Stealing the common from the goose

Typepad's comment posting isn't working for me at the moment, so this gets an elevated status.

In reply to Dad's comment, reminding me of this, a favourite of my Mother's:

The law arrests the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common;
But lets the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

Yes, I should have thought of that. The quote attributed to Aesop happened to come up in an RSS feed of quotes , at the same time as the Michael Moore story came up in the RSS feed from the Guardian.

Jon Udell (following Sam Ruby, the links suggest) calls this manufactured serendipity -- because a lot of information is piped into one place, juxtapositions are thrown up which would pass by unnoticed otherwise.

[Not the best Udell link, but I can't find the one I was looking for].

The relevance of the common/goose poem to the ongoing battle for control (or perhaps, better, battle between control and freedom) on the Internet is striking, and I can't believe I didn't think of it even earlier, given the heavy use of "Commons" language (the Creative Commons project, for example).

The metaphors are limited, of course. Common land has/had a physical extent.