<nettime> [monica@sarai.net: Contested Commons, Trespassing Publics: A Public Record]

[nettime@bbs.thing.net, Monica Narula <monica@sarai.net>]

Contested Commons, Trespassing Publics: A Public Record
Available for free download at www.sarai.net/events/ip_conf/ip_conf.htm

A rapporteur's account of the Contested Commons conference (6-8 January 2005,
Delhi), along with a range of interviews, links a wide spectrum of political,
social and cultural issues embedded in "the property question". It deconstructs
the capital-driven processes of enclosure in the contexts of software,
file-sharing, patents, biopiracy, Indigenous knowledge, cyber art, virtual
exchange, literary history, theology and law, among others.

Varied voices explore new paradigms of practice in relation to the global
intellectual property regime, its enforcement as well as its violation and
subversion by a compelling array of resilient figures.  These include the hacker,
the pirate, the solitary "genius", the reformer, the artist, the prisoner, the
heretic, the thief, the "transformative" author, the theorist, the migrant, the
vendor, the critic, the aesthete, the scribe, the citizen, the tenant, the worker,
the chairman, the rebel, the coder, the squatter, the inventor, the farmer, the
smuggler, the spectator, the judge...

This detailed account describes the radical contemporary shifts in the production,
distribution and consumption of cultural materials through the networks of digital
media.  It complicates the meaning of "community", and narrates how technology
continues to enable an unprecedented levelling of exclusionary hierarchies and
hegemonies all over the world.

Paperback, 170 pp, Euro 10, US$ 10

Monica Narula
Raqs Media Collective
Sarai-CSDS
29 Rajpur Road
Delhi 110 054
www.raqsmediacollective.net
www.sarai.net




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