[ecrea] JoPP special issue: Peer production, disruption and the law - call for debates, essays and interviews

Peer production, disruption and the law - call for debates, essays and 
interviews

We are now inviting contributions to this special edition of the Journal 
of Peer Production in the form of short essays of between 1000 and 3000 
words to complement the longer peer reviewed articles that will appear 
in this edition of the journal, due to be published in December 2014

The contributions can be testimonies, working papers and critical essays 
by researchers and practitioners. Debates are essays by several authors 
expressing clearly contrasting viewpoints about a relevant issue.

The deadline for these contributions is 24 October 2014 and should be 
sent to (disruptlawissue /at/ peerproduction.net). The contributions will be 
reviewed by the editors - Steve Collins (Macquarie) and Angela Daly 
(Swinburne/European University Institute) - and so will not be 
peer-reviewed.

Please see here for more details on JoPP submissions and style: 
http://peerproduction.net/about/submissions/


Special edition description

The disruption caused by new technologies and non-conventional methods 
of organisation have posed challenges for the law, confronting 
regulators with the need to balance justice with powerful interests. 
Experience from the “disruptions” of the late 20th century has shown 
that the response from incumbent industries can lead to a period of 
intense litigation and lobbying for laws that will maintain the status 
quo. For example, following its “Napster moment”, the music industry 
fought to maintain its grip on distribution channels through increased 
copyright enforcement and the longer copyright terms it managed to 
extract from the legislative process. The newspaper industry has 
similarly seen its historical revenue stream of classified ads disrupted 
by more efficient online listings, and responded to its own failure to 
capitalise on online advertising by launching legal campaigns against 
Google News in various European countries.

Though the law as it stands may not be well-equipped to deal with 
disruptive episodes, the technological innovations of the last twenty 
years have created an environment that generates disruption. The 
Internet, the Web and networked personal computers have converged into 
the ubiquitous post-PC media device, leaving twentieth century paradigms 
of production, consumption and distribution under considerable threat. 
The latest technology to be added to this group of disruptive 
innovations may be 3D printing, which in recent times has become 
increasingly available and accessible to users in developed economies, 
whilst the manufacturing capacity of 3D printers has dramatically grown. 
Although current offerings on the market are far from a Star Trek-like 
“replicator”, the spectre of disruption has once again arrived, with the 
prospect of 3D printed guns inspiring a moral panic and raising 
questions of gun control, regulation, jurisdiction and effective 
control. In addition, 3D printing raises a number of issues regarding 
intellectual property, going far beyond the copyright problems that 
file-sharing brought about due to its production of physical objects.

This special issue of the Journal of Peer Production calls for 
contributions that deal with the intersection of peer production, 
disruptive technologies and the law. Potential topics include, but are 
not restricted to:

- The threat posed by peer production to legacy industries

- The regulation of disruptive technologies through the rule of law or 
embedded rights management

- Lobbying strategies of incumbent players to stymie disruptive technologies

- Emergent economies or practices as a result of disruptive technologies

- Extra-legal norm formation in peer production communities around 
disruptive technologies

- Historical perspectives on the legal status of collaborative projects

- Critical legal approaches to technology, disruption and peer production

- The role and ability of the law (which differs across jurisdictions) 
in regulating autonomous production

- The resilience of law in the face of social and technological change
- The theories and assumptions which continue to underpin laws rendered 
obsolete by social and technological change

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