David Bollier

It's a pleasure to see Professor Leo Burke is getting some attention for his pioneering work in teaching the commons at..... a business school. In a wonderful profile, Notre Dame Magazine describes Burke's adventures in developing a commons curriculum for students and business executives at the Mendoza College of Business at Notre Dame University. The courses are arguably the first and only such pedagogy about the commons in the world of business. The profile, “A World That Works for Everyone,” was written by Jay Walljasper, my former colleague at On the Commons.

Full disclosure – Leo's a friend. He and I worked together last year in developing an online course, “Introduction to the Global Commons,” which is expected to be available soon on the United Nations Institute for Training and Research website.  When I met up with Leo, he had already launched the Global Commons Initiative at Mendoza College of Business, and was teaching both executive MBA and undergraduate courses in the commons. Leo has also assembled a commons curriculum for the School of Commoning in London.

Why should a business school teach the commons?  Carolyn Woo, until recently the Dean of the Notre Dame business school, told Walljasper:

Unbeknownst to millions of people recovering from their celebrations the night before, New Year's Day is a mini-celebration nested within a more famous holiday. Who among us realized that it was.... “Public Domain Day.” This is the date on which copyrights are supposed to expire on millions of works from a previous generation. It's the date on which the proprietary controls lapse and creative works become born again as public domain artifacts that can be freely used by anyone, for any purpose.

Alas, nothing entered the public domain this year. In fact, nothing will enter the public domain until January 1, 2019, thanks to the twenty-year extension of copyright law that Congress enacted in 1998 at the behest of Disney Co. and other media giants. This may explain why Public Domain Day remains so obscure! Nonetheless, the redoubtable host of Public Domain Day – the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School – annually commemorates this date to educate the public about the theft of works that rightly belong to them.

For this year's “celebration,” we learn how the public domain has been impoverished through excessive copyright terms. Last week the Center provided a wonderful survey of the cultural heritage that remains locked up. “What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2012?” it asks. The answers include the films The Body Snatchers, Rebel Without a Cause, Lady and the Tramp.  Then there are all the books from that 1950s that you could copy and share for free: Vladimir Nabokov's Lollita; Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can't Read; J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King, the last book of his Lord of Rings trilogy; and Edward Steichen’s famous book of photographs, The Family of Man; among many others.

If you listen closely (turn off that iPhone and stop checking your email!), you can hear a quiet rebellion against the too-muchness of daily life. I'm talking about the over-stimulation of electronic media and the exhaustion that comes from being always connected. This topic has been getting more attention lately, which suggests that perhaps we have hit a saturation point. People want to learn how to unplug – and re-gain some measure of their humanity.

I first became aware of this trend in 2009, when Professor David Levy of the University of Washington came to speak at Amherst College. (See my blog post here. ) Levy is a rare, committed voice of centeredness in the digital cacophony of our time.  An active meditator, he has spent years thinking about how media technologies are contributing to our society-wide attention-deficit disorder.

He points out that we have precious little uncluttered time nowadays. We live in a world overrun with email, Twitter and Facebook messages, always-on smart phones, pagers, text-messaging, and countless other media inputs. Silence and contemplation have disappeared amidst an overwhelming barrage of electronic inputs, both voluntary and force-fed. This has resulted in greater distraction and stress in everyday life, and a diminished capacity for creativity and thoughtfulness.

Richard Grossman was one of those activist eccentrics who took democratic power so seriously that he knowingly marginalized himself.  Mainstream political culture regarded his positions as crazy or tactically unwise -- but eventually the world began to catch up with him. 

The lack of constitutional authority for corporate power was Grossman's abiding passion. He began to dig into that issue by co-founding in the 1990s the activist research group POCLAD, the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy. The group describes itself as “a group of 11 people instigating democratic conversations and actions that contest the authority of corporations to govern. Our analysis evolves through historical and legal research, writing, public speaking, and working with organizations to develop new strategies that assert people's rights over property interests.”

One of POCLAD's primary concerns has been “corporate personhood,” a topic that was long treated as a fringe activist concern. Corporate personhood had its roots in an 1819 U.S. Supreme Court case, Dartmouth College v. Woodward, which declared that corporations are creatures of private contract law, not public law. It was later given a boost with a controversial headnote in an 1886 case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case, which declared that corporations are “persons” in the constitutional sense, thus preventing government from regulating their rates.