The Ontology of Cyberspace: Philosophy, Law, and the Future of Intellectual Property

Rating:
Summary: Demystifying Cyberspace, Revolutionizing Intellectual Prop.
Review: David Koepsell is a philosophically and legally trained internet ontologist who has decisively established cyberspace as not a realm populated by virtual objects, but as an arrangement or ordinary objects (like electrical charges) resident in computers and peripherals, and nothing more. Any internet ontologist, any lawyer dealing with intellectual property, and anyone facinated with computers and the internet will find this book a welcome and refreshing antidote to mystical, McLuhan-esque conceptions. And Koepsell explains several alternatives to the complex and prolix system of patents and copyrights as ways of addressing intellectual property. A MUST READ!!

Rating:
Summary: Okay on law, but philosophically meatless
Review: David Koepsell's claim in this volume is easily summarized: "cyber"-type objects do not subsist in some mysterious Land of Otherwhere; electronic media possess no strange mystical powers; intellectual property law does not require any major revolutions in order to deal with such topics; indeed it should be simplified in order to eliminate the artificial distinction between invented processes and original expressions.

As it happens, I agree in essence with every one of these conclusions. What I do not see is how Koepsell's discussion of "ontology" gets him there.

As for that ontology itself, Koepsell tempts me to climb onto a few of my favorite hobby-horses. (For example, he adopts popular misconceptions about "idealism" and "realism" all but wholesale, treats the two as contraries, and moreover fails to distinguish properly between subjective and objective idealism. The traditional foil of "idealism" is not "realism" but "materialism"; properly understood, idealism is itself a form of realism.) In general, though I don't wish to be too harsh here, I was not enormously impressed by the alleged philosophical sophistication of his approach (quite apart from my specific disagreements with it). On the contrary, it seems to me to be "deeply superficial" and littered with misunderstandings (not to mention airy references to Aristotle) to the extent that it succeeds in saying anything at all.

What Koepsell means by "ontology" is better described simply as sorting things into kinds. (Have you ever sorted laundry? Congratulations: you were doing ontology, just the way Aristotle did!) What I would call the genuinely ontological questions -- e.g. whether and in what way kinds themselves actually exist; whether and in what sense there are any real universals -- never arise. (Being a "web ontologist" is therefore, one supposes, a _much_ easier job than being an ontologist.) Which also means that we never reach any significant questions about whether and how computer-based abstract objects exist -- an odd feature in a book allegedly dealing with the ontology of cyberspace.

Now, mind you, I have no objection at all to attempts to classify computer-based objects. But I suspect a naked emperor is at work in all this talk of "ontology": if there is anything in it beyond an attempt to lend an aura of sophistication and high intellectual lineage to consultants on dotcommery, I have failed to find it.

But readers interested in these topics can sort through my older reviews (or drop me a line) in order to find better books on philosophy. (Or, for a good book specifically on ontology, scare up a used copy of E. Jonathan Lowe's undeservedly-out-of-print _Kinds of Being_.) Rather than pick more nits about philosophical misconceptions, I'd prefer to ask a more fundamental question: how does all this "ontology" advance Koepsell's argument in the first place?

For it seems to me that his case would not have suffered the slightest loss had he left out his first few chapters and gone straight to his point. So far as I can tell, at the level of generality at which his "ontology" operates, there is nothing whatsoever from which his specific conclusions about the nature of cyber-objects can be derived.

Nor do his conclusions seem to be compatible _only_ with his essentially Searlean empiricist/materialist outlook. My own is quite different from his (I am a rationalist and an objective idealist with a more or less Platonic view of universals) -- and yet, somehow, I manage to agree that computer-based objects live right here in the ordinary world rather than in some mystical cyber-realm. So what exactly has all this "ontologizing" added to his case?

Now, I've been a little hard on Koepsell's book here, but I don't mean to imply that it isn't worth reading. Far from it: it's actually very good once all the ontologizing stops and the discussion of cyberlaw gets seriously rolling.

Just don't make the mistake of supposing that accepting Koepsell's legal conclusions commits you to his metaphysical premises. Frankly, his philosophical machinery is poorly designed -- and, fortunately, largely unused.

Rating:
Summary: Okay on law, but philosophically meatless
Review: David Koepsell's claim in this volume is easily summarized: "cyber"-type objects do not subsist in some mysterious Land of Otherwhere; electronic media possess no strange mystical powers; intellectual property law does not require any major revolutions in order to deal with such topics; indeed it should be simplified in order to eliminate the artificial distinction between invented processes and original expressions.

As it happens, I agree in essence with every one of these conclusions. What I do not see is how Koepsell's discussion of "ontology" gets him there.

As for that ontology itself, Koepsell tempts me to climb onto a few of my favorite hobby-horses. (For example, he adopts popular misconceptions about "idealism" and "realism" all but wholesale, treats the two as contraries, and moreover fails to distinguish properly between subjective and objective idealism. The traditional foil of "idealism" is not "realism" but "materialism"; properly understood, idealism is itself a form of realism.) In general, though I don't wish to be too harsh here, I was not enormously impressed by the alleged philosophical sophistication of his approach (quite apart from my specific disagreements with it). On the contrary, it seems to me to be "deeply superficial" and littered with misunderstandings (not to mention airy references to Aristotle) to the extent that it succeeds in saying anything at all.

What Koepsell means by "ontology" is better described simply as sorting things into kinds. (Have you ever sorted laundry? Congratulations: you were doing ontology, just the way Aristotle did!) What I would call the genuinely ontological questions -- e.g. whether and in what way kinds themselves actually exist; whether and in what sense there are any real universals -- never arise. (Being a "web ontologist" is therefore, one supposes, a _much_ easier job than being an ontologist.) Which also means that we never reach any significant questions about whether and how computer-based abstract objects exist -- an odd feature in a book allegedly dealing with the ontology of cyberspace.

Now, mind you, I have no objection at all to attempts to classify computer-based objects. But I suspect a naked emperor is at work in all this talk of "ontology": if there is anything in it beyond an attempt to lend an aura of sophistication and high intellectual lineage to consultants on dotcommery, I have failed to find it.

But readers interested in these topics can sort through my older reviews (or drop me a line) in order to find better books on philosophy. (Or, for a good book specifically on ontology, scare up a used copy of E. Jonathan Lowe's undeservedly-out-of-print _Kinds of Being_.) Rather than pick more nits about philosophical misconceptions, I'd prefer to ask a more fundamental question: how does all this "ontology" advance Koepsell's argument in the first place?

For it seems to me that his case would not have suffered the slightest loss had he left out his first few chapters and gone straight to his point. So far as I can tell, at the level of generality at which his "ontology" operates, there is nothing whatsoever from which his specific conclusions about the nature of cyber-objects can be derived.

Nor do his conclusions seem to be compatible _only_ with his essentially Searlean empiricist/materialist outlook. My own is quite different from his (I am a rationalist and an objective idealist with a more or less Platonic view of universals) -- and yet, somehow, I manage to agree that computer-based objects live right here in the ordinary world rather than in some mystical cyber-realm. So what exactly has all this "ontologizing" added to his case?

Now, I've been a little hard on Koepsell's book here, but I don't mean to imply that it isn't worth reading. Far from it: it's actually very good once all the ontologizing stops and the discussion of cyberlaw gets seriously rolling.

Just don't make the mistake of supposing that accepting Koepsell's legal conclusions commits you to his metaphysical premises. Frankly, his philosophical machinery is poorly designed -- and, fortunately, largely unused.

Rating:
Summary: Very highly recommended, articulate, and thoughtful
Review: With his superbly presented work, The Ontology Of Cyberspace: Law, Philosophy, And The Future Of Intellectual Property, David Koepsell addresses the problems of protecting intellectual property rights in the computer age. Koepsell, Executive Director of the Center for Applied Ontology and adjunct assistant professor of philosophy at the State University of New York: Buffalo, defines terminology, identifies the problems inherent in a rapidly expanding electronic communications technology that transcends national boundaries, and has become ubiquitous in our personal, social, economic, educational, business, and literary life. The Ontology Of Cyberspace presents both the scholarly community and the non-specialist general reader with a very highly recommended, articulate, definitive, thoughtful, informative, and "reader friendly" text.