Copyright & Community: Future of the Information Society

In order to construct an appropriate copyright policy for communities using digital documents in networked environments, one must define the kind of information society one is seeking to build. Recent policy documents, legislation and court cases aimed at charting a course for copyright law in networked environments have rested upon tacit and often unsupported assumptions about the nature of digital documents, information societies and knowledge economies. This seminar probes the link between copyright and network communities from four directions:

• by studying representative copyright policy documents
• by exploring various social theories for information society
• by talking with technologists about the conception of society they are building into network technologies
• by examining the work of those who have recently tried to re-imagine copyright in the digital environment.