Intellectual property - a new code of practice?

The protection of intellectual property rights is one of the cornerstones of the modern economy - from medicines to pop songs, the ability to claim and defend ownership of creativity is a heavily protected legal right. But now it is under threat - Napster is just the latest high-profile example of how the internet is undermining long-standing intellectual property conventions.

Delegates from across the globe will converge on Cambridge next week (4-6 April 2001) to debate these issues at a unique interdisciplinary conference, CODE - Collaboration and Ownership in the Digital Economy. Speakers from the worlds of the arts, economics, law, policy, science and software will consider whether the digital revolution is a legal as well as a cultural watershed.

Alan Blackwell, lecturer at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and a Research Fellow at Darwin College, is one of the conference organisers.

"The copyright and patent laws created in the 19th and 20th centuries are inhibiting the creative freedom artists enjoyed in the past. Three hundred years ago Bach was creating new music by reworking other composer's melodies, and it was considered perfectly proper. Now in the music industry sampling of other people's work has again become a standard practice but protective legislation for digital property is restricting this development."

Perhaps the best example of a new approach to creativity comes from the Open Source and Free Software movements. The Linux phenomenon has demonstrated that co-operative working practices can create software which can compete with the closely-guarded corporate alternatives. Leading lights of this movement, including Richard M Stallman and Bruce Perens, will address the conference.

Linking software and the human genome, Tim Hubbard of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Centre project will address questions of gene patenting and management of largescale distributed data resources.

The cultural history and current laws of intellectual property will be covered by Martha Woodmansee from the Case Western Reserve University, Ohio; Bill Cornish of Cambridge University Law Faculty and James Boyle of Duke Law School, North Carolina and author of Shamans, Software and Spleen.

Artists will present case studies of working in collaborative fields and a final panel and plenary will be chaired by John Naughton of the Observer with a strong panel of speakers including Philippe Aigrain, the Head of Open Source for the European Commission's IST Programme.

CODE has been organised by the Collaborative Arts Unit at the Arts Council of England (ACE) in collaboration with the Academia Europaea; the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge and the Intellectual Property Unit at Cambridge University Law Faculty. The conference has received the generous support of ACE; East England Arts; The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology; The Centre for the Public Domain and The Rockefeller Foundation.

Find out more
For full programme information and on-line bookings please go to:
www. cl.cam.ac.uk/CODE/

CODE conference highlights will be webcast on:
www.artsonline.com