IP in China

Rob Schaap rws at comserver.canberra.edu.au
Tue Jan 12 12:00:31 PST 1999


Copyright is a tough one. It need not necessarily be taken as the expression of the commodification of information - although that's what it usually is in the west. One has to insist on the right to communicate only with those with whom one wants to communicate. Else our communications would look very different, and much would go unsaid. In this sense copyright may be seen as an enabler of communications rather than a constraint.

But our material relations decide what copyright must primarily mean, and our relations are ever more mediated by the commodity, so the primary reason for witholding information becomes commercial, and we have one notion (less than 300 years old, so coeval with the ascendance of capitalism) trying to do two different, ultimately opposite, jobs. It's there both to liberate communications and stomp on it, it seems.

It seems to me that privacy, without a certain degree of which we can not be the autonomous citizens upon which our order is theoretically based, is fast becoming something capable of formal protection only through intellectual property rights. We'd then have to uphold the notion of property to claim our right to privacy, without which we can not enjoy the rights of citizens. And that's a terrible problem.

And although it is problematic (information must ever constitute a component of the means of production - just consider Taylorism and its attempt to part the real producers from the information necessary to the strategy of production), I do see a crucial point in the proposition that:

"Marx talks about public ownership of the means of production," he says. "That doesn't mean everything belongs to everyone."

As Henry says (I've only just spotted his post), private ownership of logically public property should be stopped. Is all communication logically public? Only for those who would claim we are *exhaustively* public creatures, for we effectively *are* our communication, and nothing in us would then belong to us as individuals. We would entirely belong to a constructed whole that would necessarily be taking a very worrying form. No?

I do confess to a significant sense of confusion around these categories ...

Cheers, Rob.



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