I own this post, Google!

Does everything we right for the class belong to Google now that it’s on Blogger? Does it belong to the University of Iowa? I take it for granted that it doesn’t belong to me. I feel totally alienated. This is truly an incentive to create a shoddy product. Take that, big media!

I wanted to start by noting one point in the Huws reading that really struck me. Huws describe fixed and variable capital in an interesting way that seemed to really add to the discussion of intellectual property rights. She notes that there is a fixed capital embodied in the machinery and the raw materials and capital used to set the enterprise up. The variable capital is the living labor of the workers. So far, nothing new. She then goes on to describe how this fixed/variable capital breakdown occurs in the realm of immaterial labor” the fixed labor corresponds to the ideas of the past which we build upon, with living labor in the form of knowledge workers, both deskilled process workers and more creative, originating workers (140-141).

In this context, the question of intellectual property comes into play as a device whereby capital seeks to turn variable capital into fixed capital, in a process similar to the automation described by Marx in his Grundisse. She goes on to explain that the ownership of the idea of these originating workers is fairly ambiguous and how this is a new dilemma in capital-labor relations: “On one level, this can be regarded as a simple dispute between labor and capital, with workers fighting for a larger share of the products of their labor. However the concept of ownership is rather different from that which pertains in a typical factory. It is now over two centuries since workers effectively gave up their right to a share in the ownership of the product of their labor in return for a wage. The knowledge worker, who insists on a royalty, or on the right to reuse what s/he has produced, is not behaving like a member of the proletariat; s/he is refusing alienation” (141). I just thought that this idea of intellectual property as fixed capital provided language that was helpful when thinking about it in the context of the class. It seems particularly relevant in light of our speaking about the autonomist view of the General Intellect which includes the inalienable positioning of the human laborer who “owns” the means of production, and how the collapse of the public domain undermines this idea (not to mention the knowledge community Jenkins seems so excited about).

I must admit that I’m wondering about the role of free labor in all this. It seems that the idea of a gift economy really relies on the idea of non-remunerated labor with the assurance that the product/idea is non-appropriatable. Is it then okay to labor for free? I did think that Boyle’s point that this non-appropriatable commons relies on intellectual property and licensing provided an interesting nuance to the property-public domain binary he problematizes. You may want to check out Creative Commons which provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved."

Lessig and Jenkins must be BFFs, right? Lessig sees the glass as half-empty; Jenkins always sees it half-full. Lessig makes an important distinction that immediately reminded me of Jenkins, “a distinction that the law no longer takes care to draw – the distinction between republishing someone’s work on the one hand [i.e., copying/piracy] and building upon or transforming that work on the other [i.e., poaching]. Copyright law at its birth had only publishing as its concern; copyright law today regulates both” (17). Granted, we did not read the chapter on fan fiction and Harry Potter in Convergence Culture, but surely Jenkins’ poaching is increasingly constrained and outlawed by the collapse of the public domain that Lessig describes. Lessig’s description of the power of the blogosphere is identical to Jenkins defense (215): “Blogspace gives amateurs a way to enter the debate...It allows for a much broader range of input into a story...and it drives readers to read across the range of accounts and ‘triangulate’ the truth” (Lessig 32). But how politically effectual can this photoshop democracy be with an “orphaned public domain”? Jenkins wrote a piece in defense of free culture and the encroachment of big media: Digital Land Grab

I think that the shift that Lessig describes between the twentieth century and twenty-first century is also something we’ve seen when speaking about different notions of participatory culture. For Lessig, the twentieth century is typified by the read-only, passive recipients of culture “Couch potatoes. Consumers. This is the world of media from the twentieth century” (28). The efforts to expand intellectual property rights is read as an attempt to continue the passive, consumer-receiver of the mass media age. Without the ability to build, transform, and poach freely, we will be unable to “both read and write.” This is very reminiscent of the shift described in Stahl, who uses Debord to describe the shift from the passive spectacle-receiving consumer to the subject engaged as interactive participant, who nevertheless plays a questionable participatory role (despite what Jenkins might say!) (Stahl 115).

Check out Lessig’s home page
Students for Free Culture (apparently the University of Iowa has a chapter)