CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy (Leonardo Books) 
asked by rafit on November 5, 2006 8:39 PM
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.
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.
Reviews
0%
0%
If you think peer-to-peer collaboration is the exclusive province of 21st-century computer nerds, this hefty anthology will open your eyes to its precedents among indigenous cultures and its growing offshoots in pursuits as lofty as genomics and as mundane as proofreading.
Readers accustomed to open software manifestos by programmers like Richard Stallman or Eric Raymond will find much of this volume phrased in the academic lingo of economics or political science rather than geekspeak; the writing in the first section, mostly by anthropologists, can be turgid. But don't let that deter you, for the book's first section contains some of the most nuanced perspectives on the concept of the cultural and economic "commons"--in particular, on how its European variant is only a simplistic reflection of its older and more complicated origin among native peoples.
From anthropology the book winds its way through economics, public policy, and the life sciences, ranging from flights of theory to examples grounded in local cultures. (Did you know that copyright is stifling folk singers in Irish pubs, or that the Aboriginal word for "property" is the same as their word for "relative"?)
A particular eye-opener is Yochai Benkler's "Coase's Penguin," which traces commons-based collaboration in such diverse fields as NASA crater identification, encyclopedia writing, and proofreading--noting that the quality of anonymous contributions of online volunteers to such cultural and scientific production is often indistinguishable from that of paid professionals. John Clippinger and David Bollier's "Renaissance of the Commons," on the other hand, is a manifesto for open culture grounded in scientific revelations from recent research in neuroscience and behavioral psychology. It's an essay guaranteed to make copyright maximalists frown and commons advocates jump out of their seat and say, "Yes, I knew it!"
CODE is a circuitous but rewarding examination of open collaboration, a theory and practice poised to revolutionize the fields represented in this book and beyond.
Readers accustomed to open software manifestos by programmers like Richard Stallman or Eric Raymond will find much of this volume phrased in the academic lingo of economics or political science rather than geekspeak; the writing in the first section, mostly by anthropologists, can be turgid. But don't let that deter you, for the book's first section contains some of the most nuanced perspectives on the concept of the cultural and economic "commons"--in particular, on how its European variant is only a simplistic reflection of its older and more complicated origin among native peoples.
From anthropology the book winds its way through economics, public policy, and the life sciences, ranging from flights of theory to examples grounded in local cultures. (Did you know that copyright is stifling folk singers in Irish pubs, or that the Aboriginal word for "property" is the same as their word for "relative"?)
A particular eye-opener is Yochai Benkler's "Coase's Penguin," which traces commons-based collaboration in such diverse fields as NASA crater identification, encyclopedia writing, and proofreading--noting that the quality of anonymous contributions of online volunteers to such cultural and scientific production is often indistinguishable from that of paid professionals. John Clippinger and David Bollier's "Renaissance of the Commons," on the other hand, is a manifesto for open culture grounded in scientific revelations from recent research in neuroscience and behavioral psychology. It's an essay guaranteed to make copyright maximalists frown and commons advocates jump out of their seat and say, "Yes, I knew it!"
CODE is a circuitous but rewarding examination of open collaboration, a theory and practice poised to revolutionize the fields represented in this book and beyond.
reviewed by spiderman on November 24, 2006 4:44 AM