A commons is a resource to which everyone has an equal right to get access. With physical commons a certain phenomenon can take place which is called the tragedy of the commons. Like with the environment: if everyone freely uses the natural resources of the earth and acts out of his or her own self-interest, depletion will be the result and we have a tragedy of the commons. However, with immaterial goods that are not scarce but abundant, like information, experience, ideas and the like, this tragedy will not take place. Michel Bauwens in this context referred to what Lawrence Lessig and others have called the comedy of the commons.

Whether a tragedy or a comedy will happen depends on the nature of the good. If a good is what is called ‘rivalrous,’ in other words if my consumption of the good is at the expense of your consumption of the same good, a tragedy of the commons may happen. If the good is non-rivalrous, meaning that my consumption and your consumption go happily together and neither one of us consumes at the expense of the other, better yet: if consumption of one of us causes there to be even more to consume for others, we have a comedy of commons.

A language that only you speak is useless. The language grows in value the more people know how to understand it and communicate with it. The same thing applies to all sorts of communication devices. Being the only one owning a faxmachine, an email-address, an application for sharing music or for sending text messages is useless, you need other people whom you can send faxes, email and text massages to and whom you can share your music with. The more the better. This is what the comedy of the commons refers to.

The protectionary measures for preventing a tragedy of the commons are intended to give people an incentive to produce them. But then we are thinking of just the exchange value. We give people money and certain rights and in exchange they produce these goods. But often in networks, it is not the exchange value perse that is sought for, it is the use value, personal value, social value, cultural value, etc. For many people it is fun to participate in a network and they learn from their participation, shouldn’t this count as value too? Alan Moore refers to Pro-Ams, or professional amateurs, who act out their hobbies on a professional level in communities. People produce value together, not directly for the market, the allocation of resources is not determined by marketprice as Michel Bauwens explained, but production is based on use value. When other benefits than profit are the goal, something happens. For-profits innovate for profit, so when there’s no competition there is no need to innovate for them, because there is no extra money to be made. For-benefits innovate for the sake of innovation so they will continue anyway.

René Jansen told about the fact that the laws for the protection of privacy and personal data are not suited for his situation, in which people come to his websites wanting to tell the world about themselves. How do you deal with this? If laws are made under the assumption that resources are per definition scarce and people want to protect them out of selfinterest, what kind of laws do we need when we are dealing with abundance, with economies of plenty, with people who don’t create for money but for fun, with people who want to share? How can we deal with a comedy of the commons in which we have to understand the value of other values besides exchange value?

Some books that Michel Bauwens recommended on this subject are:

Capitalism 3.0 (Barnes) (also downloadable as PDF here)

Wealth of networks (Benkler) (also downloadable as PDF here)

Success of Open Source (Weber)