That was the message sent via “text mob” that guided protesters forward at the Republican National Convention street march in 2004, relieving them of the panic that no doubt would have ensued when the plumes of smoke rising up ahead were observed. Text mobs also helped shut down San Francisco for 12 hours when the war in Iraq broke out in 2003 and the initiation of the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine was signaled by the sound of student cell phones ringing.

A few interesting items in the news this week that I wanted to connect together.

The first is the release of Aberdeen Group's Product Intellectual Property Benchmark Report . They report that almost 25 percent of businesses surveyed say the threat to their product IP has grown over the past two years. These manufacturers claim now to be actively pursuing improved IP protection in the face of lost sales, lost market share, and lower margins. The key to success, the Report finds, is the adoption of "IP friendly" approaches to collaboration. I'm not sure what these would be.

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?