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August 10, 2009
Since 1985 Thierry Urbain (France) has been working on a series on architecture, archaeology and landscapes, particularly the architecture of the Middle East and ancient Mesopotamia.
 An example is this image from the series Babylon: the Observatories. From what I can gather Urbain's work in this series of work is one in which he imagines, constructs and photographs an ancient observatory in Babylon. Unfortunately, there is little about Urbain on the internet.
What is notable about this work is that it is in the public domain, which is increasingly becoming enclosed by a variety of technologies utilized by corporations to limit fair use in the commons.
It's a fencing off of images through the strengthening of intellectual property rights with digital fences--digital barbed wire. The expansion of property rights is a new kind of property regime. The more property rights the better say the economists. They appear to be dead against the productive power of the commons.
The enclosure of the commons is needed to ensure, or fuel, progress.
A digital text or image, unlike a plot of land, can be used by countless people simultaneously without mutual interference or destruction of the shared resource.
In Fencing Off Ideas: Enclosure and the Disappearance of the Public Domain" James Boyle argues that the logic of enclosure works for the commons of the mind as
well as it did for the arable commons, taking into account the effects of an information society and a global Internet.
Enclosure means increases in the level of rights: protecting new subject matter for longer periods of time, criminalizing certain technologies, making it illegal to cut through digital fences even if they have the effect of foreclosing previously lawful uses.
He adds that we are rushing to fence in ever-larger stretches of the commons of the mind (texts, images) without convincing economic evidence that enclosure will help either productivity or innovation - and with very good reason to believe it may actually hurt them.
Despite this we are witnessing a scramble among the powerful corporations to grab valuable pieces of intellectual property.
Jon Marshall in Internet Politics in an Information Economy in Fibre Culture says:
In the information economy "creativity" becomes a magical term used to carve out property from social and collaborative (or mixed) processes so as to justify ownership. It is usually not the creator who owns but their employer, replicating the capitalist appropriation of labour generally.....Such an extension of copyright also clashes with creativity in general as "information products" are often based on fragments of other information products ....Any information product is embedded in some kind of history and system of other products and schemas.
An example of a countermovement---fostering the commons is Wikimedia Australia organising a Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums conference in Canberra (August 2009) and the Powerhouse Museum putting the Tyrrell Collection of glass plate negatives online at Flickr.
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