ISHTIP http://www.ishtip.org International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property (ISHTIP) Mon, 06 Sep 2010 12:24:50 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 ISHTIP Workshop 2010 – programme http://www.ishtip.org/?p=106 http://www.ishtip.org/?p=106#comments Thu, 26 Aug 2010 02:57:23 +0000 admin http://www.ishtip.org/?p=106 Read More]]>

Second Annual ISHTIP Workshop

Geographies of Intellectual Property

American University, Washington, D.C.
24-25 September 2010

The programme for the Workshop is now available.

>> Programme <<

Friday, Sept. 24

Saturday, Sept. 25

]]> http://www.ishtip.org/?feed=rss2&p=106 0 ISHTIP Workshop – participants http://www.ishtip.org/?p=144 http://www.ishtip.org/?p=144#comments Wed, 25 Aug 2010 06:26:22 +0000 admin http://www.ishtip.org/?p=144 Read More]]>

Notes on the Participants of the 2010 ISHTIP workshop.

Sara Bannerman is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow with the Centre for Governance of Knowledge and Development, a part of the Regulatory Institutions Network (RegNet) at the Australian National University in Canberra. She has written a history of Canadian international copyright (UBC Press, forthcoming) and is currently working on a comparative history of international copyright focused on middle powers.

Lionel Bently is the Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law, and Director of the Centre of Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge. He is particularly interested in the history of intellectual property law in Great Britain and its then colonies during the 18th and 19th centuries. He was, with Martin Kretschmer, responsible for organising the AHRC-funded web resource, Primary Sources on Copyright (www.copyrighthistory.org) He is co-author, with Brad Sherman, of The Making of Modern Intellectual Property Law: The British Experience, 1760-1911 (Cambridge, 1999). Other recent research projects have examined the history of trademarks in the UK between 1850 and 1900, Anglo-Indian Copyright relations 1840-1912, and 18th century publishing contracts in England. He is a founding director of ISHTIP.

Maurizio Borghi, BA, PhD, is Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law at Brunel University, London. Prior to joining Brunel Dr. Borghi has been a post-doctoral research fellow at Bocconi University and a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society of the University of California, Berkeley. His research activity focuses primarily on digital copyright, as well as on theoretical and historical aspects of intellectual property law. He has authored a monograph on the genealogy of copyright in Italy, La manifattura del pensiero (Milan: 2003), and edited a book on digital copyright, Proprietà digitale (Milan: 2005, with Maria Lillà Montagnani). He has published extensively on the topics of philosophy, copyright law and new media.

Oren Bracha is Professor of Law at the University of Texas School of Law. He received his LL.B. from the Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law in 1998 and his S.J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2005. Bracha is a legal historian and an intellectual property law scholar. He has published articles on the history of intellectual property, copyright law, and internet law. His forthcoming book Owning Ideas is an intellectual history of American intellectual property law in the nineteenth century. Bracha was a law clerk for Chief Justice Aharon Barak of the Supreme Court of Israel. During his time at Harvard Law School he worked on various projects for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. His fields of interest and scholarship include intellectual property, cyberlaw, legal history, and legal theory.

Rosemary J. Coombe is Tier One Canada Research Chair in Law, Communication, and Culture at York University in Toronto. She received her doctorate at Stanford University in 1992, where she was trained in anthropology and in law. She teaches in the Communication and Culture graduate program. Her award-winning book The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties was published in 1998 and reprinted in 2008. Her current research focuses on the global proliferation of cultural claims under conditions shaped by informational capital and the intersections of neoliberalism, indigeneity, and human rights. A complete list of her publications may be found at http://www.yorku.ca/rcoombe.

Ronan Deazley is Professor of Law at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of On the Origin of the Right to Copy: Charting the Movement of Copyright in Eighteenth Century Britain, 1695-1775 (Hart Publishing, 2004) and Rethinking Copyright: History, Theory, Language (Edward Elgar, 2006 and 2008).

Peter Decherney is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (Columbia UP, 2005) and many articles on the Hollywood film industry, the history of media regulation, and fair use and academia. He has recently completed a new book on the history and future of Hollywood and copyright law. Among other awards, he was named a 2009 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Scholar and a 2010-2011 American Council of Learned Societies Fellow.

Abraham Drassinower is Associate Professor and Chair in the Legal, Ethical and Cultural Implications of Technological Innovation at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. He joined the Faculty of Law in 1999 and served as Director of the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy from 2006 to 2009.  His interests include property, intellectual property, legal and political philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. He has published in the areas of charitable trusts, unjust enrichment, intellectual property, and psychoanalysis and political theory.  His current work is focused on developing a rights-based account of the public domain in copyright law.
Christophe Geiger is Associate Professor, Director General and Director of the research department of the Centre for International Intellectual Property Studies (CEIPI) at the University of Strasbourg (France). He is also associated senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law in Munich (Germany), where he was until 2008 in charge of the Department “France and French-Speaking African countries”. He specializes in national, European, international and comparative copyright and intellectual property law and takes part in national and international conferences. He has published numerous articles on copyright and intellectual property law.
Johanna Gibson is Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law and Director of the Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute in the Centre for Commercial Law Studies at the Queen Mary University of London. Her books include Community Resources: Intellectual Property, International Trade and Protection of Traditional Knowledge (Ashgate 2005), Creating Selves: Intellectual Property and the Narration of Culture (Ashgate 2006), and Intellectual Property, Medicine and Health: Current Debates (Ashgate 2009).
Wendy J. Gordon is the Philips S. Beck Professor of Law at Boston University Law School. Her work focuses on the ethical and economic analysis of the various legal regimes regulating information and expression. A former Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Oxford and Fulbright Scholar, she has twice served as Chair of the Section on Intellectual Property for the Association of American Law Schools. Her more than three dozen articles include “Render Copyright Unto Caesar” (University of Chicago Law Review),  “Fair Use as Market Failure” (Columbia Law Review), “On Owning Information” (Virginia Law Review), “A Property Right in Self-Expression” (Yale Law Journal), “An Inquiry into the Merits of Copyright” (Stanford Law Review), and the chapter “Intellectual Property Law” in the Oxford Handbook on Legal Studies.

Debora Halbert is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa where she teaches public policy, law and society and futures studies. She is the author of Intellectual Property in the Information Age: The Politics of Expanding Ownership Rights and Resisting Intellectual Property, along with numerous articles on issues related to intellectual property. She is currently working on a third book focusing on the politics of copyright and creativity. Email: halbert@hawaii.edu.

Peter Jaszi directs the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic at the American University School of Law. He is a coauthor of Copyright Law (Lexis, 8th ed., 2010) and a coeditor (with Martha Woodmansee) of The Construction of Authorship (Duke University Press, 1994). In 2004, he helped organize the Digital Future Coalition, and in 2007 he received the American Library Association’s L. Ray Patterson Copyright Award. Since 2005 he has been working with Patricia Aufderheide to promote understanding of fair use by creative communities. In 2006–2007 he led a research team funded by the Ford Foundation on the connections between intellectual property law and the traditional arts in Indonesia.

Adrian Johns is Professor of History and Chair of the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (University of Chicago Press, 2009), The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (University of Chicago Press, 1998), and Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Origins of the Information Age (W. W. Norton, 2010). He has written widely on the histories of intellectual property, science, reading, and the book.

Stavroula Karapapa a law graduate of the University of Athens and holds LL.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Intellectual Property Law from Brunel University. Her research interests mainly focus on digital copyright, and in particular on the intersection of copyright law with technological change. Through her doctoral thesis, she determines the scope of legitimate private copying in the digital world. Currently, she is a practising lawyer at the Athens Bar.

Jeongoh Kim is a Lecturer in British literature at Vanderbilt University where he recently completed his Ph.D. He is interested in the relationship between landed property and copyright as a critical convergence of the turnpike law and literary history, and anticipates expanding his research to include the geographical practices of literary property, circulation, and ownership more generally. He is working on a book provisionally titled Cultural Geographies of Literary Imagination: Place, Identity, and Authorship in 18th and 19th Century England.

David Lametti is an Associate Professor of Law, McGill University, a member of the Institute of Comparative Law, and of the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy (CIPP). He teaches and writes in the areas of Civil and Common law property, intellectual property and legal theory. His work to date has attempted to understand the parameters of traditional and intellectual resources in analytic terms, linking them to their underlying justifications and ethical goals. His most recent representative publications are “The Concept of Property: Relations through Objects of Social Wealth” (in the University of Toronto Law Journal), and “Coming to Terms with Copyright” (in a collection published by Irwin Law).

Orly Lobel is the Herzog Endowed Scholar and Professor of Law at the University of San Diego. She writes and teaches in the areas of employment law, IP, trade secrets, regulation, and behavioral and organizational theory. She is currently working on a book on innovation and employment intellectual property, Innovation’s Edge: Human Capital and Intellectual Property Law at Work (under contract with Yale UP). She is a co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Labor and Employment Law and Economics (Elgar 2009) and a 2010-2011 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Fellow, researching risk perceptions, judgment and decision-making.

Doris Estelle Long is Professor of Law and Chair of the IP, IT and Privacy Group at The John Marshall Law School, Chicago. She has lectured in 31 countries on five continents and served as a consultant on IPR issues for diverse US and foreign government agencies, including as attorney advisor in the Office of Legislative and International Affairs of the USPTO. She was a Fulbright Professor in Shanghai and is the author of numerous books and articles in the area of intellectual property law.  Before joining the faculty, Professor Long was an attorney with the Washington, D.C. law firms of Arent Fox Kintner Plotkin & Kahn, and Howrey and Simon.

Luca Molà is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the History of Innovation and Creativity at the University of Warwick. His research interests focus on the history of the Italian Renaissance, on the economic and social history of Europe in the early modern period — particularly trading communities and commerce, artisans and industrial production, and the culture of technological change – and on the first age of globalization. His books include La comunità dei lucchesi a Venezia: Immigrazione e industria della seta nel tardo Medioevo (Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti 1994) and The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice (Johns Hopkins University Press 2000).

Marc Perlman, an ethnomusicologist specializing in the musical traditions of Indonesia, has published and taught on the psychology of music, the history and ethnography of music theory, the variety of musical taste cultures, and the cultural impact of music technology. He received a Mellon New Directions Fellowship to spend 2007-2008 studying intellectual property law at Washington College of Law (American University) and Boalt Hall School of Law (University of California, Berkeley). He is currently observing the worldwide movement to enact legal protection for traditional music, focusing on developments in Indonesia and at the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Dwijen Rangnekar is a Research Councils UK Academic Fellow at the University of Warwick, with a joint appointment in the School of Law and the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation. His recent work has been in the area of geographical indications – in part through a fieldwork-based research project funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (www.warwick.ac.uk/go/feni). He has recently guest edited a special issue on GIs for the Journal of World Intellectual Property and is working on a monograph that is tentatively titled Re-Making Place: The Social Construction of Geographical Indications.

Katie Scott teaches the history of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.  Her research interests relate to questions of commercialisation in artistic practice in early modern France, ranging from the representation of trade, to the invention of designed instruments for the furtherance of trade, such as trade cards and advertisements, to the institution of rules of practice and exchange; that is, copy privileges in art and industry.  She is currently working on a book provisionally titled Becoming property: art, theory and law in early modern France.

Jessica Silbey’s scholarship engages in a cultural analysis of law. One of her interests is the interdiscipline of law and film, exploring how film is used as a legal tool and how it becomes an object of legal analysis in light of its history as a cultural object and art form. She is also currently working on a series of articles about intellectual property, investigating common and conflicting narratives within legal institutions and private organizations that explain intellectual property protection in the US. She is especially interested in the connections between narratives of creation, discovery, incentive and labor and their legal counterparts in cases, statutes and litigation. She received her B.A. from Stanford University and her J.D. and Ph.D. (Comparative Literature) from the University of Michigan. Before joining the faculty of Suffolk University Law School, Jessica was a litigator in Boston. She also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Robert E. Keeton on the United States District Court and to the Honorable Levin Campbell on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Will Slauter studies the history of authorship and publishing, with a particular interest in journalism. His PhD dissertation at Princeton explored the phenomenon of international news in the 18th-century Atlantic World. He has taught at Columbia University and at Florida State University, where he was a member of the program in the History of Text Technologies. He has recently joined the faculty of Université Paris 8-Saint Denis. His current research focuses on journalism and intellectual property in the United States from the 18th century to the present.

Simon Stern is an assistant professor in the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.  He completed his Ph.D. in English at UC Berkeley, and his J.D at Yale.  His research on the history of copyright law includes “Tom Jones and the Economies of Copyright,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9 (1997): 429-44; and “Copyright, Originality, and the Public Domain in Eighteenth-Century England” in Reginald McGinnis, ed., Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment (Routledge 2008).  He also writes on the history of English common law and English literary history.

Eva E. Subotnik is an Intellectual Property Fellow at the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts at Columbia Law School, working on copyright law and policy issues applicable to the visual arts, sound recordings, and other media.  She is currently working on an article, Originality Proxies (forthcoming, Brooklyn Law Review), about originality and authorship in the context of photography, and on an ethnographic study of the role of copyright as an incentive among photojournalists.  Before joining the Kernochan Center she was an associate at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, where she worked on IP matters, and a law clerk to the Honorable Bruce M. Selya, of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and to the Honorable Alvin K. Hellerstein, of the Southern District of New York. Eva received her B.A. and J.D. from Columbia University

Matthias Wießner is a doctoral student at the DFG-Graduate School “Intellectual Property and the Public Domain,” University of Bayreuth, and at the Research Academy, University of Leipzig, Graduate Centre in Humanities and Social Sciences, International PhD Study Programme “Transnationalization and Regionalization from the 18th Century to the Present.” He received his MA in History at the University of Leipzig with a thesis on “Reading Societies in Leipzig around 1800.” His current research is on the history of intellectual property rights in the GDR, including copyright law and patent law.

Eva Hemmungs Wirtén is Professor in Library- and Information Science at Uppsala University, Sweden. Author of No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization (2004) and Terms of Use: Negotiating the Jungle of the Intellectual Commons (2008), her research interests include international copyright and the history of the public domain. She is currently completing three articles on copyright and translation and a chapter in a forthcoming volume devoted to Intellectual Property and Emerging Biotechnologies.  Her new book will be on The Intellectual Properties of Marie Curie. The project is part of the consortium CULTIVATE (Copyrighting Creativity: Creative Values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property), funded by HERA 2010-13. Website: http://www.abm.uu.se/evahw.

Martha Woodmansee is a Professor of English and Law at Case Western Reserve University. From 1990 to 2008 she was Director of the Society for Critical Exchange, and is a founding director of ISHTIP. She has published widely at the intersection of aesthetics, economics, and the law. Her books include The Author, Art, and the Market (Columbia University Press, 1994), The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (with Peter Jaszi, Duke University Press, 1994), The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics (with Mark Osteen, Routledge, 1999), and the forthcoming Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property (with Mario Biagioli and Peter Jaszi, University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Zac Zimmer is presently completing his PhD dissertation on “Utopia and Commons: Place, Non-Place, and the American Blank Slate” in the Romance Studies Department at Cornell University. His research interests include Latin American literature, technologies of authorship, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. He can be reached at zac.zimmer@gmail.com.

]]> http://www.ishtip.org/?feed=rss2&p=144 0 Protected: ISHTIP Workshop – downloads http://www.ishtip.org/?p=216 http://www.ishtip.org/?p=216#comments Mon, 23 Aug 2010 14:15:44 +0000 Maurizio Borghi http://www.ishtip.org/?p=216

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:


]]> http://www.ishtip.org/?feed=rss2&p=216 0 Zac Zimmer http://www.ishtip.org/?p=171 http://www.ishtip.org/?p=171#comments Tue, 10 Aug 2010 06:45:06 +0000 admin http://www.ishtip.org/?p=171 Read More]]>

Zac Zimmer,

“Commons: Copyleft as Training Ground”

In order to advance our thinking about the commons, we are faced with two needed and interrelated theoretical tasks: 1) to connect the recent enthusiasm around alternative models of intellectual property regimes–broadly grouped under the general concepts of copyleft and the creative commons–to the ur-historical struggle centered around the idea of enclosure (simply: the process of erasing the commons); 2) to move beyond US Constitutional Law-based critiques of the contemporary IP regime to an authentically global consideration of the implications of the contemporary enclosure of the immaterial world. The fundamental question is: what is the nature of human creativity, and what can it teach us about our concept of property, both intellectual and otherwise? In this sense, I would like to ask the question of the “geography of intellectual property” by connecting

the metaphorical use of the term “commons” in current IP debates to the radical history of struggle over land, commons, and enclosure. Asking this question will, I hope, create an opening through which the true history of the concept of the commons as a claim of radical inclusion can animate the current debate surrounding digital enclosures.

]]> http://www.ishtip.org/?feed=rss2&p=171 0 Matthias Wießner http://www.ishtip.org/?p=169 http://www.ishtip.org/?p=169#comments Tue, 10 Aug 2010 06:44:27 +0000 admin http://www.ishtip.org/?p=169 Read More]]>

Matthias Wießner,

“The German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the International Copyright Regime”

East German politicians had to decide if the 1949-founded GDR should continue to be a member of the Berne Convention. The occupying power, the Soviet Union, refused participation in the multilateral Berne Convention. This raised the question of whether the GDR should follow the Soviet example. But if the GDR wanted to join the world economic scene, intellectual property law was also necessary for cultural and business relations, namely book trade with foreign countries.

In 1955, the GDR government gave diplomatic notice that the Berne Convention was “again applicable”, thus reviving the membership of the former German Empire by choosing a policy contrary to the Soviet Union. On the basis of international non-recognition of the GDR and the “Hallstein Doctrine” of West-Germany, most members of the Berne Convention declined to acknowledge the GDR declaration. Neither did the international office of the Berne Convention accept an official member status of the GDR despite its formal policy concerning the extension of the geographical reach of the convention. As the GDR did not receive any recognition other than from members of the Soviet bloc, its existence as a state was hardly ever accepted in the eyes of international law until the “Ostpolitik” of Chancellor Willi Brandt led to normalization of relations between the two Germanies. It was in the 1970s that the GDR was slowly accepted by an increasing number of Convention members.

The internationalization of cultural goods and copyright forced GDR-politicians to think and act beyond a purely national perspective and short-term political interests. The western-dominated International Copyright Regime remained the ultimate reference, even for the GDR.

]]> http://www.ishtip.org/?feed=rss2&p=169 0 Simon Stern http://www.ishtip.org/?p=167 http://www.ishtip.org/?p=167#comments Tue, 10 Aug 2010 06:43:25 +0000 admin http://www.ishtip.org/?p=167 Read More]]>

Simon Stern,

“From Author’s Right to Property Right”

This paper examines the arguments developed in eighteenth-century England for regarding copyright as a property right.  The Act of Anne (1710) uses the language of property sparingly, speaking of protection for “authors and proprietors of . . . books and writings,” and explaining the need to safeguard “property in every . . . book” to which the statute applies.  As Ronan Deazley has noted, the original draft of the statute was thoroughly drenched in proprietary language that the drafters minimized (On the Origin, 41).  The statute thus created the possibility of conceiving copyright in terms of rights, duties, or actions that need not be mapped onto a view of the text (or copy) as a form of property.

Commentators generally agreed that authors were entitled to decide whether and how to publish.  This most fundamental author’s right was set out by advocates of the Act of Anne (the author “has certainly a Right to choose the Hand by which he will convey his Work to the Publick”), by Blackstone (the author has a “right to dispose of [the] . . . work as he pleases”), and by De Grey C.J. in Donaldson (the author has the “sole Right to dispose of his Manuscript as he thinks proper,” but no “Right or Property . . . detached from [the] Manuscript”).  This paper will explore how this premise, concerning authorial control, was developed in proprietary terms, rather than supporting a view of copyright as protecting reputation or privacy.

]]> http://www.ishtip.org/?feed=rss2&p=167 0 Will Slauter http://www.ishtip.org/?p=165 http://www.ishtip.org/?p=165#comments Tue, 10 Aug 2010 06:42:32 +0000 admin http://www.ishtip.org/?p=165 Read More]]>

Will Slauter,

“How News Becomes Property”

Periodicals devoted to current events have been around since the beginning of the 17th century, and the first copyright statutes appeared in the 18th century, when many of our most fundamental ideas about authorship and ownership took shape. Yet no news writer or publisher seriously claimed a property in news reports until the middle of the 19th century. As the geography of news in America shifted from a decentralized model in which newspapers exchanged news with each other to a centralized model in which press agencies contracted with individual papers around the country, newspaper proprietors sought legal remedies against news piracy. They argued that news—the factual details of reports as well as their literary expression—could be owned. The attitudes of editors also changed during the 19th century, but most of them remained uninterested in finding a legal remedy for what they saw as an ethical problem—the need to give “credit where it is due.” Studying journalistic practice alongside case law reveals a basic distinction between news editors, who tended to claim that copying was beneficial to a democratic society because it enabled the news to spread, and business managers, who sought protection against competitors in order to guarantee a return on investment.

]]> http://www.ishtip.org/?feed=rss2&p=165 0 Katie Scott http://www.ishtip.org/?p=163 http://www.ishtip.org/?p=163#comments Tue, 10 Aug 2010 06:41:54 +0000 admin http://www.ishtip.org/?p=163 Read More]]>

Katie Scott,

“Mapping Plagiarism in a Regime of Privilege”

The charge of plagiarism dispenses with the calendar and substitutes the map.  It takes a moral position in relation to artistic idea, arguably judging it always already an inalienable possession.  The passage of time does not lessen the crime.  Rather plagiarism operates and is identified by forms of mapping: by the process of appropriative tracing or re-tracing of forms and by a mental mapping of point to point correspondences which leads to the recognition of repetition.  However, not all copies are plagiaries; their classification as such is historically contingent.  This paper asks whether, and in what ways the practices of the copy in the visual arts (painting, sculpture and printmaking) and charges of plagiarism were shaped by an increasingly conspicuous and efficacious regime of copy-privilege in France during the ancien régime.  It further considers the extent to which emergent notions of copyright may have been informed by plagiarism: both its discourses and its practices.

]]> http://www.ishtip.org/?feed=rss2&p=163 0 Dwijen Rangnekar http://www.ishtip.org/?p=161 http://www.ishtip.org/?p=161#comments Tue, 10 Aug 2010 06:41:23 +0000 admin http://www.ishtip.org/?p=161 Read More]]>

Dwijen Rangnekar,

“Re-Making Place: The Social Construction of a Geographical Indication for Feni”

A range of social movements mobilise around and seek to valorise ‘place-based’ imageries. There is, these movements argue, vitality in place. And this constitutes a crucial element of critiques of power/globalisation. As anthropologists remind us, people continue to construct some form of boundaries around place, however permeable and transient those boundaries might be. In the context of global agrifood, socially generated marks indicating conditions of origin have emerged that speak to a different set of moral economies. In this constellation Geographical Indications appears as a remarkable place-based intellectual property. The paper seeks to appreciate GIs as the juridical reification of a placed-based stabilisation of cultural norms. However, rather than idealise GIs, the paper also probes a ‘politics in place’. This is achieved through a fieldwork-based case study of the recently acquired GI for Feni. The paper juxtaposes accounts and observations on Feni distilling with the specifications that constitute the GI. In explaining the social construction of authenticity that sediment in the registered GI, the paper draws attention to the exclusionary effects of this translation of a cultural object into intellectual property. Enabling the GI are the dual rhetoric that animates global and local discourse on GIs: one a rhetoric of hope that is enveloped by a seduction of plenty (exports) and the other a rhetoric of fear that is constitutive of a threat of misappropriation (e.g. Basmati).

]]> http://www.ishtip.org/?feed=rss2&p=161 0 Marc Perlman http://www.ishtip.org/?p=159 http://www.ishtip.org/?p=159#comments Tue, 10 Aug 2010 06:40:14 +0000 admin http://www.ishtip.org/?p=159 Read More]]>

Marc Perlman,

“Should There Be Property Rights in Folklore? Surveying the Intellectual Landscape of the Debate”

Along with the drive to expand intellectual property rights, a movement is underway to propertize traditional culture (folklore). Both initiatives have provoked counter-arguments. But while criticism of the extension of IP rights has been forcefully articulated, opposition to the propertization of folklore has been comparatively scattered and unfocussed.

In this paper I map the intellectual terrain of the dispute over the ownership of folklore. The opposition takes several forms in various contexts (informal, legal, diplomatic, political, academic). Many legal laypersons reject the idea on a near-visceral level. IP attorneys often see it as incompatible with the principles of copyright. Some anthropologists and legal scholars decry it as hypostatizing the concepts of ‘culture’ or ‘community.’ Diplomats of certain developed nations argue against it as inimical to the principle of freedom of expression. Some industry representatives find it incompatible with their business interests. And even some members of indigenous communities—usually supporters of propertization—see exclusive rights over traditional culture as dangerous.

An adequate cartography of these disparate vectors of protest would have to map passions and interests as well as reasons, locating all in a multidimensional social space. As an initial step toward such a comprehensive visualization, I inventory the arguments that have been given for and against propertizing traditional culture, locating them within their intellectual (rather than social) contexts. The result will be a finding aid to the debate, a display of the many proposals and objections that have been advanced in what has so far been a very diffuse controversy.

]]> http://www.ishtip.org/?feed=rss2&p=159 0