This page is maintained by Michel Bauwens, Nicholas Bentley.

Introductory Statement

Following the advice of Richard Stallman, we are not using the concept of Intellectual Property, but will focus this section on developments related to the purported ownership of non-material assets, which are covered by copyright, patent and trademark legislation.

Stallman is opposed to using an abstract concept for what are three distinct areas of copyright, patent, and trademark law.

What is called "intellectual property" is not only objectionable on the pragmatic grounds that it hinders innovation, but on the more principled ground that it is designed to prohibit freely cooperating communities. Further expansion of peer production and governance is impossible without the prior available of free and open cultural raw material.

Introductory Resources

We recommend checking out our entry on Peer Property

Richard Stallman argues forcefully, that we should not use the muddled concept of IP.

If you are from the South, Robert Verzola's Cyberlords as a rentier class is recommended reading.

John Perry Barlow's famous 1994 essay The Economy of Ideas, is still very much worth reading.

This is an essay from a radical anti-copyright point of view, which rejects the Creative Commons compromise: Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti-Commons

Citations

Jennifer Urban and Cory Doctorow:

""DRM is broken:Bits will never get harder to copy: the limits of copyright online. The problem is that until DRM started building legal restrictions on the use of cultural products into the hardware used to access those products, the relationship between technological capabilities, laws, and social changes was flexible enough to allow copyright laws to evolve with the times. When radio came along and enabled the broadcast of music that had previously been accessed through live performance or sheet music, the legal remedy of compulsory licensing enabled rights owners to be compensated and for a new medium for musical performance to grow. DRM, together with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which criminalizes circumvention of DRM measures, puts an end to that flexibility by instantiating in technology a social agreement that used to be mediated by courts: "DRM stops the change process" that been evolving since the establishment of copyright laws. "Fair use," fundamental to education, scholarship, and the arts, is broken because the rights holder, not a legal process, determines the boundaries, and "DMCA makes breaking DRM to enable fair use illegal." (http://weblogs.annenberg.edu/diy/2006/12/jennifer_urban_digital_ights_m.html)

Josef Stiglitz, on why drug patents are costing lives:

"Knowledge is like a candle, when one candle lights another it does not diminish its light.' In medicine, patents cost lives. The US patent for turmeric didn't stimulate research, and restricted access by the Indian poor who actually discovered it hundreds of years ago. 'These rights were intended to reduce access to generic medicines and they succeeded.' Billions of people, who live on $2-3 a day, could no longer afford the drugs they needed. Drug companies spend more on advertising and marketing than on research. A few scientists beat the human genome project and patented breast cancer genes; so now the cost of testing women for breast cancer is 'enormous." (http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/333/7582/1279)

Recommended Articles, Reports, etc...

The Open Society Institute on User Rights, Copyright and DRM in the EU

More in our archive of articles on Peer Property and IP developments.

Recommended Delicious Tags

Intellectual Property [1]; Open Content[2]; FLOSS [3] P2P-Filesharing [4]; Creative Commons [5]; Copyleft [6]; GPL [7]

and other appropriate tags are at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens

P2P Hall of Fame: Copyright Theory Experts

P2P Copyright Theory Hall of Fame: Richard Stallman (General Public License) Lawrence Lessig [8] (Creative Commons and Free Culture movement), James Boyle [9](IP developments), Nicholas Bentley (Intellectual Contributions Theory), Ben Moglen (Free Software Foundation legal counsel), Peter Suber [10](Open Access, Jessica Litman (Digital Copyright); David Bollier [11][12](Commons); Cory Doctorow (anti-DRM activism); Stephen Dowes [13] (e-learning and learning objects)

Peter Drahos [14] (author of books The Philosophy of Intellectual Property and Information Feudalism)

Encyclopedia