Sorry, I missed that this thread started on the topic of ebooks. To be honest, I don’t fully understand the connection you are making to the tragedy of the commons when it comes to DRM. I think I understand what you mean, if you are arguing on top of DRM, but DRM is itself already a tool of enclosure. So the problem is not really consumer choice, but rather that DRM is allowed in its current form. But I admit that this is a different discussion, I guess in the end we are talking about the same and I agree with you. I think the self organizing part here would be for authors to publish independently, and for people to support independent publishing. But as you implied, that market is already captured to a point where people don’t even know about independent publishers/markets. I wouldn’t look at that as a tragedy of the commons, where people “selfishly” choose DRM and degrade the underlying resource, rather they are simply consumers of an almost fully enclosed resource.

Glad you find it interesting enough to start reading. The book doesn’t necessarily “propose self organizing”, although that may be a conclusion one can draw. Rather it showcases different case studies where common pool resources have degraded, and others where they have flourished, and tries to compare the different situations through a few parameters. What I took from it is, that it is pretty safe to say that neither privatization, nor central planning are good “solutions” when it comes to common pool resources, also that it seems important to have some form of rule monitoring and enforcement where actors directly affected by rule-breaking are part of the monitoring. But I should probably read through my highlights again some time, to freshen up my memory :)

Really appreciated your insight.