Intellectual Property

It's interesting to think about collaborative writing and how that affects the notion of ownership. Ownership or authorship seems to be really important and that's why intellectual property laws exist. With that being said, technology such as wikis are challenging these established laws. Vie and DeWinter write, "Wikis too are far from neutral; they are a battlefield upon which concepts of intellectual property are challenged and sometimes attacked." I can see why wikis would challenge the old notion of ownership. Wikis seem to promote a voice that is the combination of many. A choir of thinkers singing the same thoughts. I imagine that this collaboration was not accounted for in the original laws established to protect authors. Not that authors haven't been collaborating before. Guys like Burroughs and Kerouac were writing together in the fifties. Burroughs even developed a cut up fold in method to collaborate with authors that were not even alive during his lifetime. I wonder what the intellectual property guys thought about that? Regardless I can see that the old ways of thinking have to change to accommodate the new ways of writing. Thats probably a lot easier written that done. I can't imagine that the authors of this article struggling to collaborate on this piece. I can only guess that the two authors combined their knowledge and experience with the subject and both threw forth their words. Maybe the only struggle was to keep it at a moderate length.