[Leonardo/ISAST Network] CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy -- now available

[Leonardo/ISAST]

NEW from The Leonardo Book Series and MIT Press

CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy
Edited by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh

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.

To order this book and to learn more about other titles in the Leonardo Book
Series please visit the Leonardo Book Series website at: http://lbs.mit.edu

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