[danlitt]

I think the sheer magnitude of the economics have made the scales fall from a lot of people's eyes. For decades people put stuff on the internet for free on the assumption it was "not worth" anything. It turns out that as soon as that commons can be enclosed, we can marshal hundreds of dollars for every single living human, to pay for this commons to be repackaged. The money is there, and we're happy to spend it, we just won't spend it on you.

[brookst]

So basically the “information is free, encyclopedias are expensive” phenomenon from the pre-internet days? Collection, collation, and distribution have more and different qualitative value than the sum of the individual bits.

[protocolture]

It remains to be seen whether the commons can be enclosed here.