57. "Governor Thomas was so pleased with the construction of this stove . . . that he offered to give me a patent for the sole vending of them for a term of years; but I declined it from a principle which has ever weighed with me on such occasions, viz.: That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously." Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, in The Works of Benjamin Franklin, ed. John Bigelow, vol. 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904), 237-238.
58. Kenneth Arrow, "Economic Welfare and the Allocation of Resources for Invention," in National Bureau of Economic Research, The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962), 609-626.
59. Sanford J. Grossman and Joseph E. Stiglitz, "On the Impossibility of Informationally Efficient Markets," American Economic Review 70 (1980), 393-408; Boyle, Shamans, 35-42.
Notes: Chapter 3
1. Apart from being anonymous, this poem is extremely hard to date. It probably originates in the enclosure controversies of the eighteenth century. However, the earliest reference to it that I have been able to discover is from 1821. Edward Birch was moved to compose some (fairly poor) verses in response when he reported "seeing the following jeu d'esprit in a Handbill posted up in Plaistow, as a 'CAUTION' to prevent persons from supporting the intended inclosure of Hainault or Waltham Forest." He then quotes a version of the poem. Edward Birch, Tickler Magazine 3 (February 1821), 45. In 1860, "Exon," a staff writer for the journal Notes and Queries, declares that "the animosity excited against the Inclosure Acts and their authors . . . was almost without precedent: though fifty years and more have passed, the subject is still a sore one in many parishes. . . . I remember some years ago, in hunting over an old library discovering a box full of printed squibs, satires and ballads of the time against the acts and those who were supposed to favor them,—the library having belonged to a gentleman who played an active part on the opposition side." "Exon," "Ballads Against Inclosures," Notes and Queries 9, 2nd series (February 1860): 130-131. He reports finding the poem in that box, and quotes a verse from it. The context of the article makes it appear that the poem itself must date from the late eighteenth century. In other sources, the poem is sometimes dated at 1764, and said to be in response to Sir Charles Pratt's fencing of common land. See, e.g., Dana A. Freiburger, "John Thompson, English Philomath—A Question of Land Surveying and Astronomy," n. 15, available at http://www.nd.edu/~histast4/exhibits/papers/Freiburger/. This attribution is widespread and may well be true, but I have been able to discover no contemporary source material that sustains it. By the end of the nineteenth century, the poem was being quoted, sometimes with amusement and sometimes with agreement, on both sides of the Atlantic. See Ezra S. Carr, "Aids and Obstacles to Agriculture on the Pacific-Coast," in The Patrons of Husbandry on the Pacific Coast (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft and Co., 1875), 290-291; Edward P. Cheyney, An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England (New York: Macmillan, 1901), 219.
2. Although we refer to it as the enclosure movement, it was actually a series of enclosures that started in the fifteenth century and went on, with differing means, ends, and varieties of state involvement, until the nineteenth. See, e.g., J. A. Yelling, Common Field and Enclosure in England, 1450-1850 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977).
3. Thomas More, Utopia (New York: W. J. Black, 1947), 32.
4. Karl Polanyi, Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 35. Polanyi continues in the same vein. "The fabric of society was being disrupted. Desolate villages and the ruins of human dwellings testified to the fierceness with which the revolution raged, endangering the defenses of the country, wasting its towns, decimating its population, turning its overburdened soil into dust, harassing its people and turning them from decent husbandmen into a mob of beggars and thieves." Ibid. See also E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: V. Gollancz, 1963), 218.
5. See generally Lord Ernle, English Farming Past and Present, 6th ed. (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961).
6. For an excellent summary of the views of Hobbes, Locke, and
Blackstone on these points, see Hannibal Travis, "Pirates of the
Information Infrastructure: Blackstonian Copyright and the First
Amendment," Berkeley Technology Law Journal 15 (2000): 789-803.