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| Essential Reading: A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism For the Net? |
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This Essay by James Boyle written in 1997 outlines a politics of intellectual property.
"Apart from the normal presumption in favour of informed democratic participation in the formation of entire property regimes, I argued that there are particular reasons why this comparative political vacuum is particularly unfortunate. Drawing on some prior work, I claimed that our intellectual property discourse has structural tendencies towards over-protection, rather than under protection. To combat that tendency, as well as to prevent the formation and rigidification of a set of rules crafted by and for the largest stakeholders, I argued that we need a politics of intellectual property. Using the environmental movement as an analogy, I pointed out that a successful political movement needed both a set of (popularisable) analytical tools and coalition built around the more general interests those tools revealed. Welfare economics and the idea of ecology showed that "the environment" literally disappeared as a concept in the analytical structure of private property claims, simplistic "cause and effect" science, and markets that do not force the internalisation of negative externalities. Similarly, I claimed the "public domain" is disappearing, both conceptually and literally, in an IP system built around the interests of the current stakeholders and the notion of the original author, around an over-deterministic practice of economic analysis and around a "free speech" community that is under-sensitized to the dangers of private censorship. In one very real sense, the environmental movement invented the environment so that farmers, consumers, hunters and birdwatchers could all discover themselves as environmentalists. Perhaps we need to invent the public domain in order to call into being the coalition that might protect it."
Find it here: http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/intprop.htm
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