Error Acknowledgement.
I’ve found — to my embarrassment — that my slam down of David Bollier contained an error of fact. When I took Bollier to task for saying that public domain items (such as works on which intellectual property protections have lapsed) were not owned by anyone (Bollier, in contrast, bizarrely asserted that they are subject to “legal and moral ownership by the American people”), I included the Linux operating system on my list. Oops. Wrong. I cannot say that I do understand how open source code works (ok, I can say that I don’t), and I should not have included Linux in my list. My criticism of Bollier is not weakened one whit, however, for my point was that Bollier hasn’t a clue what “ownership” means, since it is meaningless to say that “the American people” own the legend of Robin Hood or the novels of Jane Austen merely because there are no intellectual property rights to them. The central core of ownership is the right to exclude, which Bollier and other enemies of property consistently fail to grasp. (And, although Linux is not a matter of public domain, it also is certainly not subject to “legal and moral ownership by the American people.”) Although my point still stands, making an error of fact in a strongly worded critique of someone else’s utterly confused essay is embarrassing, nonetheless.