Andrew Herman

YOUR SECOND LIFE?: Goodwill and the performativity of intellectual property in online digital gaming

This article examines the performativity of intellectual property in digital gaming environments, with a focus on Massively Multi-Player On Line Games (MMOGs). The analysis centers on the creation and management of goodwill, an intangible asset of considerable value to corporations based on affective bonds between consumers, corporations, and their commodities in the marketplace. Most critical analyses of intellectual property consider neither the centrality of goodwill to corporate management of their intellectual properties in digital environments, nor the significance of the legal conditions that structure activity in such contexts. We develop a theoretical framework based on cultures of circulation involving network sociality, circuits of interactivity and the extensibility of the computer/user interface. This enables us to better understand shifting relations of power and reciprocity between corporations and consumers in digital gaming contexts, where the division between player-consumption and player-production is increasingly blurred. Technological capacities for consumers to become producers of gaming content changes the terrain upon which conflicts between corporations and consumers about intellectual property are negotiated and enhances the value of goodwill. An examination of Linden Labs Second Life – one of the fastest growing MMOGs and the first to affirm players’ intellectual property rights in their digital creations – provides an illustration of both the limits and possibilities afforded by goodwill as a form of emerging governance in game worlds.

Rhetorical Virtues: Property, Speech, and the Commons on the World-Wide Web

It useful to coin a neologism, combining meme with ecumene to produce ecumeme. The ecumeme, in other words, is the global market place of exchange where corporations (legally constituted as individual persons) and persons constituted as individuated consumers, are well-positioned to exercise their potential desire to buy and sell. Intellectual property law provides the principal rhetorical means by which this territory is invoked. The dominant ecumeme, as established by US legislation, the TRIPs agreement, and various bilateral trade agreements, has structured the world of cultural production in cyberspace as one governed by a rigid corporation/consumer binary. An alternative ecumeme, as put forth by American critical legal scholars and movements such as “Copy Left,” provides an alternative based on privileging Romanticized notions of “commons” rather than “enclosure.” We critique this alternative for its propensity to assume the ecumeme’s identity and its mode of governmentality by highlighting the digital debate around cultural property and corporate propriety between Lego Corporation and Maori community activists.

Culture Wars on the Net: Intellectual Property and Corporate Propriety in Digital Environments

The function of trademark law is to discursively construct and institutionally enforce particular notions of corporate identity as a property right. Intellectual property laws structure a field of meaning-making and thereby shape forms of symbolic practice. They create proprietary rights in a cultural commodity or commodity-sign — the trademark — and capacities to control its potential meaning and interpretation. The interconnected relationship between property and propriety is examined through an array of examples: from contestations over domain names, absolute ownership over trademarks and censorship, the emergence of digital communities comprising fan subcultures, as well as others. Ultimately, the Web has emerged as a digital battleground for corporate trademarks driven by the strategic logic of commodity fetishism, and counterhegemonic expressions of creativity, cultural meaning and identity formation, consumer choice, and labor rights structured through a guerilla logic of the populace.

The politics of authenticity in postmodern rock culture: The case of Negativland and the letter ‘U’ and the numeral ‘2‘

Based on recent concerns with the notion of authenticity and effective politics in contemporary popular culture and scholarship on culture, this essay uses a case study of the legal and popular controversy surrounding the Negativland recording, “The Letter ‘U’ and the Number ‘2’.” The analysis points to the organic development of alternative logics in the changing landscape of popular culture. Moreover, we point to the relationship between the “pastiche” style of the Negativland recording as a metaphor for authenticity and justice in postmodern rock culture.

Ethics as Methods: Doing Ethics in the Era of Big Data Research—Introduction:

This is an introduction to the special issue of “Ethics as Methods: Doing Ethics in the Era of Big Data Research.” Building on a variety of theoretical paradigms (i.e., critical theory, [new] materialism, feminist ethics, theory of cultural techniques) and frameworks (i.e., contextual integrity, deflationary perspective, ethics of care), the Special Issue contributes specific cases and fine-grained conceptual distinctions to ongoing discussions about the ethics in data-driven research. In the second decade of the 21st century, a grand narrative is emerging that posits knowledge derived from data analytics as true, because of the objective qualities of data, their means of collection and analysis, and the sheer size of the data set. The by-product of this grand narrative is that the qualitative aspects of behavior and experience that form the data are diminished, and the human is removed from the process of analysis. This situates data science as a process of analysis performed by the tool, which obscures human decisions in the process. The scholars involved in this Special Issue problematize the assumptions and trends in big data research and point out the crisis in accountability that emerges from using such data to make societal interventions. Our collaborators offer a range of answers to the question of how to configure ethics through a methodological framework in the context of the prevalence of big data, neural networks, and automated, algorithmic governance of much of human socia(bi)lity