they agreed that at any research center any place
in the world got to a certain level of description
of a new piece of genetic information, they would
post it on the World Wide Web within 24 hours.
And there are computers internationally which consolidate all this data.
So every morning, all over the world, all these
scientists are working from the same set of information.
And this is not about the law at all.
It's just about people saying, look, this is, we need a commons of
our ideas if we're going to proceed with this kind of complicated research.
So thinking about norms and thinking about the law, the
final thing I would say is that one thing about the
traditional embodied commons of Europe, such as woods, and fields,
and streams, and so forth, was that there was a custom
called beating the bounds.
And this meant that every year in
your village, people would get together in springtime,
and they would have cakes and beer and the, you know, party favors and stuff.
>> Yeah.
>> And, and they would walk around the village with axes and mattocks and stuff.
And if they found any place where people
had encroached upon the commons, they'd tear it down.
They would beat the bounds to make sure the commons was maintained.
>> Yes.
>> So I would, I think we should think about
also beating the bounds.
I mean, to give a modern example of this it is the case that the
entertainment industry, which has its own sense of
how it should operate and make money and
so forth often comes to colleges and
universities and says, we'd like you to police
your students and have them behave so that they conform to our model of the world.
And colleges and universities should
resist this, because in fact the college
and university sense of how knowledge circulates and
what its purpose is, is different from the the sense that they have in Hollywood.
It's not that one is right and one is wrong; they are really just distinct.
And so if the Hollywood people come and say, we'd
like to put a lot of software on your computer systems
so that we're monitoring your kids at all times, the college
should say, no, we have an edge between us and you,
and it's important to maintain that edge. So to save the commons,
there's law, there's customs and norms, but also, we should beat the bounds.
We should keep the edge.
>> Yeah.
Keep the edge, it's a great, it's a way, it's
a great way of, of bringing this conversation to a close.
I, I know here at Wesleyan I have a colleague in,
in astronomy who they too have this commons of, of data,
every morning, J, from JPL, or their other sources.
They get data from the Moon, the Mars rover, and other sp, space probes.
And all, everyone can work on this latest data.
And, of course, in the arts people want to be able to draw from a a, a,
common set of cultural reference points cultural
production and and practices.