It's true that Marx defined commodities not as things but as social relations, but it was Karl Polyani who depicted most graphically these precise social changes that occurred in the British countryside during the time of enclosures, famous calling this period "The Great Transformation."

Well, with the rhetoric of the "new enclosures" sweeping social and legal theory today, it is crucial to understand the concurrent and indeed constitutive social transformations that define these enclosures of the "intangible commons of the mind" (see James Boyle's "The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain"). Intellectual property threatens the information commons, according to theorists and activists alike, but what is the relationship of these information commons to our changing social relations, or to political governance more generally?

Anthony McMann's work exposes how the term "information commons" has become "a banner of action for a concerted lobby group of public policy activists and legal scholars from all over the United States, centred primarily in and around the civic communities of Washington D.C." He examines this phenomenon - the cooptation of the "information commons" - by unpacking the way "commons" is used only to signify economic relations and not the social relations of commodification that underlie so many "alternatives" to private property regimes.

This article is important, for it calls into question the relatively undifferentiated calls for a renewed "commons" that have widely divergent implications for how we conceive of alternatives to the privatization of knowledge.