Knowledge, ownership (and technology)

IT, Globalization and Culture 2013

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09:00-11:00 Lecture on ownership and property11:00-11:15 Online evaluation (see your email)11:15-12:00 Campaign follow-up12:30-14:00 Peer response on essay 514:00-16:00 Guest lecture on virtual teams (Carsten Østerlund, Syracuse

Program

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What are the key terms?

-Ownership-Property (including IPR)-Possession-Commons-‘Identity’ (social, cultural, personal)

How are these important culturally, globally and in terms of specific technologies?

The key terms

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The origins of ‘the possessive individual’

•John Locke – the water in the stream versus the water in the pot

•What makes something ‘property’?

- Labor- Adding value- Entitlement to one’s ‘own

products’

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Post-industrial society and the service/knowledge economy (e.g. Bell, Harvey, Giddens, Beck, Bauman, Castells etc.)

E.g. leads to …-Manufacturing replaced by services-Centrality of science in industry-New elites and forms of stratification

From modernity to postmodernity?

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Sharing versus keeping (Harrison, Barth)

•The Melanesian cult

- Secret/with-holding- The more it is shared the less

valuable it is- Knowledge as a

limited/scarce resource- Knowledge defining for

identity/value

•The Balinese priest

- Mission/expansion- The more who know it, the

more valuable it is- Knowledge is infinite good -

can be given without loosing it

- Knowledge detached from identity/value??

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Forms of property – e.g. canoe prows

• Property as what one owns (as in possession)

• Property as skill (ability, quality)• Distinguishes between transfer of

usufruct rights and ownership• Distinguishes between the

intellectual property and the material product

• Requires mechanisms of protection (against piracy)

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Copyright is a form of protection provided to the authors of "original works of authorship" including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works, both published and unpublished. The 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right to reproduce the copyrighted work, to prepare derivative works, to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work, to perform the copyrighted work publicly, or to display the copyrighted work publicly.

The copyright protects the form of expression rather than the subject matter of the writing. For example, a description of a machine could be copyrighted, but this would only prevent others from copying the description; it would not prevent others from writing a description of their own or from making and using the machine. Copyrights are registered by the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress.

Copyright

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A patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by the Patent and Trademark Office. The term of a new patent is 20 years from the date on which the application for the patent was filed in the United States or, in special cases, from the date an earlier related application was filed, subject to the payment of maintenance fees. US patent grants are effective only within the US, US territories, and US possessions.

The right conferred by the patent grant is, in the language of the statute and of the grant itself, "the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling" the invention in the United States or "importing" the invention into the United States. What is granted is not the right to make, use, offer for sale, sell or import, but the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention.

Patent

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A trademark is a word, name, symbol or device which is used in trade with goods to indicate the source of the goods and to distinguish them from the goods of others. A servicemark is the same as a trademark except that it identifies and distinguishes the source of a service rather than a product. The terms "trademark" and "mark" are commonly used to refer to both trademarks and servicemarks.

Trademark rights may be used to prevent others from using a confusingly similar mark, but not to prevent others from making the same goods or from selling the same goods or services under a clearly different mark. Trademarks which are used in interstate or foreign commerce may be registered with the Patent and Trademark Office. The registration procedure for trademarks and general information concerning trademarks is described in a separate pamphlet entitled "Basic Facts about Trademarks".

Trademark

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CopyrightPatentTrademark

Why the difference?

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Harrison: different forms exist in parallel …

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Fights over Intellectual Property Rights

• ACTA – protection of ownership versus privacy and freedom of expression

• Incentive to produce ideas versus permission to disseminate and share their products?

• What about ‘cultural property’?• What about ‘democracy’?• What about human lives?

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- Non-commercial economy- Economy of status (‘symbolic capital’ – Bourdieu 1986)- ‘Gift-economy’ (Mauss 1990)- Gift is an extension of the self of the donor …- You extend your name and fame via your work (cf.

Miller on Facebook)- Relies on mutual trust, lack of ‘accounting’ (of time,

money, other quantities)- Possession by one is not dispossession of the other

But what about free, open source software?

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I.e. value is that which has future potential?

Strathern: what does it take to make something property? … must be produced in specific (new) form-Application of technology-Prior labor (from author’s writing, to parent’s child)-Which form is it? (breaking down in infinity, more and more becomes object to ownership …e.g. the body versus bodily processes or building blocks)

Potential property (Strathern)

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‘Neither property nor people’

Only potential to become children … they lack intrinsic value to either party on their own

Who is the mother in case of conflict between ‘genetic consanguinity’ and ‘giving birth’?-mother by ‘intent’ or ‘thought’,-by being ‘the cause’ of the child,-the child is an extension of the creator’s self? -Problem: this does treat child as property (but a child cannot be sold or given free to the public)

To have rights in persons as property (Strathern)

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What property relations are at stake?

Ideal is free knowledge (for all)From elite to mass universityCommercialization of science products and ideas(Payment of tuition, taking of patents on research, sponsorship from external foundations … should unis produce patents or free knowledge?)

The university sector – free or commercial?

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How is ownership (of tangible or intangible goods) managed or controlled in different ways?

-Distribution and sharing versus keeping secret-What are the available forms for ownership, and what owners/authors impact on each?-‘Keeping’ while ‘giving’ (Weiner 1992)-New commons become subject to ownership

Concluding statements

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Barth, F. 2002. On your reading list.Bourdieu, P. 1986. The Forms of Capital. In Richardson (ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York, pp. 241-258.Mauss, M. 1990 (1925). The Gift. Oxford.Rosa, H. (2013). Social Acceleration. New York.Weiner, A. 1992. Inalienable Possessions. Berkeley.

(on law see http://www.lawmart.com/forms/difference.htm)

Further references

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