We Begin with Why, and So Shall I.

..and I promise to keep the rhyming titles to a minimum henceforth.
But I rhyme there for a reason, as the best way to start this journal seems to be with the motivations behind it's begining. A couple month ago, in the fall of ‘06, I began reading about the creative commons movement and soon found myself quite interested in intellectual property issues as a whole. This blog web journal is chronicle and canvas for my continuing study of contempory IP law. At this point I have a strong, but merely intuitive sense that in all the internet stuff (OSS, p2p,wikis,etc) going on now I we are seeing the emergence of a new mode of productive consciousness running parrellel to modern capitalism. An ear to the ground tells of quiet and not so quiet challanges to the "bourgeois" property relations ofthe past two centuries or so. The crux of the conflict, I bet, will take place over the interpretation and ridgitity of intellectual property law. I'm no one to get in the way of a good historical moment, and might find a fufilling career in doing what I can to defend the legal viability of free (as in liberty rather than beer) information exchange. At least one problem with the above story is that I know essentially nothing about intellectual property law. And so, I will spend at least the next 6 months building a basic knowledge of IP law, and drawing what threads I can between the law and changing attitudes towards information-cum-property. edit: Also, for the record, historical materialism + communicative action != Marxism

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