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