Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property

Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property charts the rise of the access to knowledge movement, a movement in which Open Society Foundations have played a key role. It maps the vast terrain of legal, cultural, and technical issues that activists and thinkers aligned to the movement negotiate every day.

Produced with the support of the Open Society Information Program, the book aims to make accessible a diverse range of subject matter, including access to medicines, software patents, food security and access to agricultural biotechnology, the public domain, remix culture, free expression, and semiotic democracy.

It features over 60 essays from leaders in the A2K movement, including influential thinkers and doers like Yochai Benkler, Peter Drahos, Lawrence Liang, and James Love. The book also contains a chapter by Senior Information Program Manager Vera Franz, exploring the potential to redress the copyright balance of a new international instrument to mandate a minimum set of limitations and exceptions.

An electronic copy of the book has been made available for free download under a specially crafted Creative Commons (by-nc-nd) license which additionally allows for translations.

Contents include:

• The Emergence of the Politics of A2K
• The Conceptual Terrain of A2K
• Strategies and Tactics of A2K
• A2K in the Future: Visions and Scenarios