emergence

From this interview, Emergence sounds like a fascinating book. (Here’s some good discussion on kottke.org.) Hopefully the book mentions the AI web game, an example of “distributed biological processing,” i.e. a mass of networked humans solving problems too complex to solve individually. Another issue that intersects with that of emergence is that of copyright: if an emergent system generates something of value, who owns the copyright? In how many cases today are copyrights preventing emergence?