Software, authorship and intellectual property

December 20, 2010

Research workshop: discussion of the Vica article “Software, instituția autorului și proprietatea intelectuală” ("Software, authorship and intellectual property"), Analele Universității București, serial Filosofie, year LIX (2010), forthcoming.

Presented by author.
Participants: research team and permanent guests.

The aim of this paper is to prove that there is a paradox concerning the relationship between software, authorship and intellectual property. The thesis developed here is that the proprietary software business (the closed source software) implies the disappearance of the authorship. I will argue that such a paradox exists and that it can be avoided by the open source model, which relies on a new account of authorship: the relational author (as opposed to the “romantic” interpretation of what authorship means). Conclusively, the statement of this paper concerns the unfair consequences of copyrights, patents and trade secrets and proposes a way in which they could be avoided by granting that the notion of “intellectual property” is a category mistake. 

Tags: software, authorship, copyright, patent, trade secret, privilege, intellectual property, institutions