- The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law
- William M. Landes
- Richard A. Posner
- This book takes a fresh look at the most dynamic area of American law today, comprising the fields of copyright, patent, trademark, trade secrecy, publicity rights, and misappropriation. Topics range from copyright in private letters to defensive patenting of business methods and from moral rights in the visual arts to the management of Mickey Mouse. The book demonstrates the fundamental economic rationality of intellectual property law, but is sympathetic to critics who believe that in recent decades Congress and the courts have gone too far in the creation and protection of intellectual property rights.
- Hardcover 2003
- A Hacker Manifesto
- McKenzie Wark
- Drawing in equal measure on Debord and Deleuze, A Hacker Manifesto offers a systematic restatement of Marxist thought for the age of cyberspace and globalization. In the widespread revolt against commodified information, Wark sees a utopian promise, beyond the property form, and a new progressive class, the hacker class, who voice a shared interest in a new information commons.
- Hardcover 2004
- Shamans, Software, and Spleens
- James Boyle
- James Boyle explores matters as diverse as blackmail; ownership of genetic information; insider trading; Johnny Carson, Bela Lugosi and the Gay Olympics; the doctor as artist and the patient as "public domain"; cyberspace as land; censorship; and robot slavery in this first social theory of the information age. What emerges from this discussion is a compelling argument for expanding the concept of authorship and the fair use of information.
- Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1997
- Who Owns Academic Work?
- Corynne McSherry
- Drawing on legal, historical, and qualitative research, Corynne McSherry explores the propertization of academic work and shows how that process is shaking the foundations of the university, the professoriate, and intellectual property law. The rush of universities and scholars to defend their knowledge as property dangerously undercuts a working covenant that has sustained academic life--and intellectual property law--for a century and a half. As the value structure of the research university is replaced by the inequalities of the free market, academics risk losing a language for talking about knowledge as anything other than property.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2003