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By Root 1936 0

seems, dogged intellectual property policing throughout its history, because of the nature of the enterprise. They continue to do so today in new forms and media. Largescale, intensive, and internationally coordinated antipirate enforcement is sometimes justified- the effort against counterfeit medicines is a relatively clear example-but in other cases the public good is not so evident. In agribusiness, for example, Monsanto alone- to cite only the usual bete noire -has reported that it "investigates" about five hundred "tips" about seed piracy every year, retaining a unit of seventy-five employees to do so and coordinating its efforts with both private detective companies and public police forces worldwide. For years its agents have been accused of trespassing or acting as agents provocateurs.19 In the digital realm, similarly, private antipiracy firms have reportedly set up fake bit-torrent sites to lure users into downloading. Moreover, because the industry that raises such concerns remains almost unknown, the vital question ofquis custodiet custodes currently has no answer. Appropriate divisions of responsibilities, powers, and resources have not been defined. We have heard a lot in recent years about the perils of piracy in all its forms; we have also heard a lot about the perils of excessive intellectual property rights. Yet the questions raised by the antipiracy industry are at once broader and more immediate than these prevailing discussions acknowledge. They are late modern incarnations of the questions foundational to society itself.

THE END OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

The confrontation between piracy and the intellectual property defense industry is perhaps set to trigger a radical transformation in the relation between creativity and commercial life. That idea is not as inconceivable as it may seem. Such turning points have happened before-about once every century, in fact, since the end of the Middle Ages. The last major one occurred at the height of the industrial age, and catalyzed the invention of intellectual property. Before that, another took place in the Enlightenment, when it led to the emergence of the first modern copyright system and the first modern patents regime. And before that, there was the creation of piracy in the i 66 o s-i 68 o s. By extrapolation, we are already overdue to experience another revolution of the same magnitude. If it does happen in the near future, it maywellbring down the curtain on what will then, in retrospect, come to be seen as a coherent epoch of about i5o years: the era of intellectual property.

The relation between creativity and commerce that has characterized the modern age emerged in the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. It was defined by the establishment of copyright and patents systems and, in the end, by the concept of intellectual property. Received wisdom holds these to be almost axiomatic concepts (and therefore sees no problem in representing history prior to 1700 in terms of them). But ever since their advent they have been dogged by challenges, which have sometimes prospered and have anyway changed the constitution and meaning of creative property. That is by no means a peculiarity of our own, digital age. The critiques of our own time, however, although not the most radical, may prove to be the most effective for centuries. The most evident reason for this is that unlike that of Sir William Armstrong in the Victorian era they can now appeal to practical experience as well as principle. The properties of the Internet, in particular, seem to confirm that there are viable alternatives to proprietary norms. The resulting plausibility matters because while piracy and policing may foment a crisis, they cannot shape a resolution. For the raw materials of such a resolution we will need to look to alternatives of similarly broad ambit. One place to find them is in the sciences.

Claims for a new economics of creativity center overtly on the phenomenon of open-source software, which exploits properties of digital networks for which there is allegedly