Editors' Rating
Published: 01 Jul 2005
It's easy to forget, what with file-sharing hogging all the headlines, that there is more than one way to skin a copyright. Much of CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy is about exactly that: culture gaps in Western intellectual property laws. Open-source software is not all that this book covers, but it, too, is an important part of it. As editor Rishab Aiyer Ghosh notes at the outset, the idea of software as a collaborative enterprise with only the most informal of organisation baffles many people the first time they hear of it. In CODE, he has gathered together a collection of papers that consider alternatives to and problems with today's intellectual property laws, primarily in the areas of science, health, and technology.
IP law, as Ghosh and his contributors argue, is primarily individualistic: everything that is produced is assumed to have one author, individual or corporate, who owns it and may dictate how it is used. Equally, we tend to presume that the incentive to create is always financial. But this model doesn't fit all sizes or types. Open-source software is the most familiar exception in the Western world at the moment; people contribute for all sorts of reasons, from the desire to give something to the community to the desire to show off one's programming skills to an admiring audience. Or: the relief of simple frustration. But this book examines many other alternatives, such as songs and dances that are created to worship a spirit or data input in the early days by the many volunteers in creating the Internet Movies Database.
This isn't precisely a business book; nor is it precisely a book about open-source software; nor is it an impossibly arcane academic or legal textbook. Some other things it's not: it doesn't review the file-sharing wars, it's not a series of diatribes and it's not a political treatise. Equally, however, it's not a blood-on-the-carpets debate. Contributors include James Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology and a strong opponent of tight intellectual property regimes in the health area; Richard Stallman, the progenitor of the open-source movement; plus experts on subjects like anthropology, folklore, law and public policy. Ghosh himself is founding editor of First Monday, a peer-reviewed journal about the Internet. You don't see folks from the MPAA, RIAA or major pharmaceutical companies defending intellectual property law.
All those negatives are in fact what makes the book so interesting. Anyone who's read a lot about intellectual property issues on the internet has run across the comparison to the British enclosures of public land, fleshed out here by James Boyle. But Marilyn Strathern's discussion of collective authorship in Papua New Guinea is new to me, as is Christopher Kelty's discussion of trust. The book is, in fact, based on a 2001 conference held in Cambridge, some of whose presentations can be found on the Arts Council Web site.
As intellectual property issues continue to become more mainstream and affect all types of businesses, understanding the many forms they can take becomes more and more important. This book is a good and different contribution to the discussion.
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