One of the biggest challenges of achieving locally self-sustaining economic models is the need to pay royalties on every available tool and devise from seeds to televisions by each one of the users. The ''passive earning'' through royalties and patents is justified with the rationale of investing in the research or development of product. However, the market system has repeatedly appropriated knowledge from the indigenous communities, skilled practitioners, artisans, rural innovators, through sophisticated systems of legal, economic and modern scientific tools. This book challenges such a modern market system, particularly the ''knowledge economy'' in its most fundamental premise - knowledge is a commodity that can be owned, priced and traded across space and time to generate profits for many.
The onset of the AI has created a new kind of ethical debate on the knowledge as it was recently reported when a deep fake video could produce an ''original piece'' by a band with lyrics, video and audio all being produced by the learning machine. The band could not claim ownership as they did not make it, and, yet, the foundational knowledge that contributed to ''teaching" the machine comes from the band. They cannot legally challenge, but, that is because legality is still not recognizing or equipped with the tools to deal with AI.
While these are new challenges that will have to be dealt with by every Nation State to assert itself, the limitation of this new development stems from a fundamental flaw of the knowledge organization itself in the market already prevalent. That knowledge and its ownership can divorce. They do this with a theory that they propound and develop through the book - Knowledge is an activity that always involves body and the mind, and, hence, its ownership can be authorized by manipulating the different practices of use, performance and naming.
This is an important time to bring out such a publication and the authors have generously made the publication available free for download keeping with the sprit of the book itself. (download the book here). We will have a detailed review of the book coming up in these pages shortly.