Julie E. Cohen

The Biopolitical Public Domain: The Legal Construction of the Surveillance Economy

Within the political economy of informational capitalism, commercial surveillance practices are tools for resource extraction. That process requires an enabling legal construct, which this essay identifies and explores. Contemporary practices of personal information processing constitute a new type of public domain—a repository of raw materials that are there for the taking and that are framed as inputs to particular types of productive activity. As a legal construct, the biopolitical public domain shapes practices of appropriation and use of personal information in two complementary and interrelated ways. First, it constitutes personal information as available and potentially valuable: as a pool of materials that may be freely appropriated as inputs to economic production. That framing supports the reorganization of sociotechnical activity in ways directed toward extraction and appropriation. Second, the biopolitical public domain constitutes the personal information harvested within networked information environments as raw. That framing creates the backdrop for culturally situated techniques of knowledge production and for the logic that designates those techniques as sites of legal privilege.

The Networked Self in the Modulated Society

The theme of the book — global community, global archipelago or a new civility? — echoes a question that has often been posed about transformative new technologies:1 Will such technologies connect us or divide us? Will networked information technologies produce a new global cosmopolitanism characterized by enlightened tolerance and mutual recognition of common interest and common ground, or will they fragment civil society into discrete cultural enclaves animated by narrower and more tribal interests? Each view has its partisans, and since the early days of the Internet, the two have vied with each other for supremacy.

Media, communication and the struggle for social progress:

This article discusses the role of media and communications in contributing to social progress, as elaborated in a landmark international project – the International Panel on Social Progress. First, it analyses how media and digital platforms have contributed to global inequality by examining media access and infrastructure across world regions. Second, it looks at media governance and the different mechanisms of corporatized control over media platforms, algorithms and content. Third, the article examines how the democratization of media is a key element in the struggle for social justice. It argues that effective media access – in terms of distribution of media resources, even relations between spaces of connection and the design and operation of spaces that foster dialogue, free speech and respectful cultural exchange – is a core component of social progress.

Intellectual Property and the Information Economy

The pundits who prophesied that the Internet would mean the end of intellectual property were wrong.1 Intellectual property is alive and well on the Internet. Copyrights, trademarks, and lately even patents are the subjects of vigorous, and increasingly successful, enforcement efforts. From high-tech start-up profiles to law-firm hiring patterns, the evidence suggests that protection of online intellectual property is a growth industry. But this is not, to borrow a turn of phrase, your father’s intellectual property. This intellectual property is different. Traditional intellectual property rights, which were limited monopolies operating in distinct and different subject areas, have been retrofitted to become sophisticated, mutually reinforcing methods of controlling information use.