4.1.F. New lines of contention: Information Commons vs. New Enclosures
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| The last 30 years have indeed seen an enormous extension of Intellectual
| Property Rights, resulting in a severe weakening of the Scientific Commons, a
| variety of detrimental social effects, while new technical developments such
| as Digital Rights Management threaten the development of a free culture.
| Cognitive capitalism is centered around the accumulation of knowledge assets,
| and has altered the classic cycle of consumption and production. In the
| industrial economy this cycle was described as
| conception-production-distribution- consumption. In this economy, over time,
| competition would arise, making the products cheaper, forcing corporations to
| become either more productive or invent new products. In the new economy, the
| cycle is better described as conception – reproduction of the informational
| basis – production – distribution – consumption. The informational basis,
| whether it is software, cultural content, or material products such as seeds
| in agribusiness, molecules and gene sequences in the pharmaceutical industry,
| are protected through information property rights. The aspect of production
| and distribution is no longer central, and can be easily outsourced. This
| mechanism has now extended to vast sectors of the 'material economy' with
| companies such as Nike and Alcatel as companies that are essentially divested
| of material production, but are centered around their knowledge and other
| immaterial assets (essentially 'branding')
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http://p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=4.1.F._New_lines_of_contention:_Information_Commons_vs._New_Enclosures
Last week:
If Intellectual Property Is Neither Intellectual, Nor Property, What Is It?
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| The main reason why I have trouble with the "property" part isn't just the
| fact that it leads people to try to pretend it's just like tangible property,
| but because it automatically biases how people think about the concept.
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http://techdirt.com/articles/20080306/003240458.shtml
Fun with Analogies
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| Copyright maximalists love to draw parallels between property rights and
| copyrights. But if we take that analogy seriously, I think it actually leads
| in some places that they aren't going to like. Our property rights system was
| not created by Congressional (or state legislative) fiat. Property rights in
| land is an organic, bottom up exercize. The job of government isn't to
| dictate what the property system should look like, but to formalize and
| reinforce the property arrangements people naturally agree to among
| themselves.
|
| The fact that our current copyright system is widely ignored and evaded is a
| sign, I think, that Congress has done a poor job of aligning the copyright
| system with ordinary individuals' sense of right and wrong. Just as squatters
| 200 years ago didn't think it was right that they be booted off land they
| cleared and brought under cultivation in favor of an absentee landowner who
| had written a check to a distant federal government, so a lot of people feel
| it's unfair to fine a woman hundreds of thousands of dollars to share a
| couple of CDs' worth of music. You might believe (as do I) that file sharing
| is unethical, just as many people believed that squatting was unethical. But
| at some point, Congress has no choice but to recognize the realities on the
| ground, just as it did with real property in the 19th century.
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http://www.techliberation.com/archives/043422.php
Related:
"Intellectual property" is a silly euphemism
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| Once the ideas have escaped there's no getting them back ...
|
| "Intellectual property" is one of those ideologically loaded terms that
| can cause an argument just by being uttered. The term wasn't in
| widespread use until the 1960s, when it was adopted by the World
| Intellectual Property Organization, a trade body that later attained
| exalted status as a UN agency.
|
| WIPO's case for using the term is easy to understand: people who've "had
| their property stolen" are a lot more sympathetic in the public
| imagination than "industrial entities who've had the contours of their
| regulatory monopolies violated", the latter being the more common way of
| talking about infringement until the ascendancy of "intellectual
| property" as a term of art.
|
| Does it matter what we call it? Property, after all, is a useful, well-
| understood concept in law and custom, the kind of thing that a punter can
| get his head around without too much thinking.
|
| That's entirely true - and it's exactly why the phrase "intellectual
| property" is, at root, a dangerous euphemism that leads us to all sorts
| of faulty reasoning about knowledge. Faulty ideas about knowledge are
| troublesome at the best of times, but they're deadly to any country
| trying to make a transition to a "knowledge economy".
|
| Fundamentally, the stuff we call "intellectual property" is just
| knowledge - ideas, words, tunes, blueprints, identifiers, secrets,
| databases. This stuff is similar to property in some ways: it can be
| valuable, and sometimes you need to invest a lot of money and labour into
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/21/intellectual.property
|
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