Shamans, Software, & Spleens

"The most interesting part of Shamans, Software, & Spleens for me is an analogy that James Boyle uses between the privatisation of the human genome and the privatisation of the agricultural commons (an analogy which has since been taken up by quite a lot of activist groups working in this area). This parallel is a useful one: in both cases, what was previously a common good and regarded as natural suddenly becomes private property. The analogy works also because enclosing the land in the case of the agricultural commons, which removed the peasants’ traditional rights so that they no longer could hunt for animals, collect wood and so on, is similar to the way that patenting individual genes by private firms has meant that researchers can be hampered in their own research."