Laura DeNardis: Protocol Politics: The Globalization of Internet Governance (2009)

The Internet has reached a critical point. The world is running out of Internet addresses. There is a finite supply of approximately 4.3 billion Internet Protocol (IP) addresses—the unique binary numbers required for every exchange of information over the Internet—within the Internet’s prevailing technical architecture (IPv4). In the 1990s the Internet standards community identified the potential depletion of these addresses as a crucial design concern and selected a new protocol (IPv6) that would expand the number of Internet addresses exponentially—to 340 undecillion addresses. Despite a decade of predictions about imminent global conversion, IPv6 adoption has barely begun. IPv6 is not backward compatible with IPv4, and the ultimate success of IPv6 depends on a critical mass of IPv6 deployment, even among users who don’t need it, or on technical workarounds that could in turn create a new set of concerns.

Protocol Politics examines what’s at stake politically, economically, and technically in the selection and adoption of a new Internet protocol. Laura DeNardis’s key insight is that protocols are political. IPv6 serves as a case study for how protocols more generally are intertwined with socioeconomic and political order. IPv6 intersects with provocative topics including Internet civil liberties, U.S. military objectives, globalization, institutional power struggles, and the promise of global democratic freedoms. DeNardis offers recommendations for Internet standards governance, based not only on technical concerns but on principles of openness and transparency, and examines the global implications of looming Internet address scarcity versus the slow deployment of the new protocol designed to solve this problem.

Publisher MIT Press, 2009
Information Revolution and Global Politics series
ISBN 0262042576, 9780262042574
270 pages

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Jason Mazzone: Copyfraud and Other Abuses of Intellectual Property Law (2011)

Intellectual property law in the United States does not work well and it needs to be reformed—but not for the reasons given by most critics. The issue is not that intellectual property rights are too easily obtained, too broad in scope, and too long in duration. Rather, the primary problem is overreaching by publishers, producers, artists, and others who abuse intellectual property law by claiming stronger rights than the law actually gives them. From copyfraud—like phony copyright notices attached to the U.S. Constitution—to lawsuits designed to prevent people from poking fun at Barbie, from controversies over digital sampling in hip-hop to Major League Baseball’s ubiquitous restriction on sharing any “accounts and descriptions of this game,” overreaching claims of intellectual property rights are everywhere.

Overreaching interferes with legitimate uses and reproduction of a wide variety of works, imposes enormous social and economic costs, and ultimately undermines creative endeavors. As this book reveals, the solution is not to change the scope or content of intellectual property rights, but to create mechanisms to prevent people asserting rights beyond those they legitimately possess.

While there are many other books on intellectual property, this is the first to examine overreaching as a distinct problem and to show how to solve it. Jason Mazzone makes a series of timely proposals by which government, organizations, and ordinary people can stand up to creators and content providers when they seek to grab more than the law gives them.

Publisher Stanford University Press, 2011
ISBN 0804760063, 9780804760065
304 pages

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Self-Organisation: Counter-Economic Strategies (2006)

The book Self-organisation / counter-economic strategies was initiated by the artists’ group Superflex, but it is not about them. It is about the many approaches to the creation, dissemination and maintenance of alternative models for social and economic organisation, and the practical and theoretical implications, consequences and possibilities of these self-organised structures. The counter-economic strategies presented here are alternatives to classical capitalist economic organisation that exploit, or have been produced by, the existing global economic system.

Essays by ten writers cover a wide cross-section of activity, from new approaches to intellectual property and the implications of the free/open source software movement to political activism and the de facto self-organisation embodied in informal architecture and the so-called black economy.

Self-organisation/ counter-economic strategies is not a comprehensive overview or an attempt to unify these diverse interpretations. It is intended as a toolbox of ideas, situations and approaches, and includes many practical examples.

Commissioned texts include Will Bradley on GuaranaPower, Anupam Chander & Madhavi Sunder on fan fiction and intellectual property, Bruno Comparato on the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil, Mika Hannula on self-organisation and civil society, Alfonso Hernández on the barrio of Tepito in Mexico City, Susan Kelly on “What is to be done?”, Lawrence Lessig on problems with copyright law, Marjetica Potrč on parallelism and fragmentation in the Western Balkans and the EU, and Tere Vadén on the future of information societies, plus interviews with Craig Baldwin (A.T.A. Gallery, Other Cinema), Brett Bloom (Temporary Services, Mess Hall), Sasha Costanza-Chock (Indymedia), Adrienne Lauby (Free Speech Radio News), and Nigel Parry (Electronic Intifada).

Editors Will Bradley, Mika Hannula, Cristina Ricupero, Superflex
Publisher Sternberg Press, 2006
Producer NIFCA, Nordic Institute of Contemporary Arts; with The Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki; The Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Montana, Denmark
NIFCA publication # 28
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Licence 2.5
ISBN 1933128135
336 pages

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