| Summary: | Part of a special section on anthropological research on free software or open source software in widely disparate social spaces and global locations. As part of their continuing work on the discourse of intellectual property in the age of digital media and information-based capitalism, the writers consider the social dimensions of trademark law. They focus on the lively and frequently angry debate that arose over the Lego Corporation's line of building toys called “Bionicle,” much of the symbolic universe of which Maori activists argued had been appropriated from Maori and other Polynesian cultures. They consider the dialogue between Maori activists and Bionicle fans about the nature of intellectual property, the propriety of cultural appropriation, the scope of the public domain, and the constitution of the cultural commons, and they assess the adequacy of the dominant competing ethos of digital governance for tackling the issues it poses.
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