J'ACCUSE...! 2026

THE ENCLOSURE OF THE COMMONS

In conscious homage to Emile Zola's "J'Accuse...!" of 1898.

There are moments when legality and justice part company so completely that silence becomes participation.

This is such a moment.

For generations we have been taught to accept an extraordinary proposition: that ideas can be owned, discoveries enclosed, culture inherited as private property, and knowledge withheld from humanity by those possessing sufficient money and legal machinery to claim it.

We have been taught to call these enclosures "intellectual property."

The phrase does much of the work.

Call an idea property and exclusion begins to sound natural. Call a monopoly a right and opposition begins to sound like theft. Give the arrangement statutes, courts, offices and official seals, and we begin to confuse the existence of legal power with the existence of moral authority.

They are not the same thing.

A legislature may possess the power to grant a monopoly. A court may possess the power to uphold it. A government may possess the power to enforce it.

None of those facts establishes the moral right to do so.

That distinction is the heart of the matter.

Patents and copyrights are not facts of nature. They are arrangements created and enforced by governments. Whatever arguments once justified them must therefore remain open to examination against their actual consequences.

And their consequences are no longer difficult to see.

A patent can allow one actor to prevent another from independently using an idea, even when the second actor possesses the knowledge, skill and material needed to put it to work.

Copyright can prevent people born generations after a work was created from copying, adapting, preserving or distributing it.

Scientific knowledge produced with public money can pass through private hands and return to the public behind a paywall.

Creators themselves can spend their lives paying for access to the accumulated work of other creators while receiving little or nothing from the monopolies nominally maintained for their benefit.

And the greater the cost of asserting or defending these rights, the more thoroughly a supposed protection for creators becomes an instrument favouring those already possessing wealth and institutional power.

I know something of this personally.

But the personal grievance is not the argument.

The argument would remain if I had never written a line of software, devised an invention, held a copyright, or watched an institution claim an idea I had previously disclosed.

The system must be judged by what it does.

My duty, then, is to say what I believe follows from that judgment. I do not wish to become complicit merely because the arrangement is old, profitable, respectable or lawful.

There is another bargain available.

Instead of each of us defending a tiny fenced plot of human knowledge against everyone else, we can open the gates.

Put the patents into the commons.

Put the literature into the commons.

Put the research into the commons.

Put our accumulated culture, technical knowledge and creative inheritance into the commons.

In return, construct a society in which no one must obtain a monopoly over knowledge merely to eat, live indoors, receive medical care, learn, create or continue contributing.

Under such an arrangement, the creator does not surrender everything for nothing.

The creator exchanges a small private claim against humanity for access to the accumulated intellectual inheritance of humanity itself.

That is an astonishingly favourable trade for nearly all of us.

And it exposes the strange inversion upon which the present system depends.

We have been taught to regard exclusion as creation.

We have been taught to regard monopoly as ownership.

We have been taught to regard privilege as right.

And, having first enclosed the commons, we have been taught to regard its restoration as theft.

It is time to name the thing plainly.

I accuse the patent system of transforming human discovery into a purchasable power to forbid others from building, making and discovering.

I accuse the copyright system of transforming what was defended as a temporary incentive into an intergenerational restriction upon human culture.

I accuse the machinery of academic publishing when it encloses knowledge produced by publicly supported researchers and sells access back to the public that paid for its creation.

I accuse corporations and institutions that invoke the struggling author, artist and inventor as justification for arrangements whose greatest beneficiaries are so often intermediaries possessing capital, lawyers and accumulated portfolios of rights.

I accuse legislatures of repeatedly treating the ability to enact these monopolies as though the possession of that power answered the moral question of whether they should exist.

I accuse courts when they confuse a finding that government possesses a legal power with a finding that its exercise is just.

I accuse the larger political and economic order of teaching generations of human beings that the enclosure is natural, the monopoly is property, the privilege is right, and recovery of the commons is theft.

But I accuse no writer for wanting to live by writing.

I accuse no musician for wanting to live by music.

I accuse no researcher, engineer, programmer or inventor for wanting security and recognition for a life spent creating.

They are not the enemy.

A humane society should make it easier for people to create without fear of poverty, not force them to construct tollbooths around their creations in the hope that some fraction of the toll eventually reaches them.

Nor is this an argument for taking knowledge from its creators and handing it to another privileged class.

It is the opposite.

It is an argument that what becomes part of the common human inheritance should belong to the common human inheritance.

The question before us is therefore larger than patent law or copyright law.

It is whether the machinery of law exists to serve human beings, or whether human beings exist to preserve machinery simply because previous generations built it.

The answer cannot be supplied by authority alone.

Might can determine what happens today.

It cannot determine what is right.

And no institution, however ancient, wealthy or powerful, can permanently survive the discovery by enough people that its authority rests upon a bargain they no longer accept.

Truth has a peculiar property.

It does not require permission.

Once seen clearly, it is very difficult to make unseen.

The commons is ours.

Not mine.

Not yours.

Ours.

And the great deception of the present order has been to persuade us that taking it from one another is ownership, while giving it back to everyone would be theft.

I accuse.

NOTE ON THE TITLE

This essay deliberately takes its title and some of its rhetorical structure from Emile Zola's "J'Accuse...!" of 1898. Zola's original is worth reading alongside it.