 to 30 who are buying her tunes in New York City, for example;
the music you place in Google’s cloud storage and playback service could shape the advertising that
you see all over the Web.

The tattletale nature of things in the cloud comes from the fact that unlike practically every other object
on the planet, cloud-things remain unbreakably tethered to their producer. This tether means they bear
little similarity to property as we have conceived it for hundreds of years. Popular understanding of what
it means to own something—be it digital file or physical object—has up to now been well aligned with
the law’s. When you buy a book you don’t get rights to the text, but you can read it, lend it to a friend,
and then sell it to a secondhand shop, which can advertise it and sell it once more. But this tacit
understanding of ownership is useless in the cloud.

Consider what happened in July 2009, when Amazon discovered it had accidently sold improperly
licensed e-books of George Orwell’s 1984 and electronically obliterated them from every Kindle in
existence. Winston Smith would have felt right at home, but the laws of physics, physical property, and
copyright would have made such a maneuver triply impossible with a conventional book. Amazon could
never have sent guards to conduct house-to-house searches.

In the cloud we are ruled by contract law and whatever constraints our provider builds into the long
legal screeds we must agree to in order to use their services. Some aspects of these contracts are
necessary for a company to operate. But they also provide an opportunity to place complex conditions
on our possessions. Yes, you may lend Amazon e-books, but only for 14 days at a time. You may delete
your e-books, but you can’t give them to a friend when you are done reading them. Publisher
HarperCollins has decided that libraries may lend out e-books only 26 times before they must purchase
a new copy. Other publishers prohibit lending entirely. Amazon’s Orwellian vanishing trick demonstrates
that cloud providers have considerable power to enforce such rules. The nuclear option is the simplest
restriction of all: terminating your account.

Back when you owned your own collection, you didn’t risk losing it because you had a billing dispute
with the Book-of-the-Month Club, nor could a library fine threaten your family photos. Such scenarios
are becoming possible as cloud services become more consolidated. Apple’s iCloud will look after e-
mail, books, music, photos you take, and documents you create; Google’s cloud services span the
same range and now also include a Facebook-like social network, Google+. A fight with a cloud
provider that controls so many of your digital possessions is a daunting prospect.

Threats to a carefree cloud come from outside, too. A hacker might steal or delete all your files, perhaps
with the help of a screw-up like one that for a short time allowed users to log in to Dropbox cloud
storage accounts with incorrect passwords.
http://www.technologyreview.com/review/425141/a-cloud-over-ownership/

When the bits and atoms that make up your possessions are safely inside your house, the security
measures that matter are the locks on your doors and windows, and your own competence. When that
property is online, a laptop anywhere in the world can steal your stuff.

Despite such dangers, the cloud cannot and should not be stopped. We have much to gain from the
freedom it offers. We want to be able to access “our” content or creations from anywhere—even if the
possessions we access that way are not really ours after all. We want the peace of mind that comes
from knowing that if our house burns down or is robbed, many of the real things that matter won’t be
lost.

Yet not all the limits physical reality places on possessions are unfortunate. Many are pro-consumer
and pro-freedom. Alas, those have been conveniently left behind by the largely unregulated market in
which cloud providers operate. If we want the best of both cloud and physical possessions, we must
find some way to rebalance the scales and reassert our rights.

Laws that force cloud providers to be humane landlords to those renting space on their servers, much
as most U.S. states regulate landlords of physical space, would be a good place to start. Physical
landlords can’t have a tenant’s possessions trucked off to the dump without due process; even those
who withhold rent are given a chance to fight eviction in court. Cloud providers should similarly be
prohibited from deleting your data at will, and there should be a legally mandated process for moving
digital possessions to another cloud—or copying it to your home computer. Likewise, we need laws that
force cloud providers to respect the privacy of their customers.

The industry currently has no incentive to allow us to negotiate our terms of service. When the laws of
physics can no longer protect consumers and citizens as they have in the age of physical property, it is
the obligation of society to intervene with the laws of man.

Simson L. Garfinkel is an author and researcher in Arlington, Virginia, who focuses on such topics as
computer forensics and privacy.