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texts This page looks at some of the more useful (or provocative) writing about intellectual property in the age of the internet.      copyright in cyberspace  Readers of Nicholas Negroponte's 1995 Bill Of Writes article and the 1994 Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age manifesto by Dyson, Gilder & Toffler would be forgiven for thinking that IP is at best irrelevant, a quaint survival like rotary dial phones.  Grateful Deadhead John Perry Barlow's 1994 tract The Economy of Ideas - A framework for rethinking patents and copyrights in the Digital Age (Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong) and Esther Dyson's 1995 article Intellectual Value argued that the concept was well past the use-by date and IP law was now deeply problematical.  Richard Stallman, free-source apostle memorably described in Peter Wayner's new Free For All: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High Tech Titans (New York, Harper 00), characterised it as 'Copywrong' in yet another article in WIRED.  We're unconvinced and suggest that you instead consider the more thoughtful, well-informed writers.       content in the borderless world  Paul Goldstein's argument for strengthened intellectual property protection has received considerable support but is criticised by interests such as the libraries and theorists such as Yochai Benkler in his October 1999 paper on Intellectual Property and the Organisation of Information Production.   A perspective on Benkler's argument is provided by Jorge Schement and Terry Curtis in Tendencies & Tensions of the Information Age: The Production & Distribution of Information in the United States (New Brunswick, Transaction 97).   Drahos' Global Business Regulation (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 00), co-authored with John Braithwaite, is a major work that provides an insightful and very readable introduction to international bodies such as the World Intellectual Property Organization.  As importantly, he anatomises how global agreements are really made and administered, as distinct from the rhetoric from Washington or the marble halls near Lake Geneva. Shamans, Software & Spleen: Law & the Construction of the Information Society (Cambridge, Harvard Uni Press 96) by James Boyle explores microeconomics, insider trading, the human genome project and copyright in cyberspace as part of a wide-ranging exploration of where IP is heading in the 'Age of the Internet'.  Bernt Hugenholtz's Copyright & Electronic Commerce - Legal Aspects of Electronic Copyright Management (Hague, Kluwer 00) and The Future of Copyright in a Digital Environment (Hague, Kluwer 00) supply detailed arguments - or merely wishes - from those who believe that technology can put the information genie back into the copyright bottle. Rembrandts In The Attic: Unlocking the Hidden Value of Patents (Boston, Harvard Business School Press 00) is a sprightly study by David Kline - co-author of Roadwarriors on the Information Highway - and Kevin Rivette.  It demonstrates that much of the value of companies such as IBM lies in its bank of patents, and more broadly in the intellectual capital that walks in and out of its offices and laboratories each day.  Global information networks and technologies such as satellite broadcasting pose particular challenges for traditional intellectual property regimes, which are based on national jurisdictions and - to a large extent - the Customers sniffer dogs administering trade barriers at the border. A succinct analysis is provided by Dan Burk's Transborder Intellectual Property Issues on the Electronic Frontier article for the Stanford Law & Policy Review.      commodification of content Anne Branscomb's Who Owns Information? (New York, Basic Books 94) is a very readable introduction to questions of owning information, including developments in the US such as the landmark 'Feist' case. Pamela Samuelson's paper Is Information Property? in the 1991 Communications of the ACM is an interesting supplement. Mark Lemley's article in the 1995 Journal of Online Law on Rights of Attribution and Integrity in Online Communication explores the consequences of some of their ideas. For perspectives on intellectual property and information as a commodity turn to the incisive Information Rules (Boston, Harvard Business School Press 99) by Hal Varian & Carl Shapiro and to The Social Life of Information (Boston, Harvard Business School Press 00) by John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid.  Fritz Machlup's Knowledge, Its Creation, Distribution & Economic Significance (Princeton, Princeton Uni Press 84) and The Political Economy of Information (Madison, Uni of Wisconsin Press 88) edited by Vincent Mosco & Janet Wasko are also of interest.  We'll be adding further pointers on this part of the IP guide in the near future. In the interim you may be interested in Charles Mann's 1998 overview Who Will Own Your Next Good Idea? and some of the major government and industry reports.  Copyright In The Electronic Age is a report by the Canadian Book Publishers' Council, of interest because Canada (like Australia), is "so near to the USA, so far from heaven".        reports on the overseas legislation Intellectual Property & the National Information Infrastructure, the detailed 1995 report of the US Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights, a subgroup of the Information Infrastructure Task Force that led to the DCMA, is also available. Thomas Dreier produced The Current Copyright Landscape in the Age Of The Internet & Multimedia, a detailed report on the first version of the EU Copyright Directive. The EC Green Paper preceding that Directive is here.    next page (patents)