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

摘要

Two countervailing trends characterize the contemporary production and circulation of new scientific and cultural knowledge. While on the one hand a high-tech collaborative renaissance chips away at the foundational pillars of intellectual property (IP) law, state and international legal regimes have in recent decades acquired new forms of legitimacy and power to restrict public access to knowledge. With these twin forces in mind, CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy, edited by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, cogently examines the meaning of ownership and techniques for collaboration within a context of competing legal and social values. The volume is divided into three sections, entitled Creativity and the Domains of Collaboration, Mechanisms for Collaboration, and Ownership, Property and the Commons, to each of which Ghosh provides a short introduction, deftly stitching connections between individual pieces. Authors elaborate on a shared set of themes to build a rich conversation out of which emerge three significant interventions: By integrating a robust comparative perspective, the volume provides specificity to the concepts of collaborative authorship and ownership; it offers a nuanced understanding of techniques of collaborations and their underlying rationalities; and it brings into plain view the political stakes and practical alternatives that follow an embrace of collaborative modes of production.