Shamans, Software, and Spleens (Paperback: Reprint: 288 pages)

Enhanced Muze Note

James Boyle's unusually adventurous Shamans, Software and Spleens...examines the ideological and practical issues raised by the figure of the author in contemporary law and legal theory...Boyle's programme is two-fold. First, he offers a social theory of the information society as it depends on the figure of the author and the fiction of originality...Second, he offers a delicately phrased argument for leftward mitigation of intellectual property rights. On both fronts, Boyle succeeds admirably, demonstrating the logical contradictions of the author-centered regime and building a strong ethical and practical case for changes in the laws governing our information society...Boyle develops a terrifically engaging discussion of various problems in legal theory such as blackmail, insider trading, and the ownership of one's genetic code...It is the great merit of Boyle's work that he engages the debate on so many fronts, opening the conceptual breach of authorship neither to close it perempt...orily nor to overcome it illusively, but to show how its very paradoxes provide the conceptual basis for the laws of property that govern our intellectual exchange. Read more Less

Enhanced Muze Note

Mr. Boyle, a professor of law at American University in Washington, argues that neither economics nor political theory tells us how much to privatize intellectual creation...Many high-sounding legal explanations, he demonstrates, are based on ad hoc, and often unarticulated, guesses about costs and benefits. Only solid facts can tell us, for example, whether the Internet on balance supresses intellectual creation by facilitating piracy or promotes creation by facilitating legitimate distribution.