Suman Sahai, Prasmi Pavithran, Indrani Barpujari: Biopiracy: Imitations Not Innovations (2007)

Biopiracy, is detailed compilation of the indigenous resources of India, some of which have been the subject of controversial patents over the years. Published by Gene Campaign, a research and advocacy organization , the book is presented in a reader friendly format and includes discussions on Indigenous Knowledge as well as the on the medicinal use of each plant, taken up as a case study.

Publisher Gene Campaign, 2007
ISBN 8190100998
76 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2014-8-29)

Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri: Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004)

The world-renowned authors of the international best-seller “Empire” follow with an astonishing, politically energizing manifesto that argues that some of the most troubling aspects of the new world order contain the seeds of radical global social transformation.

With “Empire,” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri established themselves as visionary theoreticians of the new global order. They presented a profound new vision of a world in which the old system of nation-states has surrendered much of its hegemony to a supranational, multidimensional network of power they call empire. Empire penetrates into more aspects of life over more of the world than any traditional empire before it, and it cannot be beheaded for it is multinoded. The network is the empire and the empire is the network.

Now, in “Multitude,” Hardt and Negri offer up an inspiring vision of how the people of the world can use the structures of empire against empire itself. With the enormous intellectual depth, historical perspective, and positive, enabling spirit that are the authors’ hallmark, “Multitude” lays down in three parts a powerful case for hope. Part I, “War,” examines the darkest aspects of empire. We are at a crisis point in human affairs, when the new circuits of power have grown beyond the ability of existing circuits of political sovereignty and social justice to contain them. A mind-set of perpetual war predominates in which all wars are police actions and all police actions are wars-counterinsurgencies against the enemies of empire. In Part II, the book’s central section, “Multitude,” they explain how empire, by colonizing and interconnecting more areas of human life ever more deeply, has actuallycreated the possibility for democracy of a sort never before seen. Brought together in a multinoded commons of resistance, different groups combine and recombine in fluid new matrices of resistance. No longer the silent, oppressed “masses,” they form a multitude. Hardt and Negri argue that the accelerating integration of economic, social, political, and cultural forces into a complex network they call the biopolitical is actually the most radical step in the liberation of humankind since the Industrial Revolution broke up the old feudal order. Finally, in “Democracy,” the authors put forward their agenda for how the global multitude can form a robust biopolitical commons in which democracy can truly thrive on a global scale. Exhilarating in its ambition, range, and depth of interpretive insight, “Multitude” consolidates Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s stature as the most exciting and important political philosophers at work in the world today.

Publisher Penguin Press, 2004
ISBN 1594200246, 9781594200243
427 pages

review (Tom Nairn, London Review of Books)
review (Eric Mason, Multitudes)
review (Thomas N Hale and Anne-Marie Slaughter, openDemocracy)
review (Bruce Robbins, n+1)
review (John Giuffo, Village Voice)
review (Nicholas Spencer, Electronic Book Review)

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PDF (updated on 2012-7-27)

Charlotte Hess, Elinor Ostrom (eds.): Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice (2006)

“Knowledge in digital form offers unprecedented access to information through the Internet but at the same time is subject to ever-greater restrictions through intellectual property legislation, overpatenting, licensing, overpricing, and lack of preservation. Looking at knowledge as a commons—as a shared resource—allows us to understand both its limitless possibilities and what threatens it. In Understanding Knowledge as a Commons, experts from a range of disciplines discuss the knowledge commons in the digital era—how to conceptualize it, protect it, and build it.

Contributors consider the concept of the commons historically and offer an analytical framework for understanding knowledge as a shared social-ecological system. They look at ways to guard against enclosure of the knowledge commons, considering, among other topics, the role of research libraries, the advantages of making scholarly material available outside the academy, and the problem of disappearing Web pages. They discuss the role of intellectual property in a new knowledge commons, the open access movement (including possible funding models for scholarly publications), the development of associational commons, the application of a free/open source framework to scientific knowledge, and the effect on scholarly communication of collaborative communities within academia, and offer a case study of EconPort, an open access, open source digital library for students and researchers in microeconomics. The essays clarify critical issues that arise within these new types of commons—and offer guideposts for future theory and practice.”

Contributors: David Bollier, James Boyle, James C. Cox, Shubha Ghosh, Charlotte Hess, Nancy Kranich, Peter Levine, Wendy Pradt Lougee, Elinor Ostrom, Charles Schweik, Peter Suber, J. Todd Swarthout, Donald Waters

Publisher MIT Press, 2006
ISBN 0262083574, 9780262083577
367 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2013-5-14)