Code

Book: Code. Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Commons: Rishab Aiyer Ghosh (Ed). MIT Press, 2005.

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 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.

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 an dold 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 contributes 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 threats to networked knowledge posed by globalisation.

Contributors

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

• Philippe Aigrain
• Yochai Benkler
• Boatema Boaten
• David Bollier
• James Boyle
• John Clippinger
• Paul A David
• Rishab Aiyer Ghosh
• Cori Hayden
• Tim Hubbard
• Christopher Keity
• James Leach
• James Love
• fred Myers
• Anthony Seeger
• Richard Stallman
• Marilyn Strathern

Table of Contents

Chapters:

1. Why collaboration is important (again). Rishab Aiyre Ghosh

I. Creativity and Domains of Collaboration

2. Imagined collectivities and multiple authorship. Marilyn Srathern

3. Modes of crativity and the register of ownership. James Leach

4. Some properties of culture and persons. Fred Myers

5. Square pegs in round holes? Cultural production, intellectual property frameworks, and discourses of power. Boatema Boateng

6. Who got left out of the property grab again: oral traditions, indigenous rights, and valauble old knowledge. Anthony Seeger

7. From keeping 'nature's secrets' to the institutionalization of 'open science'. Paul A David

II Mechanics for Collaboration

8. Benefit-sharing: experiments in governance. Cori Hayden

9. Trust among the alorithms: ownership, identity and the collaborative stewardshpi of information. Christophre Kelty

10 Cooking-pot markets and balanced value flows. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh

11 Coase's penguin, or Linux, and the nature of the firm. Yochai Benkler

12 Paying for public goods. James Love and Time Hubbard

III Ownership, Property, and the Commons

13 Fencing off ideas: enclosure and the disappearance of the public domain. James Boyle

14 A renaissance of the commons: how the new sciences and internet are framing a new global identity and order. John Clippinger and David Bollier

15 Positive intellectual rights and information exchanges. Philippe Aigrain

16 Copyright and globalisation in the age of computer networks. Richard Stallman

More Information

Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code:_Collaborative_Ownership_and_the_Digital_Commons