Disrupting Intellectual Properties

Throughout my research of intellectual property, one of the things that constantly crops up is the issue of technology and distribution, which is talked about in this article. How do you control the rights to a certain author's work when that work is constantly being reproduced and distributed through various different technologies? The ability of copyright to truly protect the artist is, in reality, very limited-- an issue that can be prominently seen on websites where artists can post their work online, such as Deviantart. In this article, the author's write "Françoise Meltzer traces the emergence of the concept of individual ownership of texts back to a single moment in European history: 'John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government (1690) are the paradigm of the European notion that an individual’s work and the fruits of his labor are his own property.'" I thought this little piece of history, and the continuing paragraph, very interesting. I hadn't realized how far back "this is my piece of work" went.

For me personally, it is very daunting to think about writing a collaborative piece. It's not just because I may or may not be protective of my work as -mine-, but more that I'm just not a very social person, and it is sometimes difficult for me to verbally express an idea to people. From my perspective, if I were one of these authors working on this piece, I most definitely would have had a difficult time writing this collaboratively. I feel like, in order for a piece to have genuine clarity and flow, it would be easiest to assign one voice to the piece-- essentially the "head" author. But I know that, in the reality of wiki's, that's not the way it works. Everyone must work together, combining their own individual voices to create that overall flow and clarity.