Code is speech: legal tinkering, expertise, and protest among free and open source software developers.
In this essay, I examine the channels through which Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) developers reconfigure central tenets of the liberal tradition—and the meanings of both freedom and speech—to defend against efforts to constrain their productive autonomy. I demonstrate how F/OSS developers c...
| Published in: | Cultural Anthropology Vol. 24; no. 3; pp. 420 - 455 |
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| Format: | Article |
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Wiley-Blackwell
August 2009
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=510879205&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 510879205 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 08867356 AGY jtl: Cultural Anthropology issn: 08867356 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: August 2009 vid: 24 iid: 3 pid: 480 pub: Wiley-Blackwell artinfo: ui: 510879205 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2009.01036.x ppf: 420 ppct: 35 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 194KB tig: atl: Code is speech: legal tinkering, expertise, and protest among free and open source software developers. aug: au: Coleman, Gabriella su: Open source software Freedom of speech Intellectual property sug: subj: Open source software Freedom of speech Intellectual property ab: In this essay, I examine the channels through which Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) developers reconfigure central tenets of the liberal tradition—and the meanings of both freedom and speech—to defend against efforts to constrain their productive autonomy. I demonstrate how F/OSS developers contest and specify the meaning of liberal freedom—especially free speech—through the development of legal tools and discourses within the context of the F/OSS project. I highlight how developers concurrently tinker with technology and the law using similar skills, which transform and consolidate ethical precepts among developers. I contrast this legal pedagogy with more extraordinary legal battles over intellectual property, speech, and software. I concentrate on the arrests of two programmers, Jon Johansen and Dmitry Sklyarov, and on the protests they provoked, which unfolded between 1999 and 2003. These events are analytically significant because they dramatized and thus made visible tacit social processes. They publicized the challenge that F/OSS represents to the dominant regime of intellectual property (and clarified the democratic stakes involved) and also stabilized a rival liberal legal regime intimately connecting source code to speech. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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