Against Progress: Intellectual Property and Fundamental Values in the Internet Age

When first written into the Constitution, intellectual property aimed to facilitate progress of science and the useful arts by granting rights to authors and inventors. Today, when rapid technological evolution accompanies growing wealth inequality and political and social divisiveness, the constitutional goal of progress may pertain to more basic, human values, redirecting IP’s emphasis to the commonweal instead of private interests. Against Progress considers contemporary debates about intellectual property law as concerning the relationship between the constitutional mandate of progress and fundamental values, such as equality, privacy, and distributive justice, that are increasingly challenged in today’s internet age. Following a legal analysis of various intellectual property court cases, Jessica Silbey examines the experiences of everyday creators and innovators navigating ownership, sharing, and sustainability within the internet eco-system and current IP laws. Crucially, the book encourages refiguring the substance of progress and the function of intellectual property in terms that demonstrate the urgency of art and science to social justice today.