[csaa-forum] JoPP special issue: Peer production, disruption and the law - call for debates, essays and interviews

[Angela Daly]

Peer production, disruption and the law - call for debates, essays and
interviews

We are now inviting contributions to this special edition of the Journal of
Peer Production in the form of short essays of between 1000 and 3000 words
to complement the longer peer reviewed articles that will appear in this
edition of the journal, due to be published in December 2014

The contributions can be testimonies, working papers and critical essays by
researchers and practitioners. Debates are essays by several authors
expressing clearly contrasting viewpoints about a relevant issue.

The deadline for these contributions is 24 October 2014 and should be sent
to disruptlawissue at peerproduction.net. The contributions will be reviewed
by the editors - Steve Collins (Macquarie) and Angela Daly
(Swinburne/European University Institute) - and so will not be
peer-reviewed.

Please see here for more details on JoPP submissions and style:
http://peerproduction.net/about/submissions/


Special edition description

The disruption caused by new technologies and non-conventional methods of
organisation have posed challenges for the law, confronting regulators with
the need to balance justice with powerful interests. Experience from the
“disruptions” of the late 20th century has shown that the response from
incumbent industries can lead to a period of intense litigation and
lobbying for laws that will maintain the status quo. For example, following
its “Napster moment”, the music industry fought to maintain its grip on
distribution channels through increased copyright enforcement and the
longer copyright terms it managed to extract from the legislative process.
The newspaper industry has similarly seen its historical revenue stream of
classified ads disrupted by more efficient online listings, and responded
to its own failure to capitalise on online advertising by launching legal
campaigns against Google News in various European countries.

Though the law as it stands may not be well-equipped to deal with
disruptive episodes, the technological innovations of the last twenty years
have created an environment that generates disruption. The Internet, the
Web and networked personal computers have converged into the ubiquitous
post-PC media device, leaving twentieth century paradigms of production,
consumption and distribution under considerable threat. The latest
technology to be added to this group of disruptive innovations may be 3D
printing, which in recent times has become increasingly available and
accessible to users in developed economies, whilst the manufacturing
capacity of 3D printers has dramatically grown. Although current offerings
on the market are far from a Star Trek-like “replicator”, the spectre of
disruption has once again arrived, with the prospect of 3D printed guns
inspiring a moral panic and raising questions of gun control, regulation,
jurisdiction and effective control. In addition, 3D printing raises a
number of issues regarding intellectual property, going far beyond the
copyright problems that file-sharing brought about due to its production of
physical objects.

This special issue of the Journal of Peer Production calls for
contributions that deal with the intersection of peer production,
disruptive technologies and the law. Potential topics include, but are not
restricted to:

- The threat posed by peer production to legacy industries

- The regulation of disruptive technologies through the rule of law or
embedded rights management

- Lobbying strategies of incumbent players to stymie disruptive technologies

- Emergent economies or practices as a result of disruptive technologies

- Extra-legal norm formation in peer production communities around
disruptive technologies

- Historical perspectives on the legal status of collaborative projects

- Critical legal approaches to technology, disruption and peer production

- The role and ability of the law (which differs across jurisdictions) in
regulating autonomous production

- The resilience of law in the face of social and technological change
- The theories and assumptions which continue to underpin laws rendered
obsolete by social and technological change
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