Even the most ardent free marketer would not go so far as to say that Bill Gates or T. Boone Pickens has the right to own the oxygen we breathe or the words we use. Although some forms of water privatization and genetic patenting have become issues, popular opinion still demands the fundamentals of life should be shielded somewhat from the realm of buying and selling. (That’s why prostitution and the selling of organs for transplant are illegal most places.)

With one notable exception: food. As essential to our lives as air or water, food nonetheless has been widely accepted as a private commodity. It is grown, processed, packaged and sold for a profit, usually by large corporations. Few look upon it as a commons, of which everyone rightly deserves a share.

But for more than 35 years, one woman has courageously carried the message that food is more than simply another consumer product.

She is Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet and founder of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, who overturned the conventional wisdom that hunger and starvation are caused by a shortage of food. She has patiently but forcefully made the case that people go hungry because of inequality and greed in the distribution of food.

Lappé’s influence has been immense—in promoting vegetarian and whole grains diets, in broadening the scope of democracy, in opening up thinking about international food production and marketing systems. Yet she’s not convinced everyone.

A lot of news coverage on the recent food shortages around the world did not discuss agriculture, trade and social policies that keeps food out of the hands of people, but rather blamed the crisis on “not enough food to feed empty stomachs.”

That phrase came from a reporter for National Public Radio, who in a 4-part series championed pesticides, artificial fertilizer and genetically-modified seeds as the solution to food shortages and the impoverishment of small farmers around the world.

“NPR misses the real story,” Lappé writes in a blog on the Huffington Post. “On every continent one can find empowered rural communities developing GM-free, agro-ecological farming systems. They’re succeeding. The largest overview study, looking at farmers transitioning to sustainable practices in 57 countries, involving almost 13 million small farmers on almost 100 million acres, found after four years that average yields were up 79 percent.

“All over the world,” she continues, “poor farming communities are discovering their own power to work with each other and with nature to build healthier, more secure, and more democratic lives.”

Although Lappé doesn’t use the c-word, that sounds like a good working definition for an international food commons.

For more information see the Small Planet Institute

So it is refreshing to encounter an artist who is courageously and opening using fair use to build an unusual career. D.J. Girl Talk (aka Gregg Gillis, who only recently quite his day job as a biomedical engineer) has become a hot performer by sampling dozens of music snippets and blending them into his distinctive sound collages. He doesn’t ask permission; he doesn’t make any payments. Girl Talk just takes whatever samples he finds interesting — more than 300 on his latest album, “Feed the Animals” – and claims protection under the fair use doctrine.

Girl Talk, photo by Ezalis, licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC license.

At one time, bands like the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy freely sampled other artists and became sensations. In fact, sampling was a key element enabling hip-hop to be invented in the first place. But then the record labels and attorneys got into the act, each trying to claim broad protections for “its” musical property.

The big blow came in 2004 when George Clinton’s group, Funkadelic, won a lawsuit against the rap group N.W.A. for using a nearly inaudible sample of a three-note, two-second clip from “Get Off Your Ass and Jam” – the notorious Bridgeport v. Dimension Films case. Now – fair use be damned – it is generally illegal to sample any identifiable sound snippet without first obtaining permission and making a payment to the artist’s record label and/or publisher.

This sweeping legal standard has had a profoundly negative effect on creativity, say culture scholars like Siva Vaidhyanathan, Donna Demers and Kembrew McLeod. Excessive copyright protection has made hip-hop and other musical genres less innovative and robust. The sample-heavy recordings that made the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy so popular are all but impossible today.

Which is why Girl Talk deserves kudos for defiantly claiming fair use as his artistic right. Far from just “ripping off” the sounds, Girl Talk spends months working out ideas during his live performances, and an estimated day of work for every minute of his sound collages. His sampling and sound collages may use other people’s works, but the new songs are truly “creative transformations” within the scope of fair use jurisprudence.

Just because a sound is identifiable as someone else’s does not mean that there is no new creativity going on. In any case, how can future musicians create if they are constantly fearful of stepping on someone else’s guitar riff or melody? Not so long ago, Beatle George Harrison actually lost a lawsuit because his song “My Sweet Lord” was judged to be a ripoff of “He’s So Fine.” The spectacle of some culturally clueless judge making these determinations is at once scary and hilarious. In a recent profile of Girl Talk, The New York Times gave this evaluation of his music: “At times [Girl Talk’s] album sounds like a cleverly programmed K-tel compilation that presents catchy riffs instead of full songs, and part of the fun is recognizing familiar sounds in a new context.”

Could Girl Talk’s brave invocation of fair use signal a turn of the tide for that beleaguered legal doctrine? Perhaps. Not only is fair use being thrown back at copyright industries with increasing frequency and success – evidenced by cases brought by fair use legal clinics at Stanford Law School and American University – Girl Talk actually has the public support of his Pennsylvania congressman, Mike Doyle. Also amazing is the fact that Girl Talk has not yet been sued. Apparently the record labels are fearful of the bad publicity that any litigation would bring as well as a potentially adverse judgment that could set a lasting precedent.

It’s been a long time coming — years of civil disobedience by artists; a number of lawsuits upholding fair use; the publication of new “best practices” norms for fair use in certain creative sectors; the growing use of Creative Commons licenses as a workaround – but if only as a cultural matter, I think fair use may be regaining its mojo.

People’s economic well-being can be held hostage by oil companies, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, HMOs, and other powerful multinational corporations, yet in political debates independence generally mean just one thing: the absence of government regulation, or any kind of joint citizen effort.

CC license By Marion Doss from Flickr Thomas Jefferson. Copy of painting by Rembrandt Peale, circa 1805. Still Picture Records LICON, Special Media Archives Services Division (NWCS-S), National Archives at College Park, 8601 Adelphi Road, College Park, MD 20740-6001

I was reminded of this by a headline in the New York Times citing the “independent streak” of Houston residents for the city’s miserably low recycling rate: 2.6 percent, worst in the country, four times less than some others at the bottom of the list like Dallas and Detroit.

“We have an independent streak that rebels against mandates or anything that seems trendy or hyped up,” declared Mayor Bill White, a Democrat who favors expanded recycling in the city. (Actually there’s no law in Houston or anywhere else in the U.S. forcing people to recycle—although San Francisco, ranked at top with 68 percent recycling, is considering one.)

This is surely not what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he penned the word “independence” in his immortal Declaration. Jefferson embodied a true “independent streak”, working collectively with other American dissidents to “rebel” against the tyranny of the British crown.

Jefferson and his compatriots would be amused (or more likely dismayed) to see that what passes for independence today is a peevish resistance against “trendy and hyped up” chores that might result in a tiny bit more work on trash day. Independence for them did not mean a privatized, selfish focus on individual convenience over the common good.

Although influenced by John Locke and other British philosophers stressing the pursuit of property and the rights of individuals, they still understood the commons as part of the social dynamic that allowed societies to progress.

From communal cattle grazing on the Boston Common (which continued until 1830) to the community cooperation that allowed white settlers to survive on the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia, the commons was central to American life at that time. And for anyone paying attention, the commons-based culture of Eastern Indian tribes, whose Iroquois Confederation influenced the U.S. Constitution, provided another example of the power of the collective cooperation.

No one of that era, including capitalism’s fervent champion Adam Smith, could conceive of a world where the market drove all economic, political and moral decisionmaking. Social bonds created outside the marketplace by people working together to solve common problems is what kept communities together then (and now). To refuse to join a cooperative effort to make the local environment healthier would not be seen as “independent,” but rather as foolish and lazy.

The same is true today.

Detail from a “String Web” woven sculpture by Machiko Agano. Located in Fabrica art gallery, Brighton, England. CC License By Dominic from Flickr

The City of Sapporo, a city of two million people in northern Japan, was proud as punch to cosponsor the event. City officials threw open the doors of their beautiful convention center and hosted an evening reception at the nearby ski jump for the 1972 Olympics, complete with a performance by some fierce Ainu drummers and an exhibition of skiers who gracefully flew 140 meters onto the Astroturf-carpeted slope.

On the bus ride to an evening reception at the ski jump, I met Lucifer Chu, a mischievous, public-spirited Taiwanese man who has gained some renown for translating J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings into Chinese. As the Taipei Times tells it, , Chu struck a fantastically good deal with a publisher who was skeptical the book would sell. When the Peter Jackson trilogy of films was released, Chu ended up making a small fortune.

Lucifer Chu, photo by Charles Mok, via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.

Chu started two foundations. The first, The Fantasy Foundation, promotes fantasy literature and graphic design throughout the Chinese-speaking world. A second, the Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System – or “OOPS” — coordinates some 700 volunteer translators throughout Asia to translate MIT’s OpenCourseWare website into Chinese. OpenCourseWare makes MIT’s many curricular materials available to anyone for free. By making those materials available to Chinese-speaking world, Chu’s project has helped dramatically change how China teaches physics and many other subjects.

At the conference, I also caught up with David Harris, who is producing the Global Lives Project. The project is about recording and displaying 24 hours in the lives of ten people who will represent the diversity of daily life on earth. The ten lives will be featured in a video installation and also on a website that has an even larger video library of human life experience. A portable exhibition space that immerses viewers in the daily lives of the subjects will tour venues around the world starting in 2009.

Later in the afternoon, I listened to Wojciech Gryc, an international development student who works with a group called the Article 13 Initiative. The project takes computers, Linux and open-publishing software tools to villages in Kenya and Chad to teach them young people how to publish their own community magazines. The project’s tagline is “Open access. Open source. Open media.”

The best-dressed lexicographer you will ever meet is Erin McKean, who lives in Chicago and is a big fan of dictionaries. She blogs at dictionaryevangelist.com. McKean gave an amusing talk about what life would be like if language were not treated as a commons, citing how it would be impossible to curse because religious groups would have bought up all the expletives and retired them, and some big companies would buy up ownership of key letters.

Erin McKean, photo by Neil Hunt, licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC license.

On a later panel, McKean described the unusual wiki that she launched to help women find and make vintage sewing patterns. The site has become a mecca for women in search of dress patterns from the 1920s to 1970s that are no longer commercially available. What I enjoyed about the story is how the commoners are actually helping out corporate pattern makers like Simplicity, Butterick and Vogue — and other fashion fans — because the companies haven’t even maintained archives of their own patterns.

I also learned about Qwartz.org,, an electronic music awards program for indie artists. Qwartz invites Internet users to select the winners, who are then feted at an annual ceremony in Paris that attracts more than 2,000 people from 40 countries. Result: Qwartz is helping bring the best new international indie music to greater prominence.

As this brief and extremely partial review suggests, iCommons was a dizzy kaleidoscope of venturesome people dedicated to sharing information and culture. In my next post, I will discuss some specific themes at iSummit that captivated me.

Photo on homepage, “Ainu Drummers,” by Rampant Gian, via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.