Code: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Commons

Code: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Commons is a book edited by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh and published in 2005 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ISBN 0-262-07260-2 (hc.: alk.paper)
It argues that while open source software is "considered by many to be a novelty and the open source movement a revolution", the collaborative creation of knowledge gone on for as long as humans have been able to communicate."
This book focuses on what it terms the "collaborative model of creativity" in fields such as the "collective ownership in indigenous societies to free software, academic science, and the human genome project" and contrasts this to what it sees as "proprietary frameworks for creativity based on strong intellectual property rights."
Its editor, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, has been at the time of writing the Programme Leader at the International Institute of Infonomics at Maastricht University. He was also one of the founders and is the current managing editor of the early peer-reviewed internet journal called 'First Monday'.
Table of contents
Its chapters are as follows:
* Why collaboration is important (again) Rishab Aiyer Ghosh
* Creativity and Domains of Collaboration
* Imagined collectivities and multiple authorship (Marilyn Srathern)
* Modes of creativity and the register of ownership (James Leach)
* Some properties of culture and persons (Fred Myers)
* Square pegs in round holes? Cultural production, intellectual property frameworks, and discourses of power (Boatema Boateng)
* Who got left out of the property grab again: oral traditions, indigenous rights, and valuable old knowledge (Anthony Seeger)
* From keeping 'nature's secrets' to the institutionalization of 'open science' (Paul A David)
II Mechanics for Collaboration
* Benefit-sharing: experiments in governance (Cori Hayden)
* Trust among the algorithms: ownership, identity and the collaborative stewardship of information (Christopher Kelty)
* Cooking-pot markets and balanced value flows (Rishab Aiyer Ghosh)
* Coase's penguin, or Linux, and the nature of the firm (Yochai Benkler)
* Paying for public goods (James Love and Time Hubbard)
III Ownership, Property, and the Commons
* Fencing off ideas: enclosure and the disappearance of the public domain (James Boyle)
* A renaissance of the commons: how the new sciences and internet are framing a new global identity and order (John Clippinger and David Bollier)
* Positive intellectual rights and information exchanges (Philippe Aigrain)
* Copyright and globalisation in the age of computer networks (Richard Stallman)

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