> Can I intervene in this conversation to suggest that this is a case of
> people arguing past each other?
Almost certainly Yoshie and I argue past each other. The only think really debatable about that is which of us listens most poorly to the other.
> And that furthermore we haven't really
> gone
> past where we were a week ago when Doug was talking about the need for more
> 'theory' and Yoshie replied that the stuff Doug was talking about, she
> would
> call not 'theory' but 'thought'?
I don't see the difference at all, except that theory is recorded and usually more polished than most forms of thought and designed to be thought-as-object.
> What I really think is that Marxist principles are basic to understanding
> to
> what is going on with intellectual property today, but that if you want to
> understand the particular things that are going on with the allocation of
> ownership and revenue in a particular context you need to look at the
> forces
> are involved, try to specify who owns the means of production in a given
> case, and so on, and also distinguish between the situation at the
> not-yet-reached equilibrium, and the current situation which is very far
> from there. Furthermore, I think that Yoshie and Catherine would BOTH
> agree
> with this.
Yes, mostly, I guess. But only if those "principles" are an adaptable set of tools which aren't set in their relation to a specific structural model of, in this case, the exploitation of labour or the commodity.
I was suprised to the degree to which the question of whether an institution is invested in trying to own either IP commodities or the profits of IP vary according to different agendas, influences, and internal priorities. I was also surprised that almost no one involved in those negotiations didn't prioritise negotiating general IP policy principles in the favour of staff owning rights to their own IP and to any possible profits generated from it (and, though there was some ambivalence about this) the right not to seek to make profit from it. That is, it was more important to them to have an environment attractive to "the best" academics than to maximise their own profit directly from IP, and thus increase their competitive status (in terms of grants and students and postgrad completions and attracting corporate sponsors). So it is about competition and about money, but in a way which sees making profit out of IP as a secondary and even dispensable thing.
> When Catherine challenges Yoshie to demonstrate that Marxist theory is
> "utterly sufficient to contemporary IP", I think she is rhetorically
> challenging Yoshie to do something that Yoshie is not called upon to do. I
> don't think that anybody thinks Marxist theory is "utterly sufficient" to
> ANYTHING if it means that you don't need to own any books except Capital,
> for example.
I've obviously been unclear in those posts because several people have thought I was arguing this, but I think nothing of the sort. There doesn't seem much point rehashing again the she said I said thing. But you're probably right that we're not having much of a conversation -- I find it hard to get anything from Yoshie's positions, which always seem to be some kind of board game between people she likes and people she doesn't (on and off the page). The claim that Marxist theory never needs to be challenged or to change seems to me really counterproductive. It frankly makes no sense to me. I can't see why anyone would be interested in it if that were the case.
Catherine
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