Keith Hart on Fri, 29 Aug 2003 00:30:22 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> basic terms in the IP discusssion |
Felix, You have opened up a can of worms with these definitions which seem to float between universal usage and specific application to information. I have always found the introductory chapter of C.B. Macpherson ed Property (U. of Toronto Press, 1978), "The meaning of property", useful and enlightening. He distinguishes between common, private and state property rights. "Common property is created by the guarantee to each individual that he will not be excluded from the use or benefit of something; private property is created by the guarantee that an individual can exclude others from th euse or benefit of something. Both kinds of property, being guarantees to individual persons, are individual rights. In th ecase of private property, the right may, of course be held by an artificial person, that is, by a corporation or an unincorporated grouping created or recognized by the state as having the same (or similar) property rights as a natural individual....Corporate property is thus an extension of individual private property....State property consists of rights which the state has not only created but has kept for itself or has taken over from private individuals or corporations....[These] rights are akin to private property rights for they consist of th eright to the use and benefit, and the right to exclude others from the use and benefit of something. In effect, the state itself is taking and exercising the powers of a corporation: it is acting as an artificial person....State property, then, is to be classed as corporate property which is exclusive property, and not as common property, which is non-exclusive property. State property is an exclusive right of an artificial person." (pp. 5-6) We do not have to be bound by this discussion, which comes out of the political realist tradition rather than that of idealist philosophy, But it does point to the abiding confusion when a simple antinomy, public vs. private is applied to property rights in western societies. Its historical origin is in the second half of the nineteenth century when states where formed to manage industrial capitalism. These then created the legal basis for modern corporations, while granting them the common law rights of ordinary citizens, thereby allowing both parties to hold on to the rhetoric, but not the substance of the liberal revolutions.One can see how problematic the property forms of state socialism might be under these conditions and how misleading were the slogans that animated the Cold War. It is also relevant that these words cannot easily be abstracted from their own linguistic history. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the public is taken to be an extension of relations between private persons. Macpherson's interpretation reflects this. Whereas in most Continental European languages state-made law is held to be separate from the law of persons, giving rise to the use of two words (as in the Latin lex and ius) for the English one, It would not be surprising then if the idea of a public good would be different in these cultures. And so far we have not even stepped out of Europe and North America. How will standard definitions translate into Chinese, Arabic and Hindi? It would be good to extricate ourselves from this mess somehow, but it might take the talents of a Dr.Johnson to do so by means of a dictionary. Keith # 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