‘Intellectual Property’ and Knowledge Creation in Disorganisations

Given the current forms of economic production and corporate markets, the liberating and democratic potential of digital information is counteracted by the concentration of media ownership, as well as by policy, legislation, and the development of proprietary forms of technology. The notion of ‘intellectual property’ produces artificial scarcity where digital technology could remove it. This tension between the proprietary and non-proprietary aspects of the information society can be analysed by looking at two types of knowledge creation: organisational and disorganisational. While organisational knowledge work can benefit from a notion of ‘intellectual property’, disorganisational knowledge work is disrupted, if not destroyed, by proprietary barriers on information. This is unfortunate if and when the crucial innovations and ethical potential of the information society are connected to disorganisational communities, even though the organisational type is more visible and better represented in the traditional structures of society. The Ideal of Cybernetics and ‘Intellectual Property’ The so-called information society means a restructuring of the modes of production, including the set of beliefs that go with or sustain the necessary social and economic structures. One of the cornerstones of this set of beliefs is the ‘cybernetic’ idea that some kind of information or code is the basic ontological level that guarantees both the explanation and control of all phenomena. This cybernetic ideal includes the beliefs that the functions of a computer are based on code, that human thinking is basically some sort of information processing – maybe of a self-organizing kind – and that the structure of biological organisms is ultimately based on code (the DNA). Aspects of human life are understood and operationalised as if they were in the last instance information processing according to a codified system of representations. Thus, thinking is seen as the processing of representations according to the abstract form of the representations. The form and function of biological organisms supposedly reside in the DNA code and the ways in which it is ‘read’. The operations of a computer are specified by an algorithm. Even social skills and coping in the world are thought to be included in practices and agreements that can be formally represented. ‘Cybernetics’ in this Heideggerian sense is not only a scientific way of looking at the world and explaining phenomena as if they were in the last instance algorithmic.[1] It is also an economic and social principle of organisation. As and when information and knowledge are quickly gaining importance as means and ends of production in the information society, it is becoming clear that the cybernetic ideal is closely coupled with ideas of the ownership of information and concepts such as ‘intellectual property’. These ideas have their pertinence in a world where economic production is dependent on intangibles. ‘Intellectual property’ as a concept is a way of controlling and colonialising the new production: the concept is essentially used in order to widen the digital divides. Two things are needed to sustain this process: first, a belief in the existence of code, a belief that ‘code’ is the right description of the functions of biological, technological, social or psychological systems, and ‘Intellectual Property’ and Knowledge Creation 429 second, a belief that the code can and should be owned, that it should be treated as property. This double-bind creates a commodified society and nature. It is essential to note that these processes and the concepts behind them – ‘code’, ‘digital’, ‘property’ – are historically and socially contingent. What kind of information society is to come depends in part on how these concepts are understood and employed. One of the most prominent themes in twentieth-century philosophy was a philosophy of technology that viewed technology not as a neutral tool but as inherently interest-laden. The interesting questions about technology, including information technology, can only be formed when this kind of ‘who’ analysis (analysis of the structures of power) is combined with the insight that technology is not one thing, not one identifiable whole with a lasting essence or drive leading to particular formations of society. ‘The same’ kind of technology (its forms and use) may today benefit this group of people, the next day that group of people or ‘form of life’. So the questions become more concrete: what formations of power (community, subjectivity, and so on) does a particular way of using technology support, need, presuppose or undermine? As a property of information processing, digitality is created by different technological means (electrical, optical, magnetic, and so on), but has the general characteristics of making possible the (almost) perfect copying and (almost) unlimited distribution of the information content.[2] The reproduction, copying and distribution of digital information, ‘code’, are substantially different from the reproduction, copying and distribution of analog information (such as the printed page or a speech). The crucial point is not only that copying and redistribution of digital information is much more precise, but also that digital information can be copied and redistributed at a minimal price compared to analog information. One of the technological beauties of the Internet is that the network is an effective multipurpose distributor of information packets.[3] The Net does not discriminate between packets on the basis of their content (in fact, the TCP/IP protocol does not provide a way of knowing what the content is). This basic technological fact has wide socio-political consequences. In terms of political economy the most pertinent implication is the close-to-zero price of copying in conjunction with the near-to-perfect quality of copies which, together, make digital contents possible as free public resources. This means that digitization has democratic potential: it can act as a scarcity-remover. Once adequate infrastructure exists, digital information can become available for everyone at a very low price. However, this technological possibility is far from real at the moment. Since the business model of large content-producing corporations (Hollywood industry, software industry, news and entertainment industry) is based on the scarcity of content, and since digital information and communication technology (ICT) has the potential to remove that scarcity, it is in the interest of the corporate world to try to create mechanisms of ‘artificial’ scarcity, and to erect barriers to the abundance of digital content. These mechanisms include legislation (‘intellectual property’), technology itself, policy, and education. Digital technology is reducing scarcity, legislation is producing it: this is one of the basic tensions built into information societies. Even if digital information can remove major barriers of distribution, there is no guarantee that it would actually do so. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that relative wealth rules the Internet. The notion of ‘intellectual property’ functions largely as a scarcity-producer. Most assets on intellectual property rights are owned by a few mega-companies from the northern hemisphere. The idea behind the concept of intellectual property rights is to commodify content by creating both the legal and technological means, and, more importantly, the ideological will to treat digital content as commodities, with the ensuing benefits of protection that property enjoys. Given the current forms of economic production and corporate markets, it is important to note that the liberating potential of digital information necessitates countermeasures manifested not only in media ownership, but also in policy, legislation, and the development of technology. The details of the technological infrastructure on both the hardware and software sides have wideranging consequences for possibilities of use. Once again, what matters is not only the architectural details per se but, even more importantly, the questions of ownership of technological means (patents and so forth) as well as digital content (copyrights and so on). The digital technologies that liberate information are the very same technologies that make possible almost perfect control over the distribution of content. A systematic tension between civil societies and the corporate world