Shamans, Software, & Spleens

by James Boyle

The most interesting part of the book 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 been taken up by quite a lot of activist groups working in this area since). This parallel is a useful one: in both cases, what was previously a common good and regarded as natural suddenly becomes private property