Rosemary J. Coombe

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.

The Properties of Culture and the Politics of Possessing Identity: Native Claims in the Cultural Appropriation Controversy

The West has created categories of property, including intellectual property, which divides peoples and things according to the same colonizing discourses of possessive individualism that historically disentitled and disenfranchised Native peoples in North America. These categories are often presented as one or both of neutral and natural, and often racialized. The commodification and removal of land from people’s social relations which inform Western valuations of cultural value and human beings living in communities represents only one particular, partial way of categorizing the world. Legal and cultural manifestations of authorship, culture, and property are contingent upon Enlightenment and Romantic notions built upon a colonial foundation. I will argue that the law rips apart what First Nations peoples view as integrally and relationally joined, but traditional Western understandings of culture, identity, and property are provoked, challenged, and undermined by the concept of Aboriginal Title in a fashion that is both necessary and long overdue.

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.

Legal Claims to Culture in and Against the Market: Neoliberalism and the Global Proliferation of Meaningful Difference

Under conditions of neoliberalism legal claims to protect, preserve, maintain, and to exploit culture have assumed a new urgency. Cultural diversity has become a matter of state concern and fears of cultural homogenization animate movements to promote a revitalized realm of cultural policy. Municipal governments see cultural amenities, attractions, and social values as important resources to attract labor and capital and engage in cultural planning exercises as they seek to brand urban space. Rural spaces become culturalised as traditions are constructed to establish market distinctions for local goods and traditional knowledge is valorized in international environmental treaties. But if culture is clearly delineated for the purposes of state management and the creation of new intellectual properties, it is also evoked in anti-globalization movements that contest growing forms of corporate hegemony. Finally, we witness the emergence of a new cultural politics of difference in place-based movements that draw upon international indigenous and human rights traditions to establish their claims to livelihood resources, territories, and cultural survival. Critical scholarship is needed to explore the conditions under which neoliberal regimes of govern-mentality are supported and challenged by the legal recognition of cultural assertions and the stakes and limitations of cultural claims.

X Marks the Spot: The Ambiguities of African Trading in the Commerce of the Black Public Sphere

Global capital restructuring has led to new forms of social and spatial rearrangements. These rearrangements have seen capital accumulation underpinned by finance and the globalization of manufacturing. As a result, informal economies have emerged in the peripheral shadows of the formal, elite information-based economy. A confrontation of commodified images and commercial practices along fault lines of state and corporate power will be explored on the sidewalks at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue in New York City. As a cultural crossroads in an African American commercial marketplace, this place situates many of the ironies and ambiguities that currently animate the black public sphere in the United States. We seek to illuminate a number of relationships between processes of capital restructuring, African migrations, informal economies, African American cultural forms, and those signifiers which simultaneously mask and reveal the politics appropriate to postcolonial contexts.

Tactics of Appropriation and the Politics of Recognition in Late Modern Democracies

Walking down the street in Toronto one day in 1987, pedestrians were surprised to see a message flashing across an electronic billboard. “Lesbians fly Air Canada” it repeatedly signaled. The next day the message was gone. A gay rights group broadcast the phrase, but their communication terminated abruptly when Air Canada threatened to apply for an injunction to stop the group from using its name.

Bordering Diversity and Desire: Using Intellectual Property to Mark Place-Based Products

Marks indicating conditions of origin—geographical indications, appellations and denominations of origin, as well as collective and certification marks—are legal vehicles increasingly common in global commerce. Although it is necessary to explore the legal, political, and economic conditions under which they have become newly popularized as vehicles of global capital accumulation, it is also important to consider ethnographic studies of the work they do in reconfiguring social relationships and their salience in local worlds of meaning. We argue that these marks of distinction have become important means for securing monopoly rents at the same time that they have become means to express identities and desires so as to project alternative assertions of value in commodity circuits that traverse sites of production and consumption. They create new borders around newly valued forms of cultural difference, producing places, and constituting borders of identity, while potentially linking producers and consumers in new relationships of identification.

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.

Protecting Cultural Industries to Promote Cultural Diversity: Dilemmas for International Policy-Making Posed by the Recognition of Traditional Knowledge

This section of the volume is entitled “Assessing the Suitability of Intellectual Property Rights for Traditional Knowledge and Cultural Industries,” yet none of the contributors address between proposed rights and industries of a cultural nature. I will suggest that it is precisely this relationship that needs to be considered and that the policy issues posed by considerations of cultural identity and cultural diversity are likely to be the most difficult ones to engage in ongoing international negotiations with respect to cultural forms, forms of property, norms of expression and the optimal range of public goods.

Honing a Critical Cultural Study of Human Rights

A critical cultural studies of human rights has yet to emerge as an interdisciplinary field of study. Despite the proliferation of scholarly work in legal philosophy and law and humanities over the past decade, we have seen little by way of sustained dialogue between critics of rights or conversations between rights critics and theorists of culture. Nonetheless, the characteristic approaches, concerns, concepts, and methods of cultural studies are both appropriate and necessary in a global policy environment that has put increasing emphasis upon cultural identity and cultural resources in both rights-based practices and neoliberal governmentalities, suggesting new avenues of inquiry.