The phrase has been a popular refrain here at the Internet Governance Forum. While it certainly sounds good, it is being used to justify everything from tweaking copyright law to outright theft.
Jamie love and many from the audience of a plenary on Openness brought up the topic of patents and copyrights as barriers to the broad access to “knowledge” regardless of what it took to come up with that “knowledge.”
Now it’s true that a lot of material that is paid for by the government, especially if they are not paid back, and stuff for which the term of patent and copyright have passed should all be in the public domain and there’s some work to get them there. That’s a far cry from simply taking entire sectors of innovation, like software and security and declaring them public goods whereby the moment that innovation is developed it must be shared by everyone for free. In market economies, copyright and patents provide the incentives necessary for investment in innovation, and declaring any innovation of value a "common good" and giving it to the public will cripple that system.
There’s a little thing called the tragedy of the commons whereby you get this sort of public good only once and then folks realize they can’t put their kids through college working on “public goods” so they switch fields and the public doesn’t get any more goods.
Of course, only among people like Jamie Love, can you be heard above the laughter when suggesting that the solution is simply for the government to do all of the innovating. Yes, that should do the public a lot of good!