Reigning Back: from Policing Everyone, Everywhere all the time to a focused attention upon Harm – Regulating Intellectual Property Rights within Global Network Capitalism

David, Matthew

Abstract

Intellectual property rights ( IPRs) confer something akin to ownership in the domain of intangibles, not specific material objects but particular expressions, forms, or inventive techniques; and thereby all material objects manifesting such immaterial elements. Digital storage, manipulation and circulation make it possible for such intangibles to be held, modified and passed on in ways unimaginable in an age before new media. Unmediated media, today’s global digital networks make it possible for non-rivalrous copying of everything, everywhere, all the time, and by (almost) everybody. It is for this reason that, even as global network capitalism asserts the primacy of markets over state regulation in today’s world; markets are increasingly legally suspended through the global extension of intellectual property rights monopolies prohibiting market entry and hence eliminating price competition, whether in the domains of copyright, patent, design rights, geographical indication, trade secrets and etc.. Regulating IPRs ‘fully’ in a global world would require the policing of everyone, everywhere, all the time; and as such is potentially only limited by the extent to which it is impossible. More reasonable goals are therefore required. This chapter locates the particular issue of needing to limit the policing of cyber-‘theft’ within a broader account of affordances online for access, concealment, evasion and incitement, and in relation to the wider field of harm concerning hate, obscenity, corruptions of citizenship and ‘theft’. By locating digital IPR ‘theft’ in a wider frame of ‘harms’ online, it is possible to begin to identify how best to resist pressure towards an ever expanding criminalisation of everyone, everywhere all the time, in relation to what is, at the end of the day, only sharing.

Citation

David, M. (2021). Reigning Back: from Policing Everyone, Everywhere all the time to a focused attention upon Harm – Regulating Intellectual Property Rights within Global Network Capitalism. In N. Akdemir, & C. J. Lawless (Eds.), Cybercrime in Action (140-149). Istanbul: Nobel Akademik Yayıncılık

• Publication Date: Nov 1, 2021
• Deposit Date: May 7, 2024
• Pages: 140-149
• Book Title: Cybercrime in Action
• ISBN: 9786254398445
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2433532
• Publisher URL: https://www.nobelyayin.com/cybercrime-in-action-an-international-approach-to-cybercrime_17550.html
• Contract Date: Oct 9, 2021