Opening other windows: A political economy of openness in a global information society

Review of International Studies

Volumn 34, Issue SUPPL. 1, 2008, Pages 69-92

  May, Christopher ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HAMBURG   (Germany)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 43149085046     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: 14699044     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210508007808     Document Type: Article

References (86)

1. See Christopher May, The Information Society: A Sceptical View (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).
2. Space precludes a comprehensive treatment of intellectual property here, but see Christopher May, A Global Political Economy of Intellectual Property Rights: The New Enclosures? (London: Routledge, 2000).
3. Here I allude to Nicholas Negroponte's mid-1990s celebration of the information revolution; Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (London: Coronet/Hodder and Stoughton, 1995).
4. Angus Cameron and Ronen Palan, The Imagined Economies of Globalisation (London: Sage Publications, 2004).
5. Andrew Jamison, "The Making of Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilisation", EASST Review, 14:1 (1995), available at: 〈http://www.easst.net/review/march1995/jamison〉, accessed 16 October 2006;
6. Merrit Roe Smith, 'Technological Determinism in American Culture', in Merrit Roe Smith and Leo Marx (eds.), Does Technology Drive History: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 28-30.
7. I discuss Mumford's work at length in: Christopher May, 'The Information Society as Mega-Machine: The Continuing Relevance of Lewis Mumford', Information Communication and Society, 3:2 (2000), pp. 241-65.
8. Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power, vol. 2: Myth of the Machine (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1971), pp. 421-9.
9. Lewis Mumford, 'Authoritarian and Democratic Technics' Technology and Culture, 5 (Winter 1964), pp 1-8.
10. Ibid., p. 4.
11. Ibid., p. 8.
12. Ibid., p. 3.
13. See, for instance the essays/extracts collected together in Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman (eds.), The Social Shaping of Technology, 2nd edn. (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999).
14. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, 'Power and Interdependence in the Information Age", Foreign Affairs, 77:5 (1998), pp. 81-94, at 84.
15. Phillip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, 'How The Law Rules: Variations on Some Themes in Karl Marx', in B. Fryer, A. Hunt, D. McBarnet and B. Moorhouse (eds.), Law, State and Society (London: Croom Helm, 1981), p. 33.
16. The argument against the 'information age' as a political economic revolution is set out in Christopher May, The Information Society: A Sceptical View (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), ch. 2.
17. Christopher May, 'The Hypocrisy of Forgetfulness: The Contemporary Significance of Early Innovations in Intellectual Property', Review of International Political Economy, 14:1 (February 2007), pp. 1-25.
18. See the long history recounted in Christopher May and Susan Sell, Intellectual Property Rights: A Critical History (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2005), which stretches back to the first formal patent law in Venice in 1474 and discusses earlier debates about the 'management' of knowledge.
19. See for instance, Joseph E. Stiglitz, 'Knowledge as a Public Good', in Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg and Marc Stern (eds.), Global Public Goods: International Co-operation in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
20. Leo Panitch, 'Rethinking the Role of the State', in J. H. Mittelman (ed.), Globalisation: Critical Reflections, IPE Yearbook: 9 (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1996), p. 109.
21. Christopher May, A Global Political Economy of Intellectual Property Rights: The New Enclosures? (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 16.
22. Christopher May, Digital Rights Management: The Problem of Expanding Ownership Rights (Oxford: Chandos Publishers, 2007).
23. Susan Sell, Private Power, Public Law: The Globalization of Intellectual Property Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 5.
24. Adam B. Jaffe and Josh Lerner, Innovation and its Discontents (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
25. This idea of openness as a road to innovation is not novel nor historically unprecedented, although sadly space precludes developing this train of argument here: see for instance Alessandro Nuvolari 'Open Source Software Developments: Some Historical Perspectives', First Monday, 10:10 (October 2005), available at: 〈http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issues10_10/ nuvolri/index.html〉, accessed 16 October 2006.
26. Here I have for rhetorical purposes conflated the considerable philosophical differences between the free software, and the open source, movements, as they both share an antipathy towards IPRs. Although their approaches to the problem draw on similar initial arguments, they have developed in quite different ways (see for instance Mathias Klang, 'Free Software and Open Source: The freedom debate and its Consequences', First Monday, 10:3 (March 2005), available at: (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issues10_3/klang/index. html〉, 16 October 2006. It is clear that some elements of the Free Software movement do conceive themselves as offering an anti-capitalist, non-property alternative that should be applicable throughout society. However, this is a minority position that is most often drowned out by the more common reformism implied in the main text of this article.
27. Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2001), develops a dystopian vision of a society where no-one owns anything but everything is licensed for use. Although this is an exaggeration, questions of the ability to block access to goods when a lack of final sale undermines the possibility of secondary markets are certainly increasingly salient.
28. Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), ch. 7.
29. John Clippinger and David Bollier, 'A Renaissance of the Commons: How New Sciences and Internet are Framing a New Global Identity and Order', in Rishab Aiyer Ghosh (ed.), CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), p. 271.
30. Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). p. 154.
31. Geoff Mulgan, Tom Steinberg, and Omar Salem, Wide Open: Open Source Methods and Their Future Potential (London: Demos, 2005).
32. For a fuller discussion of the 'openness' issues in academic publishing see Christopher May, 'The Academy's New Electronic Order? Open Source Journals and Publishing Political Science', EPS-European Political Science, 4:1 (March 2005), pp 14-24.
33. Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
34. See: 〈http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page〉.
35. Jill Coffin, 'Analysis of Open Source Principles in Diverse Collaborative Communities', First Monday, 11:6 (June 2006), available at: 〈http://firstmonday.org/issues/issuell_6/coffin/index.html〉, 16 October 2006; for a fuller discussion of the organisation of the Wikipedia,
36. see Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 70-4;
37. and see 'Open, but Not as Usual', The Economist, 18 March 2006, pp. 73-5, for an argument why new open source business activities will still need strong leaders like Wales and also Linus Torvalds of LINUX;
38. on LINUX, also see Glyn Moody, Rebel Code: How Linus Torvalds, Linux and the Open Source Movement are Outsmarting Microsoft (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 2005).
39. Katie Hafner, 'Growing Wikipedia Revises its "Anyone can Edit" Policy', New York Times, 17 June 2006 (Technology Section), p. 17;
40. Lorna Martin, 'Wikipedia fights off" cyber vandals' The Observer, 18 June 2006, p. 3.
41. Another popular non-software example of openness is the Danish Vores Oel open-source beer project, see their website: 〈http://www.voresoel. dk/〉 (16 October 2006).
42. This and the next sub-section draw on Christopher May, 'Escaping TRIPs' Trap: The Political Economy of Free and Open Source Software in Africa', Political Studies, 54:1 (March 2006), pp. 123-46.
43. Sean MacBride et al., Many Voices One World. Communication and Society, Today and Tomorrow (London: Kogan Page/UNESCO, 1982), p. 15.
44. World Development Report 1998/99: Knowledge for Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
45. Robin Mansell and Uta When, Knowledge Societies. Information Technology for Sustainable Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press/UNCTAD, 1998).
46. Digital Opportunities for All: Meeting the Challenge (2001), available from: (http://www.dotforce.org/reports/DOT_Force_reportV5.oh.doc), accessed 27 June 2001 - but now no longer available on line - copy on file with author.
47. See also the further sources examined in Justine Johnstone 'Knowledge Perspectives on ICT and Development: What a Theory of Knowledge can Add', in S. Krishna and Shirin Madon (eds.), The Digital Challenge: Information Technology in the Development Context (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).
48. World Development Report 1998/99, p. 57.
49. G. Adamson, 'Internet Futures: A Public Good or Profit Centre?' Science as Culture, 11:2 (2002), pp. 257-75;
50. Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (New York: Random House, 2001);
51. Deborah L. Spar, "The Public Face of Cyberspace', in Global Public Goods: International Co-operation in the 21st Century, eds. I. Kaul, I. Grunberg and M. A. Stern (New York: United Nations Development Programme/Oxford University Press, 1999).
52. Digital Opportunities for All, p. 5.
53. Ibid., p. 7.
54. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
55. May, The Information Society, p. 82-5.
56. Robert Hunter Wade, 'Bridging the Digital Divide: New Route to Development or New Form of Dependency', Global Governance, 8 (2002), pp. 443-66.
57. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, p. 309.
58. Chris Alden, 'Let Them Eat Cyberspace: Africa, the G8 and the digital divide', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 32:3 (2003), pp. 457-76.
59. 'Markets for Ideas', The Economist (14 April 2001), p. 96.
60. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, p. 467.
61. The portal can be found at: 〈http://www.unesco.org/webworld/ portal_freesoft〉, 16 October 2006.
62. This paragraph summarises the overview of UNESCO's FOSS-related activities in B. Barry and J.-C. Dauphin (2003), 'UNESCO Activities in the Field of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)', paper delivered at ACT 2003, The Fifth Annual African Computing and Telecommunication Summit, Abija, Nigeria, 25-29 August, available at: 〈www.aitecaafrica.com/.../presentations/ jcdauphin〉, accessed 25 March 2004 - but now no longer available on-line - copy on file with author.
63. Rishab Aiyah Ghosh, 'Licence Fees and GDP per Capita: The Case for Open Source in Developing Countries', First Monday, 8:12 (December 2003), available at: 〈http://firstmonday.org/issues/issues8_12/ghosh/index.html), accessed 16 October 2006.
64. Ghosh also provides figures for the EU (as well as accession and applicant countries); the Caribbean; Latin America; the Middle East; Asia; and Oceania, alongside individual figures for 178 countries.
65. N. Nir Kshetri, 'Economics of Linux Adoption in Developing Countries', IEEE Software (January/February, 2004), pp. 74-81, at 77.
66. Quoted in Frederick Noronha, 'Linux: Open Source Software for South Asia', Economic and Political Weekly (20-26 November 1999), available at: 〈http://www.epw.org.in/showArtieles.php?root=1999&leaf= 11&filename=671&filetype=htm〉, accessed 11 March 2004.
67. Daniel Yee, 'Development, Ethical Trading and Free Software' (1999), available at: 〈http://danny.oz.au/freedom/ip/aidfs.html〉, 16 October 2006.
68. Jyh-An Lee, 'Government Policy toward Open Source Software: The Puzzles of Neutrality and Competition", Knowledge Technology and Policy, 18:4 (Open Source Software, 2006), pp. 113-41.
69. 'Microsoft in $1bn Training Project", Financial Times, 24 January 2004, p. 7.
70. Weber, The Success of Open Source, p. 251.
71. Bill Thompson, 'India Lays Down "Open" Challenge', BBC News - online, 12 May 2006, available at: 〈http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/ 1/hi/technology/4764565.stm〉, 16 May 2006.
72. See, for instance, the range of areas that already 'openness' reaches into, set out in Benkler, The Wealth of Networks.
73. Stephen Gill, Power and Resistance in the New World Order (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2003), p. 132.
74. Ibid., p. 196.
75. Mark Rupert, Ideologies of Globalisation: Contending Visions of a New World Order (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 11.
76. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1944 [1957]).
77. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, pp. 72ff.
78. May, A Global Political Economy of Intellectual Property Rights, ch. 2.
79. For the importance of narrative (re)formation in the global political economy, see Angus Cameron and Ronen Palan, The Imagined Economies of Globalisation (London: Sage Publications, 2004), esp. ch. 2.
80. Michael Strangelove, The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and the Anti-Capitalist Movement (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), p. 219.
81. Hippel, Democratizing Innovation, p. 171/172.
82. Taylor Boas, Thad Dunning and Jennifer Bussell, 'Will the Digital Revolution Revolutionise Development? Drawing Together the Debate', Studies in Comparative International Development, 40:2 (Summer 2005), pp. 95-110, at 108.
83. That said, I would note that this is more than asking which niche in information markets is best served by which incentive model (that is, open benefits or private rewards) as set out, for instance in Hal R. Varian, Joseph Farrell and Carl Shapiro, The Economics of Information Technology: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 59-63.
84. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, p. 320.
85. Christopher May and Susan Sell, Intellectual Property Rights: A Critical History (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2005).
86. Weber, The Success of Open Source, p. 228.