Owning the World of Ideas by Matthew David Debora Halbert

Author:Matthew David, Debora Halbert [Matthew David, Debora Halbert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies, Sociology, General, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781473927568
Google: WD9CCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: SAGE
Published: 2015-08-17T05:38:38+00:00

Conclusions

The interconnected world of global network capitalism affords both the new transnational media firms that press to regulate copyright longer, deeper and further, and the non-commercial networks of individual sharers that challenge them. Copyright law, which was once the preserve of inter-firm rivalry, is now being revised and applied to regulate the interactions between individuals, though the success of such attempts in practice remains limited. How copyright will evolve in the future remains to be seen, but as its scope has broadened geographically as well as conceptually, the future copyright battles will continue to pit corporate copyright owners against possible users and other creators. If the notion of IP becomes more widespread and more people begin to see their creations as their property, it is likely that there will be more battles between competing private rights claims, even as further disputes over the balance between private protection and public rights carry on apace. However, the emergence of political parties such as the Pirate Party, who oppose the threat posed by too much property regulation in the digital era, combined with the massive public and worldwide resistance to the most recent efforts to enhance corporate property rights globally, suggests that efforts to keep cultural creativity open to sharing, either legally or ‘illegally’, will remain on the agenda.

Global network capitalism is confronted by its own contradictions and by a global network society that seeks to extend global and digital affordances in ways that challenge a prioritizing of IP protection worldwide even as everyone else is pressed into greater competition one against another. IP extension by geography, look and feel, and over time confronts sharing that is everywhere, total and instantaneous. What is good for corporations is not good for the creators they claim to represent, and artists find common cause with audiences in resisting IP and engaging in new ways or in more direct (if older) ways (like live performance). Protection of IP involves the infringement of more rights than it upholds, and even the claim to be promoting and protecting creativity folds when sharers routinely outclass proprietary products, whether in arts or in computer programming. Even as global network capitalism erects a global infrastructure to protect its interests in controlling IP, it finds its worst and most powerful adversaries are its own individual consumers – empowered to bypass them by global networks and increasingly annoyed at being both ignoring as citizens in the formation of IP legislation while at the same time increasingly targeted by such laws.

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