Jessica Silbey

Silbey’s work is based on extensive interviews with a number of participants in various creative and innovative fields, from visual art and novels to biotech. As she explains, intellectual property rights rarely serve as the incentives of classic IP theory. Instead, people are interested in making things for their own reasons, and then they use IP to manage relationships once they’ve created. And this is just as true in the market economy as it is elsewhere. The process rather than the product is creators’ usual focus, and the thing that is often most important to them is proper credit rather than control over every use. It’s a very useful addition to the growing literature on the way ordinary people use and don’t use intellectual property.… (altro)