Should expectant parents be allowed to sell naming rights to their baby? That was the question that came up in a dinner party conversation last weekend; the informal betting was that we will see this happening by the end of the decade. It’s a semi-serious possibility, and the question is whether ethics or policy should or will intervene. If regulation follows, what form should it take?
Does the world need a grand theory of law and technology? That’s the question posed at a new blog-based symposium… Read More »Law and Technology Theory
I got back on Friday night from a short visit to New Haven, and I came home, again, struck by the contrasting faces of the Elm City. New Haven is more and less than what it seems.
One of the great challenges for Internet exceptionalists has been creating an online equivalent to the sense of urban vibrancy that Jane Jacobs famously idealized in The Death and Life of American Cities. Steven Johnson‘s most recent enterprise, outside.in, is a cooler-than-most effort to map (pun intended) real space localism onto a virtual grid. IP policy, and copyright policy in particular, is sometimes understood as grounded in a related kind of spatiality, with ideas and expression jostling against each other, fighting for attention, and commanding commercial and cultural salience on the sidewalks and in the marketplaces, parks, and gated communities of both public and private spheres. In what I think is the dominant telling, the information ecosystem is fundamentally urban, even if comes freighted with metaphors of “openness” and commons. Carol Rose wrote, “One might envision a public space that is full of junk, trash, lies and risks, but also excitement and thrills–like Central Park after dark. It is important to have such a public space. This commons is not purely tragic; creativity thrives not only on the ability to cash in on one’s ideas– an ability that one gets from property–but also on a kind of free-wheeling give and take that we desire from open-access and public space.”
Does the urbanity metaphor miss something important? Or, what should the Internet learn from New Haven?