Winning the Web: Stories of Grassroots Campaigning for Access to Knowledge in the Networked Digital Age

The global intellectual property regime is no longer fit for purpose. As the networked, digital age matures, it puts into the hands of millions of citizens the tools to access create and share "content": text, pictures, music and video; data, news, analysis and art. Against this, the intellectual property regime falters. It presents citizens with a choice: stop using the technology -- stop communicating, stop creating -- or break the law.Legal reform is presented with two separate challenges. The first is a small but vocal minority of entrenched corporate interests -- the rightsholder lobby. Wedded to business models that pre-date the age of networked digital technology, they exploit their position as incumbents to influence legislators. Often representing the world's biggest multinational corporations, they hijack a narrative that belongs to poor artists struggling in garrets and use the considerable profits they have made from exploiting these artists in the twentieth century to access the corridors of power and make their case.That legislators listen is related to a second, geopolitical, challenge. Since the 1970s, the developed world has sought to use the global intellectual property regime to ensure its continued prosperity. Motivated by the ability of developing countries to undercut it on the global manufacturing market, it has sought to augment the financial privilege afforded to "knowledge workers". The self-interest behind this practice is masked by a flawed orthodoxy that is rarely backed up by evidence -- that more intellectual property provision is always good for economic growth.Against this backdrop, a global IP reform movement (also called the access to knowledge movement) is emerging. Motivated by a range of concerns -- from global justice, to the narrowing spectrum of permitted speech, to the broadening of surveillance power -- these individuals and organisations approach their campaigning work with combined levels of ingenuity and intellectual rigour that make them stand out in the history of fledgling civil rights movements. Recently, these pockets of activism have taken IP reform issues to a wide audience, triggering sweeping civic action in the general population. The goal of this report is to identify and interrogate these pockets of activism, and to draw lessons from them. It is hoped that these lessons spread across the broadening global network of IP reform activists, ensuring a strong, sustainable and ultimately successful global movement for IP reform well into the future

Following the Money: The Wire and Distant American Studies

In this essay, I argue that the pedagogical, or, more generally, heuristic potential of HBO’s crime drama The Wire (2002/2008) is related to the specific institutional developments in post-network television, the show’s didactic intention, and its focus on the delineation of the economic process, or what has been called its “openly class-based” politics. I will dedicate most time to the latter, as it represents a particularly welcome intervention for American Studies, a discipline in which the problem of class has usually been either marginalized, or articulated in terms of the historically hegemonic disciplinary paradigm, that of identity

Flash! Web's creator doesn't fear for its future

After discussing reputation and the blogosphere, Tim Berners-Lee found his words turned upside down. Becky Hogge helps uncross the wires

The future of intellectual property

Andrew Gowers, commissioned by the British government to map the next generation\u27s intellectual-property framework, explains his thinking to Becky Hogge, and leaves her feeling that the "copyfight" for a public domain of information has only just begun

We are the web

Like language, the internet exists as a function of its users, who define and generate its structure. As the complex digital world evolves, however, some shared values are needed writes Becky Hogge

The knowledge revolution

The global transformation of the market in intellectual property is provoking elite resistance, but also creative initiatives to develop the potential of the new knowledge economy. Becky Hogge maps the state of debate