reviews


Book Reviews  193

 

 

Book Reviews 

Boyle, James. Shamans, Software, and 
Spleens: Law and the Construction of the 
Information Society. Cambridge, 
Mass.; London: Harvard Univ. Pr., 
1996 (text ed., 1997). 270p. $35 cloth 
(ISBN 0-674-80522-4); $15.95 alk. pa­
per (IBSN 0-674-80523-2). LC 95­
42433. 

The central axiom of this book assumes 
that our contemporary society is tacitly 
forging new economic and ideological 
norms to manage the conflicting inter­
ests spawned by newly emerging infor­
mation technologies. Boyle contends 
that these norms—as reflected in 
American legal thought, judicial deci­
sions, and public policy—chart a course 
headed in the wrong direction. Specifi­
cally, “. . . it leads us to have too many 
intellectual property rights, to confer 
them on the wrong people, and dramati­
cally to undervalue the interests of both 
the sources of and the audiences for the 
information we commodify” [emphasis 
in original]. The discourse is thoroughly 
academic but in a rhetorical, not an em­
pirical, sense. It has far more to do with 
scholarly debate over public policy than 
social theory. 

The first two chapters provide orien­
tation to the concept of the emerging 
“information society.” The conceptual 
framework unfolds in three brief chap­
ters on problematic areas of capitalist 
theory, namely, public and private fac­
ets of social life, free versus restricted 
flow of information in the marketplace, 
and conceptual difficulties in the defini­
tion of property. Surprisingly, no formal 
discussion of method occurs in the early 
part of this book but, rather, is intention­
ally presented as an “Afterword” in the 
first appendix. 

Next, Boyle analyzes four puzzling 
examples of legal explanation: copy­
right, blackmail, insider trading, and a 

judicial opinion concerning a 
biogenetic patent. The com­
mon denominator among 
these four cases involves 
commercial exploitation 
(commodification) of some 
sort of “information,” includ­
ing electronic and genetic instructions. 
The first and last, of course, embody 
the central policy issue of this work— 
the allocation of intellectual property 
rights. The other two areas concern per­
nicious secrets, which illuminate the 
structure of legal thought on the exploi­
tation of information for commercial 
gain. 

Boyle’s analysis of the California Su­
preme Court case of Moore v. The Re­
gents of the University of California serves 
to confirm most of the irrational aspects 
of Western intellectual property doc­
trine unmasked in previous chapters. 
Moore sued to block a lucrative patent 
for genetically engineered cells derived 
from the plaintiff’s own tissues during 
an experimental treatment that cured 
him of leukemia. The court upheld 
Moore’s claim that his physicians had 
withheld knowledge of their patent in­
tentions in securing his consent to the 
experimental procedures. However, it 
also upheld the university’s patent 
against Moore’s argument that he 
owned the tissues (and genetic instruc­
tions) from which the patented cells 
were created. Boyle contends that the 
majority opinion appears disjointed, in­
consistent, and confused, but not nec­
essarily incompetent. The underlying 
legal doctrine itself embraces incompat­
ible ideas about rights in property, con­
flicting values about public and private 
knowledge, and artificial distinctions 
among natural and individual creations. 

The latter-day expansion of intellec­
tual property protection at the expense 

193 



 

194 College & Research Libraries March 1996 

of the “public domain” is examined by 
Boyle. Examples include U.S. diplomatic 
efforts to combat international copyright 
“piracy,” commercial “prospecting” in 
the cultural property of third-world 
peoples, decisions limiting the original 
“fair use” exceptions to copyright, ex­
tension of patents to include computer 
software, and proposed legislation re­
stricting personal disposition of infor­
mation distributed via the Internet. He 
also addresses the moral abuses made 
possible by the expansive legal rights to 
intellectual property. Current enforce­
ment of trademark protection for com­
mon words or phrases and copyright 
protection against distortions of original 
works by derivatives already abet “cen­
sorship”; the ownership provisions of 
patent law eventually may lead to “en­
slavement” of advanced biosynthetic 
creatures or sentient electronic de­
vices. 

The last chapter raises and rebuts 
hypothetical objections to preceding 
analytical arguments and proposes new 
policy measures to help shape a more 
wholesome information society. Boyle 
advocates more complex and differen­
tiated policies governing intellectual 
property. He would enlarge the scope 
of “fair use” exemptions, redistribute 
proceeds from entitlement more 
broadly, and shelter cultural heritage 
from commercial expropriation. He spe­
cifically recommends reduced copy­
right protection (period and extent), 
regulated compensation for software 
development, taxes on pharmaceutical 
patents derived from exotic cultures (to 
benefit the people and habitats of ori­
gin), legal recourse to invalidate patents 
that prove to overcompensate, and rou­
tine GAO audits to identify monopolies 
that are more lucrative than necessary 
to sustain innovation. 

Boyle concludes with a presentation 
of the three dimensions of the informa­
tion trajectory he imagines our society 
to be following. He foresees increasing 

social stratification (from differential ac­
cess to information), decreasing access 
to pertinent data (in the flood of avail­
able information), and increasing con­
flict between personal privacy and pub­
lic disclosure (with the increasing capac­
ity to track and correlate electronic 
transactions). 

Boyle’s strategy of combining all 
manner of “information” into the same 
sort of commodity may be advanta­
geous for rhetorical argument but is di­
sastrous for empirical consideration. 
Particularly onerous is the absence of a 
clear distinction between production of 
innovations (novel ideas) and produc­
tion of redundant derivatives (consumer 
goods). Furthermore, the discussion of 
“information economics” is woefully in­
adequate to support Boyle’s dismissal 
of free-market economic theory. In fact, 
the economics literature on patents 
generally regards motivation for re­
search behavior (sometimes yielding 
new discoveries) to be complex; pat­
ents account for only a fraction of in­
centive. Conversely, motivation for 
keeping mum about new discoveries 
(trade secrets) is simple, doing so 
provides advantage in the market for 
derivative consumer goods. Patents 
theoretically encourage public disclo­
sure of novel information in exchange 
for a limited monopoly (fair or exces­
sive) on specific product designs. Exclu­
sive of adequate patents, free markets 
would tend to overproduce redundancy 
and underproduce novelty precisely 
because trade secrecy impedes the 
free flow of ideas from which subse­
quent innovations derive. 

Finally, this book is a difficult read. 
The prose is turgid, the vocabulary and 
grammar impeccable beyond the re­
quirements of proffered insights. One 
quarter of the book’s substantive text lies 
within its appendixes and endnotes. The 
notes harbor far more content than 
simple bibliographic citations and may 
individually exceed a full page. In the 



Book Reviews 195 

context of such complexity, the index pro­
vides insufficient subject guidance. In 
short, this work is an indirect and convo­
luted read, not recommended for a day 
at the beach.—Albert F. Bartovics, 
Harvard Business School, Boston. 

Documenting Cultural Diversity in the 
Resurgent American South: Collec-
tors, Collecting, and Collections. Eds. 
Margaret R. Dittemore and Fred J. 
Hay. Chicago: ACRL, 1997. 122p. $21 
alk. paper ($17.50 ACRL members) 
(ISBN 0-8389-7897-5). LC 97-3357. 

How does one know the past? Beyond 
that, how do individuals or groups re­
phrase and shape changing identities, 
particularly when those individuals or 
groups have been, to greater or lesser 
extents, marginalized? Political docu­
ments, journalistic records, personal 
journals, and letters have informed the 
written records exemplified by our li­
braries’ holdings of mainstream history 
books, thereby positing histories as un­
derstood by the more educated, and po­
litically and economically powerful, el­
ements of society. Groups such as 
Louisiana’s Cajuns, or Isleños, or up­
land South Primitive Baptists make and 
retain their histories and changing iden­
tities differently, through orality and 
folklife practices. Their changing identi­
ties intertwine with the culture and his­
tories of both mainstream and 
nonmainstream groups in complex 
ways. Regional mythologies and folk­
lore have been emblematic of the 
American South probably more than of 
any other region: When not trivialized 
or caricatured, Southern folk cultures 
have been loved nearly to death, as in 
Cajun cooking or “quaint” mountain 
music. At times, they have been per­
ceptively recognized as expressive art, 
and outside observers as well as mem­
bers of diverse groups within the South 
have amassed invaluable documenta­
tion of indigenous history and folk tra­
ditions. How this documentation is to be 

preserved, understood, and interpreted 
is the salient question addressed by 
folklorists and archivists in this impor­
tant collection of essays. 

Editors Margaret R. Dittemore and 
Fred J. Hay have selected key papers 
from two conference programs of the 
Anthropology and Sociology Section of 
the ACRL. Part I deals with issues of 
documentation of southern folk culture 
through strategies such as film, sound 
recording of musical traditions, and oral 
history. Part II focuses on one state, Loui­
siana, and demonstrates how documen­
tary material can be used to reinforce 
often beleaguered cultural identities by 
giving a more authentic and resonant 
voice to these groups vis-à-vis the 
greater culture. 

The contributors address both prac­
tical questions of creating, locating, pre­
serving, indexing, cataloguing, and 
making available archival and docu­
mentary material; and larger issues of 
interpretation and misinterpretation, 
advocacy, and interfacing of folklife 
materials with other materials in reach­
ing fuller understandings of people, his­
tory, and cultures. In their illuminating 
paper, “Talk about Trouble!: Documen­
tation of Virginia Culture,” Nancy J. 
Martin-Perdue and Charles L. Perdue 
Jr., draw on their long-time study of WPA 
Federal Writers Project interview ma­
terial from Virginia in the 1930s and 
early 1940s. They found these materi­
als to be scattered in numerous loca­
tions, usually disorganized, frequently 
in deteriorating condition. One archivist 
referred to WPA material in his care as 
“that JUNK in the basement.” Beyond 
the immediate problems of locating, 
sorting through, and indexing the ma­
terial, the Perdues alert us that we must 
not take this fascinating and rich body 
of oral history at face value, as it usu­
ally represents what they term “nego­
tiated biography”—due to the “unequal 
relations that existed between the per­
son whose life was narrated and the