Kate Darling

The MIT Media Lab researcher and robot ethicist offers an optimistic look at our future with robots based on our historical relationships with animals. People name their robot vacuum cleaners and feel bad for them when they get stuck. Participants in workshops refuse to strike baby dinosaur robots. Soldiers have been reported to risk their lives to save the robots they work with. Broken robot dogs get funerals. The New Breed chronicles the past, present, and future of our relationships to animals to create a compelling vision of what our robotic future could look like. Darling argues that if we harness technology like we’ve harnessed animals in the past, we will start to see massive potential for new kinds of practices, achievements, and even relationships with machines—for the benefit of individuals and society at large. As consumer robotics investment booms and human-robot interaction increasingly enters into workplaces and households all over the world, much space has been devoted to talking about robots as replacements for humans. The New Breed looks at our rich legal and cultural history of using animals for weaponry, work, and companionship to considers how people and machines will work together.

What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots

The New Breed

Aaron Perzanowski

Intellectual property law, or IP law, is based on certain assumptions about creative behavior. The case for regulation assumes that creators have a fundamental legal right to prevent copying, and without this right they will under-invest in new work. But this premise fails to fully capture the reality of creative production. It ignores the range of powerful non-economic motivations that compel creativity, and it overlooks the capacity of creative industries for self-governance and innovative social and market responses to appropriation. This book reveals the on-the-ground practices of a range of creators and innovators. In doing so, it challenges intellectual property orthodoxy by showing that incentives for creative production often exist in the absence of, or in disregard for, formal legal protections. Instead, these communities rely on evolving social norms and market responses—sensitive to their particular cultural, competitive, and technological circumstances—to ensure creative incentives. From tattoo artists to medical researchers, Nigerian filmmakers to roller derby players, the communities illustrated in this book demonstrate that creativity can thrive without legal incentives, and perhaps more strikingly, that some creative communities prefer, and thrive, in environments defined by self-regulation rather than legal rules. Beyond their value as descriptions of specific industries and communities, the accounts collected here help to ground debates over IP policy in the empirical realities of the creative process. Their parallels and divergences also highlight the value of rules that are sensitive to the unique mix of conditions and motivations of particular industries and communities, rather than the monoculture of uniform regulation of the current IP system.

Challenging the Assumptions of Intellectual Property

Creativity Without Law

Behind the scenes of the many artists and innovators flourishing beyond the bounds of intellectual property laws Intellectual property law, or IP law, is based on certain assumptions about creative behavior. The case for regulation assumes that creators have a fundamental legal right to prevent copying, and without this right they will under-invest in new work. But this premise fails to fully capture the reality of creative production. It ignores the range of powerful non-economic motivations that compel creativity, and it overlooks the capacity of creative industries for self-governance and innovative social and market responses to appropriation. This book reveals the on-the-ground practices of a range of creators and innovators. In doing so, it challenges intellectual property orthodoxy by showing that incentives for creative production often exist in the absence of, or in disregard for, formal legal protections. Instead, these communities rely on evolving social norms and market responses—sensitive to their particular cultural, competitive, and technological circumstances—to ensure creative incentives. From tattoo artists to medical researchers, Nigerian filmmakers to roller derby players, the communities illustrated in this book demonstrate that creativity can thrive without legal incentives, and perhaps more strikingly, that some creative communities prefer, and thrive, in environments defined by self-regulation rather than legal rules. Beyond their value as descriptions of specific industries and communities, the accounts collected here help to ground debates over IP policy in the empirical realities of the creative process. Their parallels and divergences also highlight the value of rules that are sensitive to the unique mix of conditions and motivations of particular industries and communities, rather than the monoculture of uniform regulation of the current IP system.

Creativity without Law

"The MIT Media Lab researcher and robot ethicist offers an optimistic look at our future with robots based on our historical relationships with animals"--

Mitch Vane

Chester the cat loves his owner, Tina, and he loves chocolate treats. So when Tina's greedy cousin Ken comes to stay, Chester is not happy!

Kate Darling

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