Information and intellectual property: The global challenges

The paper analyses the contribution of 'golden papers' - seminal works whose ideas remain as fresh and relevant today as when they were first published decades ago - and which continue to dominate academic discourse among successive generations of scholars. The authors analyse why two works written within an industrial development context: The simple economics of basic scientific research, by Richard Nelson (1959) and Kenneth Arrows Economic Welfare and the Allocation of Resources for Invention (1962), are so relevant in today’s knowledge-driven economic paradigm. Focusing on the papers’ application to current global policy debates on information/knowledge and intellectual property, they argue that while the context has changed the essential nature of innovation - driven by widespread access to the ability to replicate and improve - remains the same. Hence a focus on endogenous innovation policy is as relevant today as it was 50 years ago.knowledge economy, science and technology, innovation, intellectual property rights, institutional change

Celebrating First Monday

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Cooking pot markets: An economic model for the trade in free goods and services on the Internet

It has long been assumed that there is something beyond economics involved in the proliferation of free goods and services on the Internet. Although Netscape's recent move to give away the source code for its browser shows that the corporate world now believes that it is possible to make money with free software - previously eyed with cautious pessimism - money is not the prime motivator of most producers of the Internet's free goods, and neither is altruism. Efforts and rewards may be valued in intangibles, but, as this paper argues, there is a very tangible market dynamics to the free economy of the Internet, and rational economic decisions are at work. This is the "cooking-pot" market: an implicit barter economy with assymetric transactions

Economics is dead, long live economics! A commentary on Michael Goldhaber's "The attention economy

A commentary on the Attention economy by Michael Goldhaber evaluating economic concepts in the context of the information age

IPR, Law and FLOSS: Building a Protected Common

176-182This paper provides an overview of copyright and patents as they apply to software, and how open source depends on and uses some aspects of the IPR system for its existence, but may be threatened by others. It examines the incentives to release software as open source under different legal instruments, and compares impact of legal frameworks for open source on innovation to traditional frameworks such as patenting

Interviews with Linus Torvalds: What motivates software developers

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