Code: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy
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About the Book
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.
Book Details
ISBN-13: 9780262572361
EAN: 9780262572361
Publisher Date: 08 Sep 2006
Binding: Paperback
Dewey: 302.3
Grade-Min: College Freshman
Illustrations: 2 illus.
MediaMail: Y
Number of Items: 01
PrintOnDemand: N
Spine Width: 21 mm
Year Of Publication: 2006
ISBN-10: 0262572362
Publisher: MIT Press Ltd
Age-Min: 18
Bood Data Readership Text: Professional & Vocational
Gardner Classification Code: A00
Height: 229 mm
Language: English
No of Pages: 358
Pagination: 358 pages, 2 illus.
Series Title: Leonardo Book Series
Width: 178 mm