CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy (Hardcover)

Description:

Open source software is considered by many to be a novelty and the open source movement a revolution. Yet the collaborative creation of knowledge has gone on for as long as humans have been able to communicate. CODE looks at the collaborative model of creativity -- with examples ranging from collective ownership in indigenous societies to free software, academic science, and the human genome project -- and finds it an alternative to proprietary frameworks for creativity based on strong intellectual property rights.

Intellectual property rights, argues Rishab Ghosh in his introduction, were ostensibly developed to increase creativity; but today, policy decisions that treat knowledge and art as if they were physical forms of property actually threaten to decrease creativity, limit public access to creativity, and discourage collaborative creativity. "Newton should have had to pay a license fee before being allowed even to see how tall the 'shoulders of giants' were, let alone to stand upon them," he writes.

The contributors to CODE, from such diverse fields as economics, anthropology, law, and software development, examine collaborative creativity from a variety of perspectives, looking at new and old forms of creative collaboration and the mechanisms emerging to study them. Discussing the philosophically resonant issues of ownership, property, and the commons, they ask if the increasing application of the language of property rights to knowledge and creativity constitutes a second enclosure movement -- or if the worldwide acclaim for free software signifies a renaissance of the commons. Two concluding chapters offer concrete possibilities for both alternatives, with one proposing the establishment of "positive intellectual rights" to information and another issuing a warning against the threats to networked knowledge posed by globalization.

Rishab Aiyer Ghosh is Program Leader at the International Institute of Infonomics at Maastricht University. He was one of the founders and is the current managing editor of First Monday, the peer-reviewed Internet journal.

 

Table of Contents:

Series Foreword	vii
	Acknowledgments	ix
1.	Why Collaboration is Important (Again) Rishab Aiyer Ghosh	1
I	Creativity and Domains of Collaboration	7
2.	Imagined Collectivities and Multiple Authorship Marilyn Strathern	13
3.	Modes of Creativity and the Register of Ownership James Leach	29
4.	Some Properties of Culture and Persons Fred Myers	45
5.	Square Pegs in Round Holes? Cultural Production, Intellectual Property Frameworks, and Discourses of Power Boatema Boateng	61
6.	Who Got Left Our of the Property Grab Again: Oral Traditions, Indigenous Rights, and Valuable Old Knowledge Anthony Seeger	75
7.	From Keeping "Nature's Secrets" to the Institutionalization of "Open Science" Paul A. David	85
II	Mechanisms for Collaboration	109
8.	Benefit-Sharing: Experiments in Governance Cori Hayden	113
9.	Trust Among the Algorithms: Ownership, Identity, and the Collaborative Stewardship of Information Christopher Kelty	127
10.	Cooking-Pot Markets and Balanced Value Flows Rishab Aiyer Ghosh	153
11.	Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm Yochai Benkler	169
12.	Paying for Public Goods James Love and Tim Hubbard	207
III	Ownership, Property, and the Commons	231
13.	Fencing Off Ideas: Enclosure and the Disappearance of the Public Domain James Boyle	235
14.	A Renaissance of the Commons: How the New Sciences and the Internet are Framing a New Global Identity and Order John Clippinger and David Bollier	259
15.	Positive Intellectual Rights and Information Exchanges Phillipe Aigrain	287
16.	Copyright and Globalization in the Age of Computer Networks Richard Stallman	317
	Contributors	337
	Index	343