| Sumario: | A special section on anthropological research on free software or open source software in widely disparate social spaces and global locations. Topics discussed include how the informal politics of everyday hacking serve to strategically disentangle some of the more sedimented distinctions between political rights and forms of property; how the links between identity, corporeality, and taboo in Papua New Guinea illuminate the practices of people enmeshed in complex life-worlds of software and intellectual property; the emergence of legislation in Peru that would require the use of free software in government activities; how a new generation of legal and economic thinkers, those who established the commons project Creative Commons, have made strategic use of a culture concept to find legal and technical ways to alter or influence people's behavior; the reaction of Maori and acolytes to the Lego Bionicle toy line, which employed Maori imagery and myths; and the relationship between the practices of Creative Commons and anthropologists' interests.
|