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Whose Democracy? Rights-based Discourse and Global Intellectual Property Rights Activism
Introduction
Since the 1970s, advances in communications technology have multiplied the economic value of knowledge. As a result of these developments, intellectual property regulation has become a central feature of global economic relations, and an important means of exercising control over knowledge. In the case of digital technology, the means of communication and cultural production are now far cheaper and more widely accessible than ever before and, in response, the corporate keepers of culture (especially in the United States (US) ) have led an aggressive drive for expanded intellectual property rights both generally and in relation to digital media.
Intellectual property law therefore has become an important means of expanding corporate control over communications and culture (Bettig 1996; McLeod 2001, 2007; Schiller 2006). Such regulation increasingly is being used to control decentralized networks of cultural production and the scope for development of digital technology itself. Rather than performing its ideal role of balancing the tension between control over and access to knowledge, therefore, intellectual property law has become a means of expanding control and shrinking access. This expansion of strong intellectual property protections into digital technology and the Internet has triggered forceful protests from legal and cultural scholars and activists, who ...
