Against Progress

Jessica Silbey is Professor of Law at the Boston University School of Law. She is the author of The Eureka Myth: Creators, Innovators, and Everyday Intellectual Property (Stanford, 2015), and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018.

"Against Progress is a satisfying, witty, and altogether magnificent provocation about the ethical limits of owning ideas. What happens when 'the road to progress' (which patent, intellectual property, and trademark laws are supposed to sustain) becomes littered with privatized toll booths and heavy fines? What happens when the right to profit from one's creativity hardens into an extractive vise so overreaching that it stifles broad economies of knowledge production? Most importantly, what happens when the internet's pyrrhic gift of viral reproductibility enables vast abuses of power, outright theft, and the widespread impoverishment of musicians, artists, writers, inventors? Jessica Silbey's brilliant book reanimates the values and virtues that once informed this legal arena: fairness, honesty, civic empathy, restraint, and the world-building sociality of shared creative enterprise."—Patricia J. Williams, Northeastern University "Against Progress announces a timely and needful reorientation of intellectual property scholarship in North America, insisting on democracy, rather than efficiency, as the organizing conceptual principle, offering an unusually insightful and revitalizing translation of efficiency into otherwise latent social justice concerns, and thus of narrowly framed economic issues into vivid dialogues and contestations about political culture. A remarkable work."—Abraham Drassinower, University of Toronto "I have long thought that we as IP lawyers would do well to listen to the voices of creators—especially when those creators are not clients of ours. Against Progress does a fantastic job of letting those creators express, in their own voices, the struggles they face trying to adapt their professional lives to a changing technological environment. Kudos to Silbey for letting their voices be heard, framed by high-level legal discussion of whether our IP laws are doing the work of advancing progress—or pushing back on it."—Gaston Kroub, Above the Law "[Silbey's] book is well-researched and organized and includes an excellent analysis of traditional IP case law and interviews with more than 100 real-world creators about how they navigate the IP law system.... This is an important read for anyone interested in the shifting policies surrounding IP law. Recommended."—J. D. Graveline, CHOICE

• Introduction: Is Progress More?1. Everyone's a Photographer Now: The Case of Digital Photography2. Equality3. Privacy4. Distributive Justice (or "Fairer Uses")5. Precarity and Institutional FailuresConclusion