[ecrea] New book: Digital Golems. Copyright and Lex Electronica (in French)

Digital Golems. Copyright and Lex Electronica

Melanie Dulong de Rosnay
Foreword by Lawrence Lessig
Presses des Mines
http://www.iscc.cnrs.fr/spip.php?article2196

Regulatory models from the analog era, based on physical medium scarcity
and exclusivity, are called into question by digital technology
paradigms of copying, remixing and sharing. Law and copyright in
particular have developed and adapted in response to innovations in
reproduction and dissemination technologies, creating access control as
an artificial corrective. Technical standards and the extension of
exclusive rights have been conceived independently, leading to tensions
between cultural industries and rights of the public. But they can also
lead to the constitution of commons.

The book offers a techno-legal model of regulation for the sharing of
culture. Following research on “lex informatica”, it is based on the
mutual influence between law and code. It proposes a reconception of
copyright categories to facilitate creative usages and non-market
sharing, and an improved technical expression of those rights built on
the systematic analysis of licenses and ontologies. As foreword author
Lawrence Lessig summarizes: "The law could infect code, carrying its
values".

The golems, artificial creatures of the mythology, designate pieces of
computer code that prevent to copy and reuse works online. Developed by
right holders to protect their interests, they implement decisions
automatically and indiscriminately , without control by the society, the
state or the law, without distinguishing legitimate uses. But the golems
can turn against their masters and create resistance. Beyond access to
information and culture that is the subject of this book, the metaphor
turns powerful to denounce the logic of encoding binary rules in the
digital devices and algorithms that govern our lives and make decisions
based on big data and traces we leave on networks, platforms, connected
objects and smart cities.

This book is grounded on over ten years of participation to copyright
legal and technical regulation on the field. Co-founder and legal lead
of Creative Commons France at CERSA CNRS University Paris 2 between 2003
and 2013, the author participated to MPEG technical standardisation at
ISO, to two advisory commitees on copyright at French Ministry of
Culture, and to diplomatic conferences at WIPO (United Nations) with the
status of observer as president of Communia, the international
association on the digital public domain.



--
Melanie Dulong de Rosnay
http://www.iscc.cnrs.fr/spip.php?article1558

Permanent researcher
French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)
Institute of Communication Sciences (CNRS - Paris Sorbonne University -
UPMC)

Visiting fellow
London School of Economics
Department of Media and Communications



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