Patrice Riemens on Wed, 6 Oct 2004 14:21:32 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Reflections on Dan Hunter's Culture War |
(This is not meant as an overal review of Dan Hunter's article. I just want to highlight a few points that stroke me...) Dan Hunter's Culture War (Download from: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=586463) A very good and useful paper, immo, which has attracted some controversy I fail to understand. Of course, some criticism is possible, and I will attempt to share mine here. In his rendering of why IP has become so important in the 'new' economic regime, DH is, as the Dutch would say, 'going a bit sharp through the bend'(aka 'cutting corners';-) I do not think that it is the importance or even prevalence of 'intangibles' in our time that has given rise to the IP madness, whereas their lesser importance in a previous epoch made copyright etc. enforcement 'lite' and limited. I think that previously, proprietors were more pessimistic about protecting and enforcing their intangible assets, which Ronald Coase (1937) aptly called 'proprietary knowledge'. Their assumed inability to protect their proprietary knowledge, that is, to establish and extract an 'arm's length' price for it was, according to Coase, precisely what made firms opt for 'internal markets', aka 'internalisation' as opposed to 'open markets', this in turn explaining the growth of firms, both individually, and as a category(*). Now that intangibles are effectively protectible by law, seeing holders rush to establish an increasingly 'robust' IP regime comes as no surprise. To me, there is a strange parallel here with the privatisation drive of structurally unprofitable public goods and services, for instance public transport. What was once considered as unattractive to private enterprise becomes a highly enticing proposition once a financial construct, converting the operating loss in a (tenderable) subsidy, has worked its 'magic'. If the private operator is then able to make the loss less than the subsidy, a profit is 'created'. It is remarkable that the flanking argument in both cases (privatising knowledge and public transport) is 'efficiency', which of course obtains thanks to the 'socialising' of the externalities... There is another interesting parallel that may be noted in Dan Hunter's article when he discuss the public domain as a 'left-over' ("after all private interests have been allocated"), and it is with the relentless attacks on the welfare system. both public domain and welfare were 'traditionally' considered as a provision. Both are now seen - at their great expense - as a 'safety net', and driven to near-extinction as an 'anomaly'. Another flaw in Hunter's argument is the usual Anglo-saxon bias in his discussion of copyright's history, and hence of its juridico-philosophical tenets. The French concept (or is it Roman Law?) of 'droit d'auteur', i.e. the moral right next, and sometimes opposed to, commercial rights, is once more conspicuously absent. Yet its tribulations (also, but not exclusively, at the end of propertied lobbies and their political mignons) goes at great lengths to explain the current, almost farcical, internet regulation frenzy (in defence of the sacro-sanct 'droit d'auteur') that has seized France, and from there, threatens any international drive to delegitimize (and de-legalize) the current oppressive, IP regime. Ceterum Censeo... Along the same line as I advocate the systematic replacement of 'intellectual property' by 'proprietary knowledge ( a line that was criticised in nettime, but I have forgotten the argument ;-) I think that we should abandon the use of the word 'private'/ 'privatisation' and substitute 'corporate'/'corporatisation' for them since this is what we actually mean when talking about the seizure of our life by big transnational enterprises and their allies in government. That would defuse a considerable amount of fruitless controversy in our ranks, mostly centering around the interpretation of the libertarian position (and would incidentally free Lawrence Lessig of accusations of 'reformism' ;-) BTW, 'Marxist-Lessigism' should be written 'Marxism-Lessigism' ... .............. (*) Incidentally, Coase's seminal paper is mostly associated with his description of (the consequences of) transaction costs, and much less with the, immo far more important and now, also far more relevant, 'proprietary knowledge' part. And even less remembered is his assertion about the continuously growing transfer of incomes from households to firms - the very mechanism driving the 'corporatisation' of our world...) (R.Coase, The Nature of the Firm, ECONOMICA 4(1937) # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net