Vol 7 No 1 - Roger Williams University School of Law

the United States, the power of the First Amendment is beingemployed to attack the “private property” imperialism of the IPstatutes over information and to thereby assist the case of theculture theorists.If we live in an information based economy, culture andsociety, the process of propertizing information30 must be seen asbeing inherently concerned with the way we live, think,communicate and construct knowledge. This takes us far beyondquestions of economics to key cultural and social issues, which theprocess of propertizing information must now accommodate. Forinstance, it is no longer good enough to allocate property rights insoftware without considering the social and cultural implicationsof the market power and monopoly of thought that such a processwill engender. Software is not just code, it is discourse, in that itallows us to see and say things in digital space.31Free software and open code software projects, in someinstances, epitomize a cultural rationale for intellectual propertyrights.32 In the classic free software scenario embodied in the30. See Felix S. Cohen, Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach, 35Colum. L. Rev. 809, 814-17 (1935); see e.g., E. Richard Gold, Body Parts: ProprietaryRights and the Ownership of Human Biological Materials (Geo. Univ. Press 1996);Ejan Mackaay, The Economics of Emergent Property Rights on the Internet, in TheFuture of Copyright in a Digital Environment 13 (P. Bernt Hugenholtz ed., 1996)(stating that although traditional property fencing techniques do not work well on theInternet, property is by no means dead, because of the initiatives exploring alternativefencing and new extensions of property rights); Thomas A. Stewart, IntellectualCapital: The New Wealth of Organizations (Bantam Doubleday Dell 1997); JamesBoyle, Cruel, Mean or Lavish? Economic Analysis, Price Discrimination and DigitalIntellectual Property, 53 Vand. L. Rev. 2007 (2000); Julie E. Cohen, Copyright and thePerfect Curve, 53 Vand. L. Rev. 1799 (2000); Michael A. Heller, The Tragedy of theAnticommons: Property in the Transition From Marx to Markets, 11 Harv. L. Rev. 622(1998) (discussing the dangers of anticommons property, specifically the under use ofresources and the lack of effective privileges to use); David Lange, Recognizing ThePublic Domain, Law & Contemp. Probs., Autumn 1981, at 147; Pamela Samuelson &Kurt Opsahl, Licensing Information in the Global Information Market: Freedom ofContract Meets Public Policy, 21 Eur. Intell. Prop. Rev. 387 (1999); Lester C. Thurow,Needed: A New System of Intellectual Property Rights, Harv. Bus. Rev., Sept.-Oct. 1997,at 95; Hal R. Varian, Versioning Information Goods, (Mar. 13, 1997) (discussingdifferential pricing known as quality discrimination or versioning), athttp://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/papers.html.31. See Brian F. Fitzgerald, Software as Discourse: The Power of IntellectualProperty in Digital Architecture, 18 Cardozo Arts & Ent. L.J. 337 (2000).32. See Marcus Maher, Open Source Software: The Success of an AlternativeIntellectual Property Incentive Paradigm, 10 Fordham Intell. Prop. Media & Ent. L.J.619 (2000) (showing how the science of complexity theory is able to explain the opensource movement’s ability to translate non-economic incentive mechanisms into a