Owning the Future: Staking Claims on the Knowledge Frontier by Seth Shulman

by Seth Shulman

Information wants to be free--or so goes the motto of every laptop libertarian from Newt Gingrich on down. But if Seth Shulman's sweeping overview of current trends in the ownership of knowledge is as correct as it is convincing, information has in fact never been less free than it is right now. The more valuable knowledge becomes, the more fiercely corporations and individuals struggle to control it--through patents, trademarks, and other legal tools. Freedom of information is the most obvious potential casualty of that struggle--but it's far from the only one, argues Shulman. At risk in the current intellectual land rush, he insists, are nothing less than our prosperity, our sense of economic justice, and our democratic principles.Those are strong claims, but compelling evidence backs them up. Shulman draws some of his most eye-opening examples from the computer industry, in which acts of info-monopolizing run the gamut from the subtleties of the Microsoft case to the absurdities of software patents that have actually granted ownership of particular numbers. But it's the breadth of Shulman's argument--moving briskly across the high-tech landscape from computers to pharmaceuticals to genetic engineering to university research practices--that gives it force. Shulman leaves you with the sense that few aspects of our social and economic future will remain untouched by the new knowledge monopolies and that the time to rethink their place in our world is now. --Julian Dibbell

Genres: Technology

Hardcover

First published February 19, 1999