6. Courts of Law V. Choke Points for Technological Innovation

In the course of our journey, we have seen the ‘traditional’ approach to innovation becoming challenged by networked individuals involved in grassroots initiatives. It has been discussed at length how the networked innovation culture, which had laid the foundations for the digital reality of today, had operated for years based on sharing and collaborative effort, allowing the coining of quality technological standards and their widespread diffusion. It has also been shown how fragile this type of ‘digital evolution’ may be when confronted with the licensing schemes for proprietary code. What now merits a closer look is how such innovation models put to the test the very foundations of copyright from the perspective of its purpose of balancing incentives. When the lines between creators and users become blurry, as it happens in the case of a grassroots mass innovation network, the ages-old division into the suppliers and consumers of intellectual property may no longer apply—or apply in an entirely different way.