Copying a file costs almost nothing. Producing it, explaining it, finding it and keeping it available all cost money and work. An honest account of digital knowledge would begin with that distinction. Instead, we have spent three decades pretending that each copy leaves a gap on a warehouse shelf.
That is not an innocent conceptual mistake. Paywalls, expiring licences, books a library cannot preserve and programs disabled when a vendor turns off a server all depend on it. Networks made sharing at unprecedented scale technically ordinary. Property responded by learning to install a meter at every door.
Copy
If I lend somebody a printed book, I no longer have it for a while. If I send a digital copy, we both do. That difference does not erase the labour of writing, researching, editing or programming. Knowledge does not appear spontaneously, and servers do not run on goodwill. It removes a different cost: the need to manufacture another physical item for every reader.
The promise was practical. A textbook could reach any connected classroom. Publicly funded research could be read by a doctor in a small hospital, a student outside a wealthy university or a laboratory on another continent. A program could be inspected, repaired and adapted without an audience with its owner.
Much of that promise exists underneath a different economy. The internet rests on free software, open protocols and knowledge published for reuse. Linux, PostgreSQL, Apache and thousands of libraries support services later sold as private gardens. The commons does the heavy lifting; the platform installs the turnstile.
Free software never guaranteed equality or an absence of power. A critical project may rely on exhausted maintainers while giant companies extract value and contribute too little. It nevertheless created one decisive political difference: the vendor does not possess an automatic, exclusive right to understand and alter the tool. Waiting, paying or walking away are no longer the only imaginable responses.
Toll
Academic publishing pushes the contradiction towards farce. Universities and public bodies fund research. Academics write papers and review their colleagues’ work without payment from the journal. A publisher assembles the result, closes the gate and sells access back to the institutions that supplied the money and labour.
Editing, coordination and preservation have costs. The scandal lies in confusing those costs with a right to collect rent from a chain largely built by other people. When a library cannot renew a subscription, no less science has been produced. Only the set of people allowed to read it has changed.
Repositories such as arXiv and bioRxiv show that open circulation does not destroy scientific communication. Diamond open access promoted by UNESCO charges neither readers nor authors. Other publishers found a splendid answer for themselves: replace the reader’s toll with thousands charged to the author. The paper is open; the ability to publish is distributed according to budget. Lovely.
The enclosure reaches beyond journals. Copyright began as a temporary monopoly and expanded across generations under pressure from companies holding valuable catalogues. Culture has always fed on existing culture: Shakespeare borrowed plots, Disney borrowed from the public domain, and hip-hop made new work by cutting recorded fragments together. Every term extension leaves the next generation less common material it can use without consulting a lawyer.
Large rights holders can negotiate, litigate and keep a work dormant for decades. A teacher, local archive or independent creator meets ownership that may be impossible to trace and legal risk they cannot afford. The law calls them equal participants, then supplies each with power roughly proportional to their bank balance.
Custody
Owning digital culture increasingly means not owning a copy. A library buys access under conditions subject to change. A film vanishes from a catalogue. A purchased game needs to authenticate against a server that no longer exists. A manufacturer closes a device’s cloud service and working hardware becomes waste.
Preservation now means more than caring for media and migrating formats. It means struggling with encryption, contracts and systems built to prevent copying. Orphan works are the purest absurdity: nobody can find the party authorised to permit access, nobody is commercially exploiting the work, and the archive still cannot safely open it.
The Internet Archive works in that gap. It preserves pages, software, audio, video and books because markets have no reason to retain everything they stop selling. In 2024, major publishers upheld a judgment against its controlled digital lending programme, and the Archive accepted a permanent injunction. The dispute contained real questions of law. It also exposed a political fact: a library has less autonomy when a book becomes a licence.
Wikipedia provides a useful contrast. It is not valuable by magic because it is open. It is valuable because it has sources, revision history, discussion, procedures and a community capable of correction. Its licence also allows the material to survive the organisation currently hosting it. The ability to copy, fork and rebuild is institutional security. A commons does not rely on one owner remaining kind, solvent or alive.
Commons
Opening access does not require refusing to pay creators. It requires separating remuneration from the power to block every later use. Libraries, public funding, salaries, commissions, grants, cooperatives and sectoral funds already pay for work without demanding a fee for every future copy. The real debate is which combination sustains production while widening access. “Monopoly or nothing” is an argument made by people who already own the monopoly.
A digital commons needs servers, preservation, documentation, moderation and maintainers with paid time. A public administration that uses free software without funding maintenance has not achieved sovereignty. It has shifted its costs onto volunteers. A funder that requires open access but will not cover publication has left the publisher to charge at another door. A commons is not free of cost. It is a decision about ownership, governance and who bears that cost.
It also requires the practical right to repair and migrate. Open formats in government, auditable code in critical infrastructure, public repositories for publicly funded research and a legal right to preserve are not cultural decoration. They reduce dependency. They let another institution continue the work when a supplier changes its terms or disappears.
Material scarcity remains: time, equipment, energy, care and specialist knowledge are all limited. That makes it particularly stupid to spend some of those resources manufacturing additional scarcity where copying is already cheap. We lock away papers needed for research, prevent the repair of tools already paid for and allow works to decay because nobody can locate the owner of a right.
The network did not abolish property. It made the political work required to maintain property against technical abundance easier to see. Every paywall, DRM system and revocable licence answers one question: now that sharing is easy, how do we retain the toll? A commons begins with another: what still deserves a toll, and who profits from keeping it there?