Ned Rossiter on Mon, 14 Oct 2002 13:45:48 +0200 (CEST) |
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RE: <nettime> Dark Markets: Whose Democracy? |
> >This helps me articulate much of what I find troubling about Ned >Rossiter's concept of cultural IP: Once you define a culture so >rigidly as to set it into law, how does culture change? Culture changes because it cannot be reduced to law. Of course. Among other things, it consists of a complex dynamic between the production of meaning/s and regimes of practices embedded in sociotechnical settings and institutional realities. Right, got the 101 out the way... IPRs, as my paper makes some effort to point out, cannot be considered in isolation, but need to be considered in relation to specific actors and their various needs and interests. My examples consisted of developing states and indigenous peoples, for starters. As such, the discussion of IP in this instance would perhaps benefit by taking such factors into account. > >I suppose this is in general my major qualm with any sorts of >arguments that fall to hard on the side of power stemming from >cultural ownership -- Precisely!! Power for exploitative TNCs, or economically and political marginalised peoples at the source of production? Not such a hard choice is it? Power is never going to go away... >cultures change and shift, often creating new fascinating cultures >in the process. As they always will. Advanced economies are laden with IPRs - would you consider their cultures as static? Probably not... >I'm deeply in love with the effects of diaspora and miscegenation, hmmm, I enjoy the diversity of consumption and the sensation of affect that comes with cultural intermingling as well... >and I have a hard time with intellectual scheme that downplay such >dynamics because they're conceptually inconvenient. My argument never states that networks [dynamics] of "sharing" cannot continue in "informal" ways (see endnote 16) at translocal levels. Or that culture becomes static. My argument is based around the problematic of economic and political self-determination by those who need and want it. IPRs, as far as I can understand (in very basic ways, I'll be right upfront about that) seem to offer that possibility. I'm still far from convinced by arguments put forth by cyber-libertarians/open source folks contesting this... in fact, they are not arguments, but assertions, wild claims and head-in-the-sand stances to complex issues and problems. Lachlan just unpacked some the key hypocrisies and underpinning political economic forces shaping the c-l position. I'd find it very helpful if anyone could point me in directions that: 1. suggest real, viable alternative economic models indigenous peoples and those in developing states might pursue 2. how this impacts upon the state and concepts of democracy formation 3. what sort of international/national courts pack the weight to pursue violations to indigenous IP (a point I remember Ted Byfield raising earlier in the year) I don't think any of us on this list, to my knowledge, has tabled much about the complexities and diversity of TRIPS. Soenke has pointed to some of the alternatives being pursued within that framework, and indeed, to my knowledge, indigenous peoples are pursuing these alternatives at the level of interventions in international and national law and policy formation regarding proprietary ownership of cultural production and biological knowledge. Nettime would become a different world if it opened its dialogues up to these endeavours. Otherwise it's just a ghetto of smug self-satisfaction (on these sorts of issues)... Ned # 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