S e t h S h u l m a n
BOOKS:
Owning the Future (Houghton Mifflin, 1999)
After reporting as a correspondent for the journal Nature on conflicts of interest among academic scientists with ties to industry, I became fascinated by modern-day patenting and intellectual property claims.
It seemed clear that ideas, blueprints, codes (software and genetic), and concepts were fast becoming the most lucrative commodities in our society and yet it didn’t seem as though our system for allotting rights to so-called intellectual property was keeping pace. I worried that freely shared knowledge—the lifeblood of the “new economy”—would become an endangered species.
The book is my effort to make sense of the issue. It required me to learn more about cutting-edge, high-tech fields and patent law than I ever thought I would. Owning the Future staked out terrain that now, nearly a decade later, is being addressed more widely.
It also led to host of opportunities. I debated IBM’s top patent lawyer at a legal conference in London. I sparred on NPR’s “Science Friday” about the book with Q. Todd Dickinson, then U.S. patent commissioner (listen to the audio). As a result of the book, I also wrote a monthly column of the same name in Technology Review for the next three years, chronicling battles over intellectual property in high-tech fields. You can read the columns.
Selected Reviews
Shulman tackles what is arguably the most important economic and cultural development of the century’s end: the privatization of information and knowledge.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Impeccably documented...Eminently readable and entirely unacademic, Owning the Future sounds a clarion call, one that is particularly pertinent in the present climate of merger-mania and antitrust scrutiny.” —Seattle Times
Shulman’s book is entertaining, and a selective reader could easily skim for the pure thrill of outrage, skipping from one mind-boggling case of info-profiteering to another. But Shulman himself is careful never to stray too far from the larger and subtler social consequences.” —Village Voice
Should companies be able to stake commercial claims on the natural processes of the human body? Will the stampede to the Patent Office by software inventors and on-line businesses result in a legal gridlock of the industry? These are important questions, which few people aside from Mr. Shulman are raising.”—New York Times
Shulman’s elegantly argued and well-researched book shows how the appropriation and privatization of scientific knowledge and medical procedures has taken market-mania to its absurd limits...Owning the Future is a sober expose of the U.S. patent system run amok.” —Sheldon Krimsky, Tufts University
It's the breadth of Shulman’s argument—moving briskly across the high-tech landscape from computers to pharmaceuticals to genetic engineering to university research practices—-that gives it force. Shulman leaves you with the sense that few aspects of our social and economic future will remain untouched by the new knowledge monopolies and that the time to rethink their place in our world is now.” —Amazon.com
“To divide basic ideas up into what Shulman terms fiefdoms of knowledge assets is to threaten the very expansion of knowledge itself. He points to real dangers as knowledge seems, more and more ominously, to equal power.” —Kirkus Reviews
The range and variety of outrages Shulman catalogs are reminiscent of those that sparked the Revolutionary War…Owning the Future excels at sounding the alarm. If we don’t heed it, the future we lose will be our own.” —Philadelphia City Paper
This is a very smart book—it asks the kind of questions that usually only get asked too late. The developments Shulman describes are still in their infancy, or at worst their adolescence; with luck, his reporting will rally people around the banner of common sense.”—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature
Owning the Future shows how power over information—once seen as a common good—is being concentrated in big corporations and in the empires of new information ‘robber barons’…In the future, those who own information will be rich and the rest of us will pay. Read this book before it is too late. —New Scientist
Physicians patenting surgical procedures, seed companies suing farmers for selling part of a genetically engineered crop to neighbors for seed, and pharmaceutical firms purveying drugs derived from tropical plants without paying a cent to the indigenous tribes who first noticed their curative powers all come under Shulman’s lens. His book amounts to an eloquent warning against what he describes as 'an uncontrolled stampede to auction off our technological and cultural heritage.'“—Technology Review
Purchase
Buy the book at Amazon.
