Hegemony, Intellectual property and the Commons...

[. . .] nothing determined or automatic about this process. Such hegemony can be sustained by the rulers only by the constant exercise of skill,  of theatre and of concession. [S]uch hegemony, even when imposed successfully, does not impose an all-embracing view of life; rather, it imposes blinkers, which inhibit vision in certain directions while leaving it clear in others.  (Thompson 1991, p. 86) In this case, the blinkers tend to clear the way for our gaze in the direction of private property, while obscuring and even diverting it away from a closer inspection of an area where certain things are not privately owned, or rather, are supposed to be freely accessible: the public domain, or the commons. The Western conception of authorship, based on ideas of individuality and originality 􏰀/ which emerges towards the end of the eighteenth century and which to this day exerts a prevailing influence over how we view ourselves and the world 􏰀/ is profoundly counterproductive in helping us to understand this collective nature of creativity, not to mention that it is an historically specific rather than a god-given or natural rule. ‘Authorship’, indeed, is one blinker that makes us see clearly that which we have been taught to recognize as ‘correct’ expressions of individuality and originality, and that wraps a dense fog around the significance of artifacts and practices that fall outside of what, in effect, is an extremely narrow idea of how cultural work occurs. The repercussions of this inclination are perhaps most acutely felt in the problems facing indigenous/native peoples as they seek access to a legal regime that has disregarded the specificity and value of traditional, collective knowledge and culture (Brown 2003). (and our own  mystified/repressed/dismissed ?simple R.E.F. access to creativity (as valid as any other view ?) A major danger of the problems addressed in this issue of Cultural Studies and in critical studies of intellectual properties more generally is that they seem to invite polarization of debate and ways of thinking: intellectual property rights v. the public domain; free v. control; private v. public; owned v. unowned, perhaps even, (although I would have thought that division long buried) droit d’auteur v. copyright. All of these concepts are placeholders in a binary system of discourse that sometimes leads well-meaning scholars and activists to misrepresent the complexity of the problem. It is almost as if we need the perfect oppositions of  good v. bad in order to make an expedient case against the increasing encroachment of greedy intellectual property rights holders. This is under- standable, perhaps even necessary. But I have a problem with the fact that such a matrix of opposites makes it so easy, too easy in fact, to determine who are the bad guys, and thus quite logically, who are the good ones. It sets the stage for oversimplification, and when possible, oversimplification should be avoided. Instead, a more constructive way to approach these pairs is to envision them not as static opposites, but as constituents of a field in constant flux. As we consider the public domain must we also deal with intellectual property rights, or rather with flows of ownership between spheres that we sometimes define as private, sometimes as public. Indeed, what is most striking about these spheres from an historical point of view is that they are never pure and fixed but always in motion.  My aim has been to stress how important rhetoric and discourse are to our analytical constructions, and how they sometimes result in navigation with one eye only. Finally, it cannot be stressed forcefully enough how intellectual proper- ties/the public domain are global issues. Yes, they are also about national laws and nation-state interests, but their ramifications cannot be countered without international mobilization; nor is it possible to move ahead analytically without collaboration. Self-reflexivity is an essential part of such a global, inter- disciplinary dialogue that ultimately should be about lowering, not raising, blinkers. OUT OF SIGHT AND OUT OF MIND Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs table of content - full text Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs(2006) 'OUT OF SIGHT AND OUT OF MIND', Cultural Studies, 20: 2, 282 — 291

also read Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity (Vaidhyanathan 2001), Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (Lessig 2004), and Freedom of Expression†: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity (McLeod 2005), M.F.Brown: Who Owns Native Culture?                     (edic. Harvard Univ.Press, 2003) http://juanjolopezgutierrez.com/filesHTM/NativeCulture.htm