Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society

In 1990 the Supreme Court of California ruled that DNA extracted from a spleen removed from your body could be patented--one of many court precedents to define the emerging laws of cyberspace. Boyle explores such seemingly weird decisions as well as legal issues surrounding autodialers, direct advertising, consumer databases, ethnobotany, the right of publicity, and the right to privacy. Boyle argues that contemporary ideas about intellectual property are based on a Romantic notion of selfhood that is outmoded and counterproductive in our information-based society, a society in which--as someone else probably said before the phrase was popularized by Stewart Brand--"information wants to be 'free.'"